My grandmother, Viola, used to work at the Shamrock Cafe in Inman Square in Somerville. It was a barroom and she worked late into the night.
For years, she lived above the cafe, but then she moved down the street. After work, she walked home. My mother begged her to take a cab. My grandmother refused. During the 1960s, the Boston Strangler was killing women her age. We worried that she would be found dead somewhere on Hampshire Street.
Read MoreEvery day it's the same lesson. Over and over we learn and relearn it.
Sometimes it sticks for a while. We'll have an epiphany. We'll understand. But then we forget, and have to begin again. And on it goes, a cycle that goes nowhere, spinning like a top, motion without movement, life without growth…
Read MoreWhen Xena, the cousin I love, was here, before she grew up and met the boyfriend she loves, we would walk from my house all the way downtown, then home again.
She was 11 that summer and couldn't read. And no one had known. She'd buffaloed her teachers and her parents and everyone else. She had listened, observed and pretended to read. It was her fifth-grade teacher who finally realized that she couldn't…
Read MoreHe helped my son move, lugged stuff down from a six-floor walk-up. My husband helped, too, so he met Bill. But I didn't. Bill Hunt was a name, an old college roommate, someone I heard about but didn't know.
Then came Sept. 11…
Read MoreWalt was my best friend’s sister’s husband. Janet brought him home one day when Rose and I were in our teens. And I gawked and Rose giggled because Janet was in love and batting her eyes and smiling sweetly even at us, and talking in the softest voice. And we weren’t used to seeing Janet this…
Read MoreIt took me an hour and 10 minutes to reach her and I wouldn’t have if she hadn’t told me about “American Idol.” She said that she’d hit redial non-stop for two hours before she got to vote for Clay. “You can’t give up, Mom. If you keep dialing you eventually get through.”
I started dialing my daughter on her cell phone Friday afternoon the second I heard…
Read MoreThe stars are a new thing. When he mentioned them the first time I thought they were a figure of speech. “I’m giving you a gold star, today,” my father said.
“Why are you giving me a gold star?” I asked, humoring him.
“Because you called,” he said.
Read MoreIf my family were in the middle of nowhere, we would think we were happy. Plunk us on an island with no one else around and we would think it was Eden recreated. That's how charmed we'd feel. That's how blessed…
Read MoreIn the movies, music announces the big moments. An orchestra swells, there's a shift in keys, a violin wails and you know you'd better pay attention.
Real life doesn't give you a warning. The big moments come and go along with the small ones. We don't edit our lives. And yet somehow they get edited…
Read MoreThe piano sat in the living room for 33 years. A baby grand, it took up a lot of space. It was old, it didn't hold a tune, it needed to be refinished, but I loved it - not just for the notes that filled the house whenever it was played, but for its history. It was my in-laws' piano before it was mine. My sister-in-law played and my father-in-law sang and strummed a ukulele, and friends would come by to visit or to have dinner and inevitably end up around the piano. For years, it made music for parties that seemed to run one right into the next.
Read MoreNo one means to scare parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles. What they mean to do is inform, enlighten. The more you know, the better off you are, right?
Knowledge is power, right?
Except that sometimes it isn't.
My mother-in-law had a saying: "Wee steps and slow." She applied this philosophy…
Read MoreI will have to apologize to her someday. I will have to tell my grandchild that I cried the day she was born.
Not immediately. Not when I first held her and she looked into my eyes and I looked into hers. There's a picture of this. Lucy, just minutes old, almost saying hello. I never shed a tear in her first 12 hours of her life when I thought she was USDA…
Read MoreThe rhododendrons bloomed on her wedding day. The front yard was pink with them, big, bright, showy flowers everywhere you looked.
Call it luck, chance, happenstance. I know better. Those bushes were woody and straggly for years before, the flowers few and pale, nothing you’d notice. Nothing that would take your breath away. And in the years after, they were worse…
Read MoreHe never believed in signs. When I told him about my mother and the bird, he just smiled. "It was more than coincidence," I would argue. And he would give me a look that may as well have been a pat on the head. My friend, Father Coen, had no trouble believing in the Resurrection, the Transfiguration, the Ascension, transubstantiation and eternal life. But he couldn't buy the simple fact that a lone bird flying in a barely open window on a cold November day was a sign that my mother was safe and that she had found a way to tell me…
Read MoreThe national threat level: from orange to yellow and back again. Twenty degrees one day, zero the next. Snow everywhere. And bad news. Month after month of it. Except for the miracle of Elizabeth Smart, it was all bad news. The winter was miserable. It was long and dark and hard and scary. And it refused to leave. But here we are on the other side of it. Most of us anyway. Those of us who didn't lose anyone to the winter or the war. For us, finally, the bad time is over. It's May and if it's a little cloudy and rainy, who cares?
Read MoreIt was never pretty even when it was new. It was the pink of Canada mints and mother of pearl white, the pedestal, all white, the top a series of concentric squiggles of pink twirls. I paid 50 cents for it at a yard sale 30 years ago. For a cake plate…
Read More'm singing a lot these days - out loud, off-key. But who cares? I'm singing love songs: ``You Are My Special Angel,'' ``Getting to Know You'' and ``You'll Never Know Just How Much I Love You.''
Who'd have thought?
I've been in love before. I'm familiar…
Read MoreThere is a boy and he has thick, dark red hair with lots of cowlicks. And he has freckles on his face and hazel eyes. And there is gentleness about him, and something else, too, a kind of joy that makes you smile and wish you had a boy his age at home. I asked him last week, “How old are you?” and he said, “I’m nine…
Read MoreI put the candle in my window Thursday morning. I walked down to my cellar, rummaged through the Christmas decorations, found a candle with a working light and set it in the middle of my living room window.
Read MoreA simple thing in these complicated times. My son-in-law e-mailed me a test. You know the kind. What's your favorite food? What was the last movie you saw? Which do you prefer: Sprite or 7-Up? Croutons or bacon bits? The person sending the quiz answers these questions, then sends it to you. You read his answers, delete them, add your own, then e-mail the test with your answers to all of your friends…
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