n the beginning, the trees were rag-tag things, missing more limbs than they had. Even Charlie Brown wouldn't have bothered with them.
But my father always did. He'd come home on a December night, a man with a mission, dragging in a long, skinny sapling, branches awry, half its needles frozen, the other half gone. "It's ugly," my mother and I would say. "It's a work in progress," he'd announce, then go get…
Read MoreI don't know Kyle Gendron, except socially. We say hello at functions, make small talk, and now and then, I post on his Facebook page "Wow!" and "Amazing!" because he is such a superb photographer.
When I e-mail him sometimes for advice about photography, he always e-mails back.
Read MoreHere's what we've all been taught. To be polite. To be quiet. To not make a scene. To go with the flow. To be aware of other people's feelings.
Here's what we teach our children: To acknowledge a person's presence. To look someone in the eye. To say "please" and "thank you." To not interrupt. To say "excuse me." To be respectful.
And it's all good advice. Until it isn't.
Read MoreBack-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…
Read MoreAll I did was pull open a kitchen drawer to get a butter knife.
I'd been reading the newspaper, drinking coffee, enjoying the early morning quiet. The crumbs in the divider must have been there for weeks. But I hadn't noticed them before. Now they were all I could see.
So I abandoned the paper, dumped all the silverware in the sink, got out the Comet, and began scrubbing.
Read MoreIt'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…
Read MoreShe was born nine years ago on June 20, and it was the best of times and the worst of times.
Lucy's being here was what we had prayed for, what we had begged for. But not exactly. Because she was not the child we had imagined.
Read MoreI 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…
Read MoreFor most of the years I knew him, Al Delcupolo never sat still. He was polishing his car, or sweeping the driveway, or shoveling snow, or hosing down his lawnmower, or cleaning the gutters, or digging, or climbing, or hacking at some shrub, or up on his roof - a thing that drove his wife, Katherine, and me crazy.
He wasn't a spring chicken. He was in his 60s and then in his 70s and still climbing ladders.
Read MoreHe 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,…
Read MoreWhen a doctor at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia told New Jersey mother Chrissy Rivera last month that her 3-year-old daughter was ineligible for a kidney transplant, she was incredulous and furious.
``Did you just say that Amelia shouldn't have the transplant done because she is mentally retarded. I am confused. Did you really just say that?'' she wrote in her blog on wolfhirschhorn.org describing the meeting.
Read More"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…
Read Moret's young love that songwriters go on about and that filmmakers explore, young love that propels poetry and novels and myths and fairy tales. Romeo and Juliet. Antony and Cleopatra. Lancelot and Guinevere. Jack and Rose (Remember ``Titanic''?). And, of course, today's most popular young couple, “Twilight’s” Edward and Bella.
Young love, just out of the gate with its longings…
Read MoreI 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…
Read MoreIt wasn’t supposed to end like this. Not after all they have been through. Not after all the hope and prayers and therapies and people storming the heavens. If you have faith the size of a mustard seed nothing will be impossible to you. That’s what we’re told. They had faith. And they didn’t want to move anything as big as a mountain. All they wanted was to save a child, their child, to make their child well…
Read MorePlanting bulbs is an act of faith. You dig holes, take some dry, scaly ugly things out of a paper bag, place them right side up in the holes, cover them with dirt, watch rain and snow and ice entomb them. And you wait and wait and wait, believing they will transform themselves into things of beauty. When I was a kid, one of my favorite ``Superman'' episodes - the old black-and-white half-hour show starring George Reeves - showed the Man of Steel holding a piece of coal in his hand and squeezing it, turning the coal, in seconds, into a diamond. That's what the Earth does, Superman explained, only it takes the Earth a million years. This was magic to me…
Read MoreMy 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…
Read MoreThey 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…
Read MoreMy 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…
Read MoreI have a picture of Adam taken in April seconds before he blew out the candles on his birthday cake. It's a photo I keep going back to because he is pure child in it, bright-eyed and full of wonder and innocence.
Sometimes it hurts to look at it.
And yet I keep on looking.
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