What I know now, what I've learned but what I have to remind myself every day, is that none of it matters. The snow. Sitting in traffic. Missing a flight. Forgetting to TiVo "Lost." A bad cup of $2 coffee. A woman sitting in her car, WHAT IS SHE DOING JUST SITTING??? while you are waiting with your blinker clicking for her to pull out of a space so you can pull in because the parking lot is that crowded and it's not even a Saturday.
Read MoreThey met in Virginia in 1946. They were in their 20s. She was a Navy nurse, and he was a Navy doctor. He noticed her in the cafeteria, then on the dance floor. "All the fly boys liked to dance with her." He liked how she walked - "Lily had her own kind of gait." And how "she could recite poetry like mad." And how, at the age of 16, "all on her own she decided to become a Catholic." There wasn't anything that Dr. Jack Manning didn't like about Lily Sharpe Fields. They married at the US Naval Chapel in Portsmouth, Va., and a year later Jack Manning brought his new bride and infant son home to Taunton…
Read MoreShe has lost her words. Last year, I could feed them to her. Fill in the blanks. "How is . . . the bald one?" she said when I came to visit. She exaggerated bald, drawled the word, made a joke, covered up. I covered up, too. "How is Bruce? He's great. Definitely bald, but great."
Read MoreHe had a loud voice, something that normally would have made me cringe. A loud talker on an airplane is always annoying. And when the loud talker is in the row opposite you? And the flight is nearly full and there is nowhere to run? This is a prescription for a long flight.
But this loud talker wasn't a business person on a cellphone, making sure you hear every word. Or some teenager bragging to a friend "So she was, like, amazing, you know?" wanting attention, wanting to be overheard. This loud talker was a boy of 8 or 9 who wanted the attention not of all the people around him but of the one person who mattered most to him: his father…
Read MoreNever mind that she has dark blond hair and light blue eyes and the fairest of skin. Or that in four weeks she'll be 17. Or that she was in love, seriously in love, and that was good, that was great, but then it was bad and now, well?
Never mind.
Read MoreThe thank-you notes arrived less than a week after I brought over two small presents to the twins who live next door. They are 8 and in second grade. The notes, one from Albert and one from Melody. were written in little-kid print and addressed the same way, carefully, in neat straight letters. I read them and thought that with all their mother has to do - she works full time and takes care of a house, a husband, two kids, and a recently widowed father - she did this. She bought the kid-friendly stationery, sat down with her children, directed them ("Do we have to do this now, Mom?" at least one of them must have said), then made sure the letters got stamped and posted.
Read MoreBefore, my daughter was the one begging. "Please, please, can I get a dog?" I was the one saying: "A dog is a big responsibility. You have to walk him and train him and be around every day to let him in and out. And dogs shed and get ticks and dig holes in the backyard, and when it rains they smell. You really don't want a dog." But she said: "Yes, I do, Mom. I need a dog. Please, please, talk Dad into it." And so I did.
Read MoreI haven't put him in my dead book yet. A hard word, "dead." A word you want to camouflage with softer syllables: deceased, departed, passed on. But dead is the right word because dead is hard, people you love not in the next room, or the next town, or on the telephone saying, "Do you know that I'm the only one in the world who can call you daughter?"
Read MoreA woman is tormented by footsteps in the apartment above hers. She pounds on her ceiling with a broom. She screams "Shut up!" out the window. Finally, she runs up the stairs, broom in hand, to confront whatever monster is above her, infringing on her quiet. What she sees makes her stop in her tracks. "He's the one making my ceiling shake?" she asks, incredulous, her anger melting like snow on a coat…
Read MoreMy husband was always the keeper of the lights. For 30 years, he strung them wherever I saw fit in the front yard on everything green, in the backyard on a skinny dogwood, on a small Christmas tree that we put on the deck, inside on a big tree, over the mantle, and above the sliding glass door…
Read MoreThey are just things and things shouldn't mean so much. But they do.
Most are old and many are broken. A musical clock, a plastic reindeer, a dime store manger, Santa at his desk, a faded ornament they all tug at me.
Read MoreWe are older now than we ever dreamed we'd be, Rosemary and I. When we were children, best friends forever, Rose pricking her finger to seal the vow, me chickening out, we imagined a lot of things. But never this. Grandparents were what we had, not what we would grow up to be. It wasn't conceivable that we could be so old…
Read MoreThe 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….
Read MoreIt 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…
Read MoreThey 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…
Read MoreI love the way he looks at her.
I've watched him look, not often and not for long - not for months or days or even for hours. I hardly know him - or her. But I know the look. I recognize it from poems and love songs and old black and white movies. I recognize it from real life, too. My neighbor Stan, who died too young, used to look at his wife in the same way…
Read MoreIt 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…
Read MoreHe 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…
Read MoreIt'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…
Read MoreHe 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…
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