I call him my first pancake. It's a term of endearment and part of our family vocabulary. All families have their own words and phrases.

When you make pancakes, the first is the one you burn or undercook or make too fat or too thin. First pancakes are hard to get right because you haven't got the process down yet. Imagine taking someone who…

The day that President John F. Kennedy was killed I was 16 and a senior at Archbishop Williams High School. My class was in the cafeteria at a sodality meeting when the announcement came over the PA that the president had been shot. A half-hour later we were back in our homeroom when the PA clicked on again and we learned that the president had died…

You wonder how much people can stand. How they get up and go on under the worst of circumstances. How faith isn't enough sometimes and hope is fickle and how sorrow wears you down. I see her walking the hall, holding her baby. She passes the room where my family waits with my daughter's baby for more tests and more doctors with their maybes and possibilities…

He didn't cry this time. He grinned and handed his sister a baseball, an official major league one. "I've been waiting 26 years for this," he said hugging her, my son a man, but my boy still.

We were at Penn Station on the run - work, responsibility, places to go, things to do. Have to get home. Have to get to class. But before we  separated, some…

Hundreds of people could tell this story, maybe thousands. It could be told in Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese, Korean, English - the kind the queen speaks - and the language of the streets. Old people could tell it and young people, too, and though the words would be different, all the stories would be the same: ”This is how Sister Eustace helped me," each would begin…

The wallpaper was gray with flourishes of pink and magenta running through it, sprigs that looked like feathers on an old lady's hat, or the kind of pen George Washington would have used. It covered the living room walls and a stairwell in the house where I grew up, a small cape built in 1953. I remember the wallpaper vividly, not just because…

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…

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…

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…

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…