Back-to-school shopping has always been my favorite ritual. As a kid, I loved taking the train into Boston with my mother on a hot August day, trying on plaid dresses and cordovan shoes, eating lunch — always macaroni and cheese at Colestone’s — heading home, then arranging all the loot on my bed and waiting for my father to come in from work, to show him all we had bought…

It's all about juxtaposition.

I had been to visit Chris McLean at Norwood Hospital. Chris has fluid around his heart. He's 52. I've known him since he was 5. He isn't any more or less extraordinary than anyone else. He's just one more person who was born and shared his childhood…

I don’t know when the late Erma Bombeck, whose column appeared in hundreds of newspapers for 30 years, wrote “The things a dad does.” All I know is that I read it a long time ago, loved it, and saved it. And every Father’s Day, I reread it because it captures a way of life that existed for most of the 20th century but doesn’t anymore. Bombeck’s piece is short, just 300 words.“When I was a little kid, a father was like the light in the refrigerator,” it begins…

He loved her and she loved him. It is that simple. It was love at first sight and love at every sight for nearly nine years. A fairy tale. A legend. Too good to be true, but it was true.

Al wasn’t her grandfather, but you don’t have to be a grandfather to love and be loved like one. Al wasn’t even Lucy’s uncle, or a long distance cousin. He was simply Al – neighbor, friend,…

"You have hair like an old lady," my four-year-old granddaughter said to me one day last month. It was a simple observation, not a judgment. No negativity implied. Charlotte and I were at my kitchen table sitting side-by-side making a birthday card for her mother, when she looked at me and made this totally innocent, out-of-the-mouths-of-babes…

I said it didn't matter. And I'd convinced myself that it didn't. So had my daughter, Lauren. We both insisted it was no big deal.

My granddaughter, Lucy, would be going to the Dean S. Luce School for first grade. Not John F. Kennedy, the closer neighborhood school where her mother and aunt and uncle had all gone, which she could walk to by herself when she got a little older, where the whole family had sat through dozens of plays and concerts and "bring your parents to lunch" days…

My father called at the crack of dawn the day I turned 40. "Good morning, daughter,' he said, the way he always did, preferring "daughter' to "Beverly' because, as he liked to remind me, I was Beverly to a lot of people, but nobody's daughter but his…

They came from short and long distances to meet him. They came before work and after work, and in between commitments and appointments and all the things that everyone has to do every day. They stopped doing these things, took a break, and showed up at my door smiling, walked in, sat down, held out their arms and oohed and aahed…

My role models, “long ago in the last century,” as my grandson loves to say, were saints and movie stars. Joan of Arc and Debbie Reynolds topped on my list because they both suffered pain and hardship, one for the love of God, (Joan of Arc was burned at the stake) the other for the love of a great singer. (“Any Time” is a really fantastic song but Debbie Reynolds was burned by…

Adam is seven and Charlotte just turned four. Last week, for the first time, the three of us played War.

Adam's an old hand at the game. He knows that a Queen beats a Jack and a King beats a Queen and that triple war is so much fun. War, for him, is a piece of cake…