October 08, 2003

Friendly circle grows sweeter

October 08, 2003/ Beverly Beckham

Francesca filled them with chocolate this year. Not all of them. Just some.

They were small and round and hidden at the bottom of a plate, underneath the thin strips of sugary fried cookies that she makes and brings to my house every fall. Francesca bakes her special cookies and Liz makes her special salad and I order pizza and everyone brings wine. It's a tradition, a small party we had for the first time eight years ago when our children went off to college.

October 08, 2003

Friendly circle grows sweeter

October 08, 2003/ Beverly Beckham

Francesca filled them with chocolate this year. Not all of them. Just some.

They were small and round and hidden at the bottom of a plate, underneath the thin strips of sugary fried cookies that she makes and brings to my house every fall. Francesca bakes her special cookies and Liz makes her special salad and I order pizza and everyone brings wine. It's a tradition, a small party we had for the first time eight years ago when our children went off to college…

October 03, 2003

A reminder that life doesn't end

October 03, 2003/ Beverly Beckham

A reminder that life doesn't end

I never understood. All the times Maureen told me she couldn't do this and she couldn't do that, I gave her a hard time. "What do you mean you're cooking a meal for your mother's anniversary Mass." Or her brother's. Or some other deceased relative or friend…

September 26, 2003

A Yarn of Perseverance

September 26, 2003/ Beverly Beckham

A Yarn of Perseverance

It wasn’t a metaphor at first. It was just a ball of yarn. I took a picture of it, though. A close-up. I set it on my daughter’s pull out couch and clicked away intending to keep it as a reminder that perseverance pays off…

September 14, 2003

Ritter's Death Reminds Us of the Infinite

September 14, 2003/ Beverly Beckham

Ritter's Death Reminds Us of the Infinite

Every 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…

September 12, 2003

Simple fun and kids enrich life

September 12, 2003/ Beverly Beckham

When 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…

September 10, 2003

For Some, Every Day Is September 11

September 10, 2003/ Beverly Beckham

He 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…

August 17, 2003

Sisterly Bond Encircles Time

August 17, 2003/ Beverly Beckham

Sisterly Bond Encircles Time

Walt 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…

August 17, 2003

Blackout

August 17, 2003/ Beverly Beckham

It 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…

August 13, 2003

A Gold Star from Dad

August 13, 2003/ Beverly Beckham

A Gold Star from Dad

The 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.

August 08, 2003

Above All, Baby's a Blessing

August 08, 2003/ Beverly Beckham

If 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…

July 23, 2003

A memory is nature's snapshot

July 23, 2003/ Beverly Beckham

In 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…

July 20, 2003

Friendship reveals the depth of trust that belongs to God

July 20, 2003/ Beverly Beckham

Friendship reveals the depth of trust that belongs to God

The 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.

July 16, 2003

Step by step, challenges met

July 16, 2003/ Beverly Beckham

No 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…

June 02, 2003

Granddaughter's a Rare Gem

June 02, 2003/ Beverly Beckham

I 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…

May 28, 2003

The Wedding

May 28, 2003/ Beverly Beckham

The 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…

May 09, 2003

A sign from above via the phone

May 09, 2003/ Beverly Beckham

A sign from above via the phone

He 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…

May 02, 2003

Spring replaces a winter rife with discontent

May 02, 2003/ Beverly Beckham

Spring replaces a winter rife with discontent

The 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?

April 27, 2003

A Misshapen Plate Produces Happy Years of Just Desserts

April 27, 2003/ Beverly Beckham

It 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…

April 13, 2003

Can't Stop Singing on Cloud Nine While Awaiting First Grandchild

April 13, 2003/ Beverly Beckham

Can't Stop Singing on Cloud Nine While Awaiting First Grandchild

'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…