If they had landed safely, it would have been just another mission. We wouldn't know their names. We wouldn't be reading about their histories and their families and the lives they lived and the things they did and were planning to do…
Read MoreIn the nearly 20 years that I have been writing this column, I've received many letters. I wish I could say that I answered every one promptly. Most times it took me a while. Eventually though, I got to almost every letter because each was there on my desk, in plain view, with my name printed or scrawled or typed or underlined in red…
Read MoreIt came out of nowhere. Without preamble, without warning, it was simply there - a long-forgotten fact that I didn't search out because I didn't know it still existed.
That fact is this: When I was a child, I knew all the serious talk about keeping the Ten Commandments had nothing to do with me or anyone else I knew. With the certainty of innocence, I was sure human beings wouldn't…
Read MoreThey were probably the nicest young women, good to their mothers, loyal to their friends, devoted to their pets. They were both pretty and cheerful and neat. But they never stopped talking. They sat not together but in their individual seats on a train…
Read MoreMy husband calls our bedroom the igloo, though not for reasons you might suspect. The bedroom is cold, so cold that if David Lean were alive he could film all of "Dr. Zhivago" within its confines and never have to deal with the fickle outdoors…
Read MoreI didn't watch the Super Bowl so I didn't see the ads then. But on Monday morning there they were, on AOL, just a click away. That's how I happened upon Michael Jordan. He was on the screen, the man he is now, playing hoops - through the magic of technology - with his younger self. Michael Jordan the man and Michael Jordan the boy together in a pitch for Gatorade…
Read MoreAs the war drums beat louder and faster every day, I wonder, how did we get here?
Every night now on the news there is fresh footage of young people going off to war. Why are they going? What exactly are they fighting for?
Two Air Force pilots went off to Afghanistan with the best of intentions. Then the Air Force allegedly force-fed them amphetamines, gave them a plane…
Read MoreIt stalked him his whole life and he ran from it but he couldn't hide. He knew about good and he knew about evil and the legacy of both, long before he knew that a camera could be a weapon and that memory is the best revenge. Roman Polanski was only a boy when his mother, who was four months pregnant, was killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz…
Read MoreThey make the most compelling photos. A firefighter rushing into a burning building. A passer-by pulling a stranger from a hissing car. An unidentified someone risking life and limb to rescue a cat from a tree or a dog from a patch of ice. There was Officer Russell Cera crawling across a half-frozen river in Racine, Wisc., Tuesday, and the breadth of his effort was so clear that the photograph made national news. We eat up these snapshots of heroes in our midst. Didn't we all believe and imagine, until a feeding pond came up empty, that a Bridgewater farmer…
Read MoreIt stands out now because it stands alone. Last week, all the houses in the neighborhood where I walk had wreaths on the doors and lights in the windows. Now the lights are gone and the wreaths, if they're there, hang in the dark.
Only one house still has lights in the windows, and on every bush…
Read MoreBeth and I have been walking. Almost every day. Around her neighborhood. Around in a circle. Four loops and we're done.
I used to walk, years ago, because it was the only way I could get anywhere. I walked over to Janet Butler's and we'd walk together to church…
Read MoreIt's strange what your brain decides to remember, what it puts in first place and shuffles to the head of the class. It's not rule-bound like a teacher. The brain doesn't select the smartest or the best looking or even the cleverest memory to take out of mothballs. It's almost as if it reaches into a grab bag of life and pulls out whatever it finds. A snippet of conversation here. A splice of an afternoon there.
Read MoreThe box arrived last week when my husband and I were in Canada. My neighbor, Al, brought it in and left it on the kitchen table. He does this. He brings in the mail and the papers, takes care of the dog, leaves the front light burning when he knows we're coming home and Katherine, his wife, waters my plants, and offers me tea, no matter what time it is when I knock on her door. How did I get these wonderful neighbors? How is it that…
Read MoreIn Whistler, British Columbia, where snow is why people come and skiing is what people do, there is no snow. There is only rain and more rain. Day after day of it.
It will snow soon, people say, looking up at a thick, gray sky that is more November than December. There is no bite in the air, only a chill. There…
Read MoreEvalyn had her bone-marrow transplant a month ago. The words take a single breath. One exhale and they're said. Even their meaning fails to hint at all a transplant entails. The word is ordinary. Transplant evokes an ivy grown too big for its pot, upended and plunked down in a bigger, prettier container; or a sprawling bush dug up from the front yard and moved to the back. Transplants are a part of gardening. A little sun, a lot of water and transplanted things grow sturdier. Even a human transplant is just a person raised in one place who now lives in another.
Read MoreThe house I grew up in has changed hands again. I saw the new owner standing in the yard as a friend and I drove past. I do this sometimes, drive by to look and to remember. My father paid $ 10,000 for this house in 1954. The new owner paid $ 280,000. But the house isn't just more expensive. It's changed in many ways. It's bigger. One of the owners built on and up. And because of this, the yard is smaller. The trellis is gone, along with the rose bushes my mother planted and coaxed to grow. And the sprawling, silvery spidery things that lined the front walk have disappeared, as have the shrubs that separated our yard from the neighbor's, my mother's rock garden and the green awnings she scrimped and saved for.
Read MoreHe would say it's a reach because he never believed in these things. And I admit it is a reach. There is no direct connection between Pope John Paul II's announcement Thursday that he has added five more mysteries to the rosary and my friend Father Coen. Except for the connection in my mind….
Read MoreIt’s just a piece of orange felt that was made into a mitten so many years ago its loss should mean nothing now. There were two mittens then, plus a giant, orange, Ernie head.
Ernie, as in Bert and Ernie from “Sesame Street,” was a Halloween costume I made for my youngest child at least 20 years ago. I don't sew now. I should never have sewed then. I botched everything. I stitched left sleeves into right armholes…
Read MoreNothing had prepared her for this. Jennifer Johnstone was a healthy 26-year-old, 35 weeks pregnant with her second child, a girl, whom she and her husband Scott had already named Madison. She had ultrasound pictures of Madison too. One showed her so tiny that it was difficult to see her as anything but an outline. In another, Jennifer could almost see her daughter's smile. "This is your baby sister," she'd tell Cameron, now age 3. "Do you want to feel her kick?" she'd ask, taking his hand and guiding it with her own.
Read MoreThey wanted an apology. As much as they needed the man who killed Christine Griffiths punished and put away, they needed his remorse, too. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. I wish I could take it back." They ached for this. But what they got was a man who refused to even look at them, who kept his head bowed and his eyes lowered as one by one they took the stand and talked about a young woman each of them had loved…
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