Frankie's snowman built with love

/
Frankie's snowman built with love

Michelle and Victor Clerico speak in whispers because sound hurts their son's ears and they touch him gently because pain comes with even the lightest touch. Frankie is 5 and handsome with thick red hair and smooth pale skin and a heart as big as he is small. He tells his parents that when he dies he's going to Heaven and that God is going to give him wings. He tells his little sister: "Don't be sad. When I'm in heaven you won't be able to see me but I'll keep an eye on you."

Read More

Codman center can celebrate its work, plans

/
Codman center can celebrate its work, plans

I never lived in Codman Square yet in every sense of the phrase, I grew up there. I was 11 and in the seventh grade, a commuter student at St. Mark's in Dorchester and as lonely as I would ever be. That's when I discovered the square and the library that overlooked it. Every day when the neighborhood kids went home to lunch and the other commuters ate their waxed paper-wrapped sandwiches in the gloomy auditorium, I walked up the hill past Girl's Latin to the Codman Square library.

Read More

Davis-Mullen stakes her turf

/
Davis-Mullen stakes her turf

It's not news that Boston City Councilor Peggy Davis-Mullen is a thorn in the side of Mayor Tom Menino. Their relationship is adversarial. But this isn't a bad thing. In government as in a garden there need to be thorns - prickly someones who don't play a role as in "The Emperor's New Clothes," who aren't always telling the mayor what he wants to hear, who remind him that outside the royal buildings, things are not quite as rich or as rosy as they are inside.

Read More

Still giving life to his father

/
Still giving life to his father

Robert sits on a chair next to his father's bed. He holds his father's hand and talks to him just to talk. He tells him about the day's news, about a weekend they spent in Maine, about all the people who have come to the hospital to visit. When an aide arrives to take his father's temperature with a thermometer she has to put in his ear, Robert explains the procedures. His father motions and Robert understands. "You want some water?" he asks. The older man nods and Robert adjusts the bed and holds his father and puts a cup to his lips and says, "It's coming," as he tilts the cup so that just a tiny bit of liquid drips into his father's mouth. More than a little will make him choke and cough and struggle for breath. And he is struggling hard enough as it is.

Read More

Radio host plants addictive seed in unsuspecting home

/
Radio host plants addictive seed in unsuspecting home

At first it was background noise, nothing more, I swear. I wasn't really listening to the man on the radio talking about root balls, and even if I were, I was only half listening. I was curious, that's all. Not addicted. Not yet. But now I am. Come 7 a.m. on Saturday mornings I'm up and tuned in to 99.1 FM, sitting at the kitchen table listening to Paul Parent tell me things like "clematis requires sweet soil" and the way to make soil sweet is to sprinkle a little lime into it, but not bone meal because that attracts animals…

Read More

We can't turn back time, but we can remember, move on

/
We can't turn back time, but we can remember, move on

What you want is to turn back the clock, to make it Tuesday morning again, early, and make the accident not have happened, to change the confluence of things - the rain, the timing, a car being where is was? A few seconds sooner, a few seconds later and what is would not be. What you want is to give three dead children and one broken one back to their parents, whole…

Read More

On life's rocky road, another pebble

/
On life's rocky road, another pebble

The backpacks look alike. This is my sole defense. But I don't mention this as we drive silently along. The Berlin Wall was just a picket fence compared to the wall between us. When in trouble, remain mum, that's the rule. I learned this from the leader of the free world, President Clinton, who is an expert on at least one virtue. But silence is difficult for me. What I'd like to do is talk - argue, plead, say to the man who promised to love me for better or worse (and this is definitely worse) that I made a simple, run-of-the-mill, everyday, garden-variety mistake.

Read More

Sometimes the song must end

/
Sometimes the song must end

My mother used to sing. Every morning I'd come downstairs and there she'd be standing at the kitchen sink, singing some tune, even if it were winter and dark and the coffee hadn't yet perked. She'd hum as she put on her makeup and sing softly as she dressed, and in the car she would always turn up the radio and sing along with Peggy Lee. She cleaned the house to music, the record player at full volume, as she belted out tunes from "Gypsy" or "Annie Get Your Gun."

Read More

Admire yes, but also follow Mother Teresa's example

/
Admire yes, but also follow Mother Teresa's example

'Smile at each other - it doesn't matter who it is - and that will help you to grow up in greater love for each other.' - Mother Teresa

She is the antithesis of everything we worship in this country. She is old and we revere young. She is wrinkled and stooped, and we admire smooth and tall. She is humble and we're used to boastful. She is poor and we idolize wealth.

