Adam has lived three years and two months on this earth and has figured out many things in his short time here. He knows to say “please” and “thank you.” He knows how to play Diego games on the computer. He knows to get a flashlight and look under the couch when a piece of the map puzzle is missing. And he knows words and concepts that we didn’t teach him…
Read MoreThey told their stories and I listened. But I'd heard them before and I knew I'd hear them again, so there was no need to pay strict attention to details, to memorize names and dates, to note the people and the cities they mentioned.
For the stories were predictable, like songs on a radio. You could count on them the way you can count on hearing "Dancing Queen" when you're driving and switching stations. My mother-in-law, my father, my Aunt Lorraine - each of them regaled me with tales that I didn't write down because I didn't think I had to. Because all I had to do was nudge them and say, "Can you tell me that story again?"
Read Moret's eight in the morning and my husband and I are talking about laying stones around the periphery of the garden, big stones, more boulder than brick, in an effort to keep the dirt in and the rabbits out. It's a sensible plan, except for my worry about the little kids who cut through the garden and race down its slope. "Maybe stones are a bad idea," I say to my husband. "What if the kids fall?" "Maybe living near a street is a bad idea," he says, meaning you can't protect children from everything…
Read MoreI am my father's daughter. I have his hands, old hands, worker's hands, calloused and sun damaged. And I have his ways. His ways I accept. The hands stun me. I look at them and they are his, only smaller; the fingers short, the knuckles creased, the veins like tree roots too close to the surface. How and when did this happen? My father's hands fixed things. They were exact, like tweezers, plucking tubes from the back of our TV, testing them, until the one that was making the picture arc was found…
Read MoreI found it in a card shop in Concord, N.H. - Caardvark's, a place that is now closed. It was hanging on a wall and it was perfect.
I'd been looking for perfect. My daughter was newly engaged and I wanted something special to celebrate the moment. For this was my baby who was getting married, my youngest child leaving home not for a little while, not for college, or for a summer, or to test her wings. But to fly away - with someone else - forever.
Read MoreI wake to birdsong these days, to trills and cheeps and caws, a chorus that begins in the dark. It doesn't obliterate the noise of traffic and trains and planes and sirens. But I hear the birds first and I wake up smiling.
I don't know what kinds of birds are singing, but my friend Anne does. She can identify them by their sounds. Sometimes I'll walk…
Read More“The tooth is missing. It will never come in. Missing teeth are common among children with Down syndrome,” the specialist told my daughter and son-in-law months ago.
He didn’t cushion his words. He didn’t say, “May not.” He said never.
And then last week, there it was – a lower right lateral incisor, next to her lower right central incisor, exactly where it belongs.
Read MoreIt was easier when Father Coen was alive. His faith was strong and certain, and as long as he was here, my faith was strong and certain, too. I called him my window through whom I saw God. And he said, "God is everywhere. You know that." I know it sometimes, but not all the time. Not enough of the time. Not the way I knew it when he was here to remind me…
Read MoreI like to believe that it's a lack of thought and not meanness that makes people use words that hurt. That they're going with the flow, following the crowd, saying what everyone else is saying with no intent to wound.
But words do wound.
Read MoreLucy is my first grandbaby, and her song just came. I didn't expect it, so I didn't go looking for it. It found me.
I was singing all the time back then, when my first daughter was pregnant. "You Are The Sunshine of My Life" and "My Special Angel." "You'll Never Know Just How Much I Love You" and, of course, "Baby Love."
The baby wasn't even close to being born, but I was already head over heels in love. And people in love are known to do some strange things, like walk on clouds and burst into song.
Read MoreOld memories, like flotsam and jetsam, bob to the surface at odd times. I am sitting in church with my granddaughter, Lucy, loving the feel of her arms around my neck. She is all mine in church, no distractions, no one to whisk her away. And I am thinking about Father Coen, and how he used to say that it didn't matter if children understood the Mass. Their presence was enough. That taking kids to church was like taking them to baseball games. Eventually they would come to know and love both.
Read MoreThe Boston Globe
February 25, 2007
`It's Janet’s birthday," I tell the person who answers the phone, expecting her to say, "It is? I'm so glad you mentioned this." Or "I know. We're having a little party this afternoon." But she says, "Oh." She says it flat, without inflection, in a way that means "I don't care. What difference does it make? Why are you telling me?"
Read MoreWhen I brush my granddaughter Lucy's hair and put it in a ponytail, I always kiss the back of her neck. And she giggles. She is 3. She talks. She dances. She goes to school. She plays house and tea, and kick ball and follow the leader. She loves books and Bambi and church and playing with her cousin Adam. Lucy has Down syndrome. She looks and acts more like a 2-year-old than a 3-year-old. But is this so awful? Don't we say, "Children grow up too fast"? Lucy isn't growing up too fast. She's taking her time.
Read MoreBeverly Beckham
It sits on top of a hill, overlooking a busy road - a big, pink stucco house that dwarfs all the houses around it. It is conspicuous consumption at its worst, or at its best, depending on your point of view. It's not the biggest house around. There are many bigger - one just a few miles from where I live, perched not on top of a hill but practically on the offramp of a highway. So many smaller houses have been knocked down to make room for these…
Read MoreHer history is hospitals. They're where she lived, where she grew up and where parts of her died. They were the best hospitals, the Ivy Leagues of psychiatric care. Her father, a heart surgeon, trusted these places, with their names that overshadowed their failures. They had big reputations and bigger price tags. He took her to one after another. But his daughter slipped deeper into herself and further away from him. He wouldn't give up. He refused to accept the "We're sorry, but there's nothing more we can do" he kept hearing. "If you try something four times and it doesn't work, then you try it again," says Dr. Frank Spencer, now in his 80s.
Read MoreI thought she was doing me a favor. All the times I would call her on the phone and ask, "Will you watch Robbie this afternoon?" or "Can the kids spend the night?" And when she said yes, which she always did, I thought she was sacrificing her plans and her energy to watch my children.
Now I know better. Now I know…
Read MoreShe died on a Monday in September between a weekend when my son was home and a Tuesday night pizza party. The sun didn't blink; the world didn't pause. Nothing happened - there was no presentiment of change, not even a flicker of feelings to make me think of her, my long ago friend, a woman I loved, a woman who was good to me, passing through and by and on. Flo Grossman died on Sept. 25 and I didn't know until Dec. 19. How can this be? The world should have felt different that Monday - slighter, duller, because the space filled by a vibrant life was suddenly left vacant.
Read MoreI will miss the cards the most. Not the music, though I have loved having the radio on all day, one Christmas song after another. But there will be hymns, still, at all the churches all the way through Epiphany.
Read More
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