Parent's age is measured not in years, but in memories

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Parent's age is measured not in years, but in memories

My father was sick last week. The heat ambushed him. He has never been able to tolerate heat. He blames the malaria he had in the war for this. Before Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower marched him through Africa, he was fine, he says. After the war, he wasn't. The heat, since, has always slowed him down.

But it has never stopped him before.

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He's Mr. Right - really he is

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He's Mr. Right - really he is

Of course he was telling me a better way to prune the rose bush. That's what he does. He's Mr. I Have a Better Way of Doing Everything, a man with vision, practical in his assessments and, as he likes to remind me, always on target with his recommendations. "Just get a saw and get rid of the whole bush," he said last Sunday afternoon as I belatedly attempted to tend to a wild mass of dead wood and thorns that I hadn't bothered to look at all year. I had killed my rose bush with inattention and was now determined to bring it back to life with a little pruning, a little Miracle Grow and a lot of love…

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Mary was everyone's nice aunt

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Mary was everyone's nice aunt

Aunt Mary wasn't my aunt. But that's what I called her. That's what most everyone who met her through her nephew, George, called her.

"This is my Aunt Mary," he'd say. And the name stuck, for it was a perfect fit for a woman who was like a favorite aunt - the one who always likes what you're wearing and praises your food and admires what you've done to your house and tells you you have nice children, even on days when they're not being so nice.

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Love is natural, but it's hate that's learned

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Love is natural, but it's hate that's learned

While 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?

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Growing up, growing together create a lifetime of memories

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Thirty-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").

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