Conjuring up images of the past

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Conjuring up images of the past

It used to be easy. More than easy. It was like breathing. It happened without thought. I'd be driving - past my old school, Tower Hill, where my best friend, Rosemary, and I used to play; past the halfway point, where Rosemary and I used to meet; past St. Bernadette's Church, where my husband and I were married. And I'd see these places exactly as they had been, 10, 20, 30 years before - Tower Hill School hidden behind a hedge of lilacs so thick you could smell them from the next block; the halfway point all woods and swamp and orange lilies; St. Bernadette's so new it looked placed, not built, on the black macadam…

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Finding that the garden is a rabbits' salad bar

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Finding that the garden is a rabbits' salad bar

They ate my Jack and the Beanstalk tree. From stem to leafy stem they felled it, devoured it, and made it disappear. Rabbits, I fumed. Bandits and thieves. And other names I cannot repeat. It wasn't, for the record, a real Jack and the Beanstalk tree. It didn't grow from magic beans overnight and disappear above the clouds into a land of giants. It wasn't even a tree, just a leggy, flowering plant. But it was taller than I am by at least a foot, and to the 3- and 4-year-olds who called it their Jack and the Beanstalk tree, it seemed to reach the sky…

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A giving heart takes a worrisome pause

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A giving heart takes a worrisome pause

watch him all the time. He is my entertainment and my muse. For years, I'd come into my office, glance out my window and across the street and there would be Al, buffing his car, scrubbing his gutters, mowing his lawn, trimming, digging, raking, painting, hammering, hosing, chipping, shoveling, season after season, always doing something. Or he would be walking Dante, his wife Katherine's big black dog, smiling and talking to everyone he met along the way…

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The hands that tell of life and love

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The hands that tell of life and love

I am my father's daughter. I have his hands, old hands, worker's hands, calloused and sun damaged. And I have his ways. His ways I accept. The hands stun me. I look at them and they are his, only smaller; the fingers short, the knuckles creased, the veins like tree roots too close to the surface. How and when did this happen? My father's hands fixed things. They were exact, like tweezers, plucking tubes from the back of our TV, testing them, until the one that was making the picture arc was found…

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In every end, there's a beginning

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In every end, there's a beginning

I found it in a card shop in Concord, N.H. - Caardvark's, a place that is now closed. It was hanging on a wall and it was perfect.

I'd been looking for perfect. My daughter was newly engaged and I wanted something special to celebrate the moment. For this was my baby who was getting married, my youngest child leaving home not for a little while, not for college, or for a summer, or to test her wings. But to fly away - with someone else - forever.

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Father Coen made it easier to keep the faith

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Father Coen made it easier to keep the faith

It was easier when Father Coen was alive. His faith was strong and certain, and as long as he was here, my faith was strong and certain, too. I called him my window through whom I saw God. And he said, "God is everywhere. You know that." I know it sometimes, but not all the time. Not enough of the time. Not the way I knew it when he was here to remind me…

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A new baby brings a song to her heart

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Lucy is my first grandbaby, and her song just came. I didn't expect it, so I didn't go looking for it. It found me.

I was singing all the time back then, when my first daughter was pregnant. "You Are The Sunshine of My Life" and "My Special Angel." "You'll Never Know Just How Much I Love You" and, of course, "Baby Love."

The baby wasn't even close to being born, but I was already head over heels in love. And people in love are known to do some strange things, like walk on clouds and burst into song.

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The loneliness of old age cries out for comfort

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`They're all so busy." That's what she says whenever I ask about her family. She insists that they aren't ignoring her, that they're busy with work and school and friends and shopping and sports and meetings. That's why she doesn't see them often. She understands. She's not complaining. She used to be busy, too, her door always open, people coming and going, the phone ringing, then more people stopping by. It was a whirlwind for 20, 30, 40 years, and she was at the center, in the kitchen cooking, baking, the teapot always warm. She was a joiner, too. She belonged to church and civic groups. She rang other people's doorbells. She didn't stand still, not ever. Life was always too full of things to do.

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When memories are merely jogging in place

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When memories are merely jogging in place

We remember it differently. Anne says that we went to Story Land on a summer day not more than five years ago. And that we walked around, just the two of us, enjoying the scene. Going there was my idea because I wanted to revisit a place I had come with my parents and my grandmother when I was a child. I don't dispute being with my parents and my grandmother. I wore an aqua-and-white dress, which I hated. I posed with the Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe. I smiled for the camera. This was nearly 50 years ago.

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DAD GAVE ME THE KEYS TO LIFE

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DAD GAVE ME THE KEYS TO LIFE

My father was not overtly, nor even subtly, religious . He hardly ever went to church and I didn't have a sense that he prayed, though at the end of his life he told me that St. Jude was his good buddy. I imagine, though, that he talked to St. Jude in the way he talked to me, not often couching his requests with "please" and "if possible," but stating them directly and firmly as in, "I need you to do this for me." At the end of his life he handed me a crucifix, which he said he carried with him throughout the Second World War.

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FIND YOURSELF BY LOOKING INSIDE

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I have it upstairs in a box somewhere, a piece of pink, lined paper filled with writing that's straight up and down. The penmanship struck me as exotic when I first saw it because it wasn't the Palmer Method. It was a combination of printing and art, the f's and g's and p's and q's big and bold and gaudy. The words the letters made were bold, too, because they held up a mirror to my life. This is who you are, the lady who penned them said.

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WORDS ESCAPE HER BUT LAUGH IS STILL THERE

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WORDS ESCAPE HER BUT LAUGH IS STILL THERE

She has lost her words. Last year, I could feed them to her. Fill in the blanks. "How is . . . the bald one?" she said when I came to visit. She exaggerated bald, drawled the word, made a joke, covered up. I covered up, too. "How is Bruce? He's great. Definitely bald, but great."

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COUNTING OFF THE YEARS WITH A BOOK OF THE DEAD

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I haven't put him in my dead book yet. A hard word, "dead." A word you want to camouflage with softer syllables: deceased, departed, passed on. But dead is the right word because dead is hard, people you love not in the next room, or the next town, or on the telephone saying, "Do you know that I'm the only one in the world who can call you daughter?"

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How wistful our autumn years

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How wistful our autumn years

There's something about growing older that makes a person a little nutty about the seasons. It makes a person behave as if she's never before seen a tree turned all orange, or a pumpkin, or a garden transformed by mums. ``Hey, what do you know? It's fall, already. Hard to believe that summer is over. Where did it go?'' What child says these things? Or adolescent walking to school? ``Look at the way the sun lights up that yard. And the berries on that mountain ash. Wow.'' This does not happen. But adults? We're consumed by the changes a season brings…

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The happiest of birthdays at 57

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The happiest of birthdays at 57

You wouldn't want people, even people you love, phoning you every morning, then, heaven help us, singing their hello. A ringing phone plus a chirpy person before a second cup of coffee is definitely not a good thing.

Except when it's your birthday. Then you want the phone to ring. Then you're eager for everyone you know to do his-her rendition of "Happy Birthday to You," never mind how early it is because even though you're not a kid anymore, on your birthday you still are and you want the song and the celebration, the cake and the candles and everything - balloons, lunch, "It's your birthday, wow!" in between.

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Snake oil can't rejuvenate a soul

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It was tucked into the news Wednesday. Something about a treatment called "Gentle Waves" that can make old skin look young. You sit in front of a flashing light for 40 seconds and you can reverse the aging process. Except that it takes at least eight treatments at $ 100 each to begin to see a difference and the difference is, even then, subtle…

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