The words are ugly in the 1952 Funk & Wagnalls Standard Encyclopedia. Trisomy 21, called Down syndrome now, was called mongolism then, and the description of the condition was graphic and cruel and wrong….

It was the Sunday before Halloween and the children came to church dressed not as ninjas or vixens but as saints. They'd been asked to do this and dozens did, young kids and older ones, arriving in flowing robes and sandals; and the priest invited them all up to the altar. "Can you tell us a little about your saint?" he asked. And the children…

They sit in their homes and tell their stories and show you photographs and sometimes they show you their child's room. Books. Trophies. Posters. Clothes in the closet. Shoes on the floor. Things are all they have left. And their stories run in the papers. And on the news. And into each…

It wasn't intentional, the juxtaposition of an old man dying underneath a picture of an old man young. A grainy black-and-white, the picture was part of a collage that hung on a wall with other photos and plaques. It was hardly noticed when the room was my father's den, before it became the place where he would die…

He was 19 and his name was Shayne Cabino and he lived in my town and he was killed on Oct. 6 in Iraq, one of at least 1,965 members of the US military now dead since the war began.

Cabino's family, too distraught to talk, held a news conference at the Canton police station, where a friend read a statement saying that…

It's the silliest, most superfluous thing: a big, stuffed, standing-up, udders-hanging, tan-and-white toy cow that does nothing. It doesn't moo. It doesn't give milk. It doesn't even twitch its tail. 

Who needs a thing like this?

The cow lived for a long time in a hospital gift shop…

He says not to come and I don’t. I respect his wishes because he is my father.

He is old and he is sick and he is leaving me. The cancer is killing him and the chemotherapy is its unwitting accomplice. He has been in a hospital for more than a month now. He’s a good patient, everyone says. He was a good soldier, too. He doesn’t complain and he does…

It was called the "The 200 Club" and to be a member was simple: All you had to do was graduate at the bottom of your class. There were about 40 of us in this self-appointed, self-denigrating group in May 1964. I remember worrying that we would be called up to graduate in order of class rank…

He says not to come and I don't. I respect his wishes because he is my father. He is old and he is sick and he is leaving me. The cancer is killing him and the chemotherapy is its unwitting accomplice. He has been in a hospital for more than a month now. He's a good patient, everyone says. He was a good soldier, too. He doesn't complain and he does what's he told…

Thirteen weeks without writing a column. Without cutting and pasting pieces of life, a thing I did three times a week for much of my life. My grandson, Adam, is asleep upstairs in my house. His mother, my daughter, is in Foxborough waiting to try out for "American Idol." He dreams and so does she…

I took the coaster home and stuck it in my journal, but I didn't tape it in. I like holding it. I like looking at it.

The image on the coaster could be my father. It's circa 1950, a sepia sketch of a police officer, standing alone, straight, serious, hard-brimmed hat, young face, clean shaven, long wool coat, badge over the heart, polished leather shoes…

I've always had trouble with endings. My friend, Anne, gave me a card full of them one Christmas years ago, which she'd cut from newspapers and magazine articles.

“I need an ending,'' I'd said to her at least a hundred times. And so she sent me some: ``And that, folks, is not funny.'' ``Oh, yes, and have a nice day.'' ``Yup. Just like your…

I never would have described Rona Jaffe's 1958 best seller  “The Best of Everything, ''which I read in 1958, as “vintage heavy breathing.''

I don't remember heavy breathing at all or “sweaty, illicit and brain-fogging sex; furtive hotel room trysts; tussles in boardrooms and darkened apartments; and searing emotions…

He loved them instantly, more than all the other wind-up things in the room. He looked at them in wonder, the way his mother did when she was his age. It was the first time I saw the baby she used to be in him…

The pool was full of people when Loretta went under - her mother, her sisters, my husband, our friends. She slipped into the deep end from the shallow end, the drop abrupt. Only my husband saw.

He fished her out and she came up sputtering. She was 9 or 10 at the time. She hadn't screamed or thrashed. If he hadn't been watching…

We never take our eyes off them. Well, sometimes. When we blink. When we sleep.

But all the other times we're watching.

We watched them when they were infants, first in their bassinets, then in their cribs. We watched them in their swings, opening their eyes, looking around…

They are kids. Take away the wheelchairs and ventilators, the crutches, the aides, the letter boards, the speech machines, all the adaptive equipment and what you have is a group of kids hanging out on a spring day waiting for the speeches to end and the fun to begin…

The video tells the story, some of it, anyway. Proms are always magical. Function halls are transformed by balloons and soft lights into ballrooms and kids are transformed, too, by hopes and by dreams. Every girl is a princess on prom night. And every boy is Brad Pitt…

Every Saturday of my youth, from third grade up, winter or summer, rain or shine, my best friend Rosemary and I walked to the Turner Free Library in Randolph where we were allowed to borrow two books, no more. And where, until we were 12, we were confined to the young adult section…