I didn't expect to see the tulips bloom this spring. Planting them was an act of faith. I dug 100 holes in a patch of dirt in my front yard, placed a bulb in each, shoveled dirt over them, watered them, then forgot about them. Maybe they would survive the winter. Maybe they wouldn't. After Sept. 11, everything was a maybe.
Read MoreWhile delegates from 57 Muslim nations sit around in Malaysia trying to come up with a definition of terrorism - using human beings as bombs to blow apart civilians is, most of them say, mere freedom fighting - the truth, as usual, gets buried under words. The truth is simple. Life is precious. Life is a gift. Life should be safeguarded, not sacrificed. So why isn't the preservation of human life the subject of the day instead of the ongoing rationalization for yet more murder?
Read MoreYou wonder what makes an ordinary day stand out in memory. Who takes the mental snapshots that we see when we look back through time? There are no real snapshots recording the day, because there was nothing special about it. Nothing special at all.
Read MoreThirty-four years ago my husband and I stood at the altar at St. Bernadette's Church in Randolph and before God and friends promised to love one another until death did us part.
Death was something straight out of the movies back then, drama relegated to the final scene. So were the words: "To have and to hold, from this day forth."
I was 20. The groom was 21. Our favorite song was the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice" ("if we were married").
Read MoreThe five of them were talking about a restaurant we had eaten in last year.
"It was across from Pat O'Brien's," one of them said.
"It had all that chrome going on."
"We ate breakfast there two mornings."
"And you got french toast and bacon both times," Maryanne told me.
They remembered but I didn't. It was gone, a restaurant and two mornings.
Read MoreI phoned her for another reason, but there is no other reason for Jill these days. All talk leads to Tara.
"In 40 days Tara will be married," she said, not in a forlorn, I'm-losing-her way. But with wonder. Forty days, can you believe it?
Jill has always talked with wonder about Tara.
Read MoreIt's all going back to the way it was before September 11th. But how can it?
Is this our fate? Court TV and celebrity news and issues we knew four short months ago were a waste of time are still a waste of time.
Thomas Junta has been charged with beating his son's hockey coach, Michael Costin, to death at the Burlington Ice Arena in Reading 18 months ago. This 275-pound man allegedly smashed the head of the 150-pound Costin against the ground until Costin lost consciousness. What more do we need to know?
So why the national coverage? Why the day-to-day dissection of anger gone awry? Why the news updates, the talk-show discussions, the media frenzy about what is indisputably a horrific crime, but not, as some would have it, a trend? Will we be better people for having watched this sideshow?
Read MoreHe can't talk about it. Not now. The pain is too new. Harry Hewitt saw his wife killed last Saturday night. "I was right there," he says.
Right behind her as she traveled home from a dinner the two had shared.
rRight behind her, driving his car because she had cashiered at Wal-Mart that day and he had met her after and taken her to eat and then dropped her back at her car.d
Read MoreI saw my neighbor, Al, sitting in his driveway, propped up against his wheelbarrow, still as stone. I thought he was dead. Who sits in a driveway? Who puts down his rake or climbs off a ladder or stops mowing his lawn to rest for 10 minutes, to close his eyes and drop his head and let his body go limp and do absolutely nothing? Al does. And he's taught his big black dog Dante to do the same.
Read MoreI was thinking Sunday, as I was reading the papers, giving most of my attention to the pile of flashy, color flyers packed with things to buy, things to give, things that promise to make an old-fashioned Christmas - so much more pleasant than the news - that this is what happened to the Jews in Germany. They didn't pay attention, either. They sat among their families, buffered by them, and pushed away the world, deluded into thinking that what was happening outside their doors could never happen to them.
They were preoccupied, as we are, with life, with celebrations, with birthdays, graduations, and holidays. Our personal lives brim with these small, good, wonderful things.
Read MoreThe videos of Terri Schiavo are stunning. Doctors say she is in a persistent vegetative state, a miserable sequence of words and inaccurate, too. "Vegetative: growing or developing as or like plants." What exactly does this mean? But the videos show a responsive Terri smiling at her mother, opening her eyes at a doctor's request, recognizing music…
Read MoreThe world goes on without us. In the mountains, where my friend Anne lives, there is the certitude of this. The mountains surround and sustain her. She sees them wherever she goes, in front of her, in her rear view mirror, solid, permanent. She derives peace from them. And a quiet strength...
Read MoreBefore, on a September Sunday, I would be looking at the world in all its beauty and thinking that it's going too fast - the month, the fall, the leaves turning, every day getting shorter than the one before. I would ache to slow it down and be sad when I couldn't. September is always a bittersweet time. Before, on a September Sunday, I would drive to church and see pumpkins for sale at Cassie's and I would think, I have to stop on the way home and get some. And I would pass a nursery full of mums, and think, I need to get mums, too, and cornstalks and hay for the wheelbarrow. And I need to repaint the wheelbarrow.
Read MoreIt's hard to know what to do next. Even the essentials seem unessential, showering, dressing, making the bed, making coffee. The gym seems superfluous. A walk feels surreal. Morning is just an extension of the previous day. No need for an alarm. Night and day blend, all the days since Tuesday like time spent in a hospital room waiting to find out what's wrong…
Read MoreIt began as such an ordinary morning. At 8:30 my husband and I boarded Continental Airlines Flight 847, wrestled a bag into an overhead, complimented ourselves on securing a coveted emergency exit row seat and settled back for a flight to Puerto Rico, with a connection in Newark. We were headed for a cruise. The first time the captain came over the loudspeaker it was to announce a small mechanical problem…
Read MoreI hadn't been back in more than two years to the place that feeds my soul. I went to other places and I thought, this is fine. I don't need one particular plot of earth where the sea meets the sky and I meet God. I found God in people and in landscapes: on my walks with the dog, in my small garden. And I convinced myself that this was enough. I thought I had become wiser. God is everywhere, I said. All I had to do was look and I would see.
Read MoreIt started with Great Woods. I mean the Tweeter Center. I dialed information to get the number, heard "Welcome to Verizon" and thought, not just that Verizon sounds like an antibiotic (Erythromycin? Tetracycline? Verizon?), but what's with all these companies changing their names?
Read MoreOf course he had to die sometime. He was 86 and much as we wish it could be, people don't live forever. But it seemed that he would. It seemed as if he would always be sitting in his rocking chair on his front porch, his wife beside him, or making his way down Chapman Street to the L'il White Store, Cassie's now, but always the L'il White to him.
Read MoreAl was on his roof Tuesday morning, broom in hand, sweeping. Al, my across-the-street neighbor, is hardly a spring chicken. He should not be climbing ladders. He especially should not be climbing a ladder onto his roof because it is the kind of roof a child draws, a steep upside down V. But there he was climbing, then crawling like a crayfish, standing intermittently to out-out-damn-spot, some spot only he could see. Who, in his right mind, sweeps his roof?
Read MoreMy mother's birthday was yesterday. She would have been 76, not old by today's standards. But she died when she was 63, and I lost her many years before. I should be used to not having a mother by now.
But you never get used to it.
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