It wasn’t easy. Not for him. Not for his children. Not for his brother and sister. Not for any of us who loved him. He was needy. He was demanding. He was stubborn and brilliant and frustrating and funny, a pain in the neck, sometimes, and an ache in the heart all the time; a very human, human being locked in a body…
Read MoreI had been thinking about her. That's the way these things happen. Coincidence? A random pairing of events? Or something more? Sound just out of earshot? Sunlight, bright and steady, but in another room? I had been remembering who knows why? being a child sitting on a kitchen chair, my face pressed against a window, waiting for my aunt to come and play with me. I could hardly say her name. "Rain coming?" I would ask my mother, "Lorraine" too big a word, "Aunt Lorraine" impossible.
Read MoreThey are listening to records not tapes on a Fisher-Price tape player, not CDs on a small boom box, not music that you get at the press of a button. They are listening to small, plastic 78 records no bigger than a salad plate, some red, a few orange, but most bright yellow, bought by my mother for me more than 50 years ago…
Read MoreA young man interviewed me for a college assignment, and he asked some interesting questions. "Do you think people like me inspire people like you?" He has cerebral palsy. He has difficulty walking. I walk the way I breathe, without thinking about it. His question stayed with me.
Read MoreI am as Catholic as the moon is round. It's not visible, sometimes, the moon, my Catholicism, but it's there, pulling the tides, shaping the earth, pulling and shaping me. I knew who made me before I knew who I was. God made me. "Why did God make you?" the catechism asked.
Read MoreThe e-mail's subject was "Nice thoughts for the start of Lent," so I opened it and read it, and because I thought it was worth rereading, I printed it and hung it on my bulletin board. It's a "give up" list, but it's not full of the usual give-ups: cookies, cake, ice cream, candy, wine. This list is about behavior, about giving up complaining, pessimism, worry, negativism, and gloom. Having given up all things delicious, including Dunkin' Donuts sugar-coated jelly sticks and Brigham's chocolate chip ice cream, many times before, I figured that "to give up gloom and enjoy the beauty that is all around" would be a piece of cake, so to speak.
Read MoreWe called him Mr. Skeptical when he was born because he came into the world scowling and it wasn't just your typical infant ''I'm hungry. I'm wet. Feed me! Change me now!" scowl. It was an old man's reproving look. It was as if Adam had been sitting in a Chippendale wing chair, sipping brandy and smoking a cigar in front of a fire somewhere…
Read MoreThe birthday has come and gone, not a significant one, though all are. Another year checked off. One more candle on a cake. Birthdays invite reflection. Some days I feel like Elaine Stritch with her raspy voice, belting, "I'm still here."
Read MoreWhat 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…
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