She is a bent, old woman who drapes cloth on her body only to cover herself, who doesn't dye her hair or work out or wear makeup or jewelry or spend even an ounce of energy worrying about what she looks like.

Read More

The incredible wonders of life

/

'What I wish is that I could do all the things I used to hate to do - cut the grass, wait in line."

That's what he said. And that's what I've thought about since Thursday night when he said it.

The young man was on "48 Hours," a boy from Milford who caught a wave on Martha's Vineyard the wrong way last Labor Day weekend and is now a paraplegic. "48 Hours" filmed his long, slow days of recovery and therapy and adjustment. It was a superb documentary because it didn't gloss over pain.

Read More

When music makes magic

/
When music makes magic

He takes you back to a night you thought you'd forgotten, when there was laughter and champagne and glasses clinking and young people laughing, and you were one of the young people, dressed to kill, out for an evening, out on the town.

He whisks you to Broadway, and ushers you to a front-row seat where you heard, maybe for the first time, Judy Garland, John Raitt, Mary Martin.

Read More

Ah, to be young and oh so sure

/
Ah, to be young and oh so sure

He didn't exactly swagger into the house. He walked the way he always does. Only he walked with confidence.

He didn't hunch through a doorway. He didn't slouch in a chair. He sat like a capital "L" perfectly straight, not crossing and uncrossing his arms, not shuffling his feet, not looking like a corralled horse eager to bolt.

Read More

Adults need to remember when snow was wonderful

/
Adults need to remember when snow was wonderful

When my kids were little, I used to notice these things: The way the sky in winter looks as if you could skate on it; the way the evergreens, laden with snow, look like they belong next to a gingerbread house; the way the world looks when the snow stops and the sun comes out and everything seems fresh and newborn…

Read More

Drunk driver claims a victim

/

It is snowing and I am late, the traffic on Route 138 backed up for miles. When I arrive at New England Sinai Hospital, Laurie Kelly is gone because the traffic will make her late if she waits for me. She cannot be late. She has driven all the way from Monument Beach to Stoughton with her 6-year-old daughter so that the child can see with her own eyes that her father is still in the same room, in the same hospital bed, where he was yesterday, and the day before yesterday and dozens of days before that.

Read More

It's too late to say thank you

/
It's too late to say thank you

ORLANDO, Fla. - We met Tuesday in the hotel lobby on our way to somewhere else. It took a minute for me to match a name with his face because I hadn't seen him in a couple of years and then we were in another city in another hotel lobby. He was smiling, extending his hand, saying his name and when he did, I thought: of course. And it all came back then, the details of our last conversation.

Read More

Memory: Where all is safe

/
Memory: Where all is safe

My friend Anne e-mails me an excerpt from "Listening to Your Life," a book of daily meditations by Frederick Buechner. I find it on my computer at 5 a.m.

It is dark. The house is quiet, and I feel a little like the shoemaker in the old children's tale. I tiptoe downstairs to find that someone has been working while I've been sleeping, a pair of shoes on the workbench already made. An idea on the computer, already hatched.

Read More

Turning 85 is a present for all those who love her

/

When she was 80, we bought her 80 presents. It took a while to find 80 things that an 80-year-old didn't already have and could eventually use, but we did. We bought shortbread and jelly and notepaper and stamps and dusting powder and assorted teas, and wrapped all the gifts in silver foil and tied them with white bows then placed them in and around a pink hatbox. The presents, by their sheer number, made 80 look inviting. My mother-in-law, surrounded by family and friends, sat in the living room and talked and laughed as she unwrapped each present…

Read More

Bring on the kids next door

/
Bring on the kids next door

The sign is on the lawn "sale pending," so it's not a done deal yet. But I am pretending it is. I have my hopes high and my fingers crossed. I am thinking about cookies and cocoa with marshmallow and jars full of penny candy.

The priest who lived next door for 21 years moved last month and the house has been vacant since. It used to be my house before it was his. "Oh, you moved next door," people usually say when they learn this. "You were lucky. It must have been such an easy move."

Read More

Some angels take human form

/
Some angels take human form

The poster has been hanging on my office door for nearly two years now. It's an angel poster. I've read it a hundred times. "Angels are the guardians of hope and wonder, the keepers of magic and dreams," it begins. Angels, as in spirits, heavenly visitors who keep you from harm's way; phantoms, shadows, apparitions, guardians from another world. That's what I've always thought…

Read More