He came home New Year's Eve. I looked up and there he was, standing at my neighbor's door all ready for a party. 

I didn't expect him. He'd spent Christmas in Scotland with his wife - her family's turn this year - and though she'd stayed the week, he'd had to fly back to work. I thought he'd be spending…

The world rushed to help the devastated city of Bam, Iran, first to rescue those trapped beneath mud, cement and rubble, then to bury the dead, feed the hungry, house the homeless - reaching out despite history and politics. A tear in the earth's skin, a shudder that buried 50,000 human beings, spurred this humanity.

Iran responded by opening its doors, waiving its strict passport controls, rebuffing only Israel. Seventeen hundred international relief workers…

He has a million good points. He makes me laugh. He cleans up after the dog when I gag and say I can’t. He takes the laundry to the dry cleaner. He never overreacts when I write a check or 10 and forget to copy the amount in the check register. He tells me I look good even when I don’t. He gives me his coat when I’m cold. And he gave me his car because it came with a Global Positioning System and I’m the one who can’t find my way out of a paper bag…

Two days before Christmas I logged on to AOL and there was the home screen reminding me that the nation is on high alert, because of a "possible grandiose terrorism attack." Directly underneath this, there were the "must have reads" for the holiday season. Now you'd think that the "top biographies" that we "must" read would enlighten us in some way because, God knows, we need meaning in our lives as well as a Sacagawea to help…

We added our granddaughter, Lucy, to the collage this year. But not sitting on Santa’s knee. It snowed.  She has a cold. So we sat her under the tree and clicked away making funny noises and funnier faces until she rewarded us with one of her blink-and-you’ll-miss-it smiles. It’s her first Christmas and Santa or no Santa it was a Kodak moment…

Maybe God is watching these two boys and their dog. Maybe they are enough to keep Him from giving up on the world for one more day. They are enough for me.  They are 10 or 11and as skinny and wiry as pipe cleaners, children still, playing on a beach in Hawaii. And because it is early on a Sunday morning they have the beach to themselves…

You think you’ll remember but you won’t. You’re certain you will always know the exact year you waited in line to have your daughter’s picture taken with Santa, have her finally seated on his lap only to have her take one long look at him and burst into tears. Of course you’ll remember. The moment is unforgettable…

The advertisement is old. It ran in the Patriot Ledger in January 1991.   “Lab Pups – 6 wks old, jet black, classic English features, champ lines. Father has misplaced his papers. Our loss, your gain. $150 with shots. Hurry, only 3 left…

Oh, we have turned into a bunch of goofballs around my house.  Look at us, oohing and aahing over a smile, a coo, a tiny fist wrapped around our finger, two arms fluttering like wings.

“Look how cute she is,” we say 100 times a day. “Look how cute she is sitting. Look how cute she is sleeping. Look at her cute little lips and her cute little cheeks…

"Everybody wants to be somebody," Sharon Randall wrote in The Monterey Herald, quoting a guy who stuffed nine rattlesnakes in his mouth to break a world record. "I'm doing it for the prestige, the glory and the attention."

Then she told about how her mother wanted…

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…