She has a face like a torn scone. That's what my mother-in-law would have said. And then she would have let it go. She was not the type of woman who would have spent even a minute of her time trying to get a permanently dour someone to smile. So why can't I let it go? Why do I think that if I work hard enough, if I try just a little more, I'll find underneath this woman's scowl a hint, a glimmer, of a smile?
Read MoreIt is not the prettiest tree. A big, gangly oak, it blooms late and it blooms slow and every spring it leaves a thick layer of pale green pollen all over the driveway and the cars and the newly washed windows. And I have thought, many times, I wish we had a maple in the front yard instead.
Read MoreWe watch them and are amazed. They are like the Internet and Velcro and DVD players and cellphones, everyday staples that weren't even imagined when we were young. My husband and I gawk. "Unbelievable," he says. "Fascinating," I add. Different, we say, and agree that this time different is, indeed, better. It's a few days before Father's Day, and we are watching our sons-in-law father. We are watching them make lunch, change diapers, read stories, give baths, sing lullabies, tuck their children into bed, clean up, load the dishwasher, and unload the dryer.
Read MoreI thought it was the rain, long days of it. No sunshine. No color. I thought, I'll be fine when the rain stops. But when it stopped, finally, last Monday and the sky brightened for a while, I wasn't fine. It was June 5, my mother's birthday, and though she has been absent from this life for many years, the lack of her felt new, my loss startling, like walking into a familiar room and banging into a glass door.
Read MoreIt is not a beach book. It is not funny like "Marley & Me" or intriguing like "Beach Road" or trendy like all the Whitey Bulger books now suddenly in print. It is, no doubt about it, totally incompatible with summer and sand and sea air laced with Coppertone and flimsy bathing suits and cups full of lemonade. "Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust" is exactly what you don't want to read on a summer day. Which is why it's not on any summer reading list that I've come across. But here is why it should be.
Read MoreYour whole life, all you hear about is romantic love. It’s the stuff of fairy tales when you’re young, and poetry when you’re older, and six-handkerchief movies, paperback novels, and Lifetime TV, now and forever.
A kiss from a beloved awakens not just a sleeping princess…
Read MoreMaybe I bought the book after Lucy was born, or maybe some well-intentioned someone gave it to me. I don't remember. But here it is, nearly three years later, still next to my bed.Back then, I read it and lots of other books, looking for answers to questions. Lucy, my first grandchild, my oldest daughter's baby, was born with an extra chromosome…
Read MoreI wonder if the old songs were true. If "It Had to Be You" and "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home to" came straight from the heart. Or were they just sentimentally tweaked to sell? Was love 60 and 70 years ago as tender and innocent as the music made it seem? Or were all the songs “I'm wild again, beguiled again, a simpering, whimpering child again” a lie, truth sacrificed for meter and rhyme?
Read MoreWe play this game, my grandbabies and I. "How old are you?" I ask Lucy and Adam. And they say sometimes, when they want to "2!" And they will hold up their pointer and their middle finger and grin, the pair of them eager and earnest and proud. Then I say, "I'm 59! " And I count, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 . . . all the way to 59. And they gape at me, not because I'm old to them anyone bigger than they are is old but because I can count…
Read MoreIt's not something we talked about, and we talked about everything. But not this. Not then. Not now. Not ever. Our imagined husbands might go off to fight a war someday, we said, and our sons, if we had sons, might someday be called to fight. We were, even as small children, familiar with battle. We'd read the poetry my father had written in combat. We'd watched "The Fighting Sullivans." But we never imagined the kind of war we're mired in now. We never anticipated raising a child and seeing him grown and married and settled, then suddenly unsettled and terrifyingly vulnerable. We never expected that at 35 he'd be called to serve.
Read MoreBLACK HILLS, S.D. - You'd think that we'd know his name. You'd think if a man from Boston, born on Harrison Avenue, orphaned at the age of 1, beaten and abused his whole childhood, grew up and did something great something no one else has ever done we'd have at least heard of him. You'd think that conceiving and working for 35 years on the biggest sculpture in the world, bigger than the pyramids in Egypt, would be a shoo-in to fame.
Read MoreI'm taking a gardening course this spring, not for obvious reasons. Not just because a friend said, "You have to!" (She's seen my garden.) And not just because I want to grow something other than daffodils, which are in bloom now and look lovely but will be gone in days, leaving the round patch of dirt at the top of my driveway bereft for another 11 months…
Read MoreIt 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."
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