My 13-year-old grandson cannot read cursive. I didn't know this until about a month ago. I was showing him something in my journal, and he couldn't make out a word. "They don't teach cursive anymore," he informed me.

I was flabbergasted…

They aren't wrapped yet. They're lying side-by-side on the dining room table in no particular order, stiff-spined, some with glossy covers, some matte, some thick with pages, some slim, some traditional paperbacks, some the mass-market kind, all of them with that new book smell.

For weeks I'd been thinking about what to get my grandson, Adam, for his 13th birthday. Anything sports…

Easter has so many things going for it. Not just the resurrection and the promise of eternal life, though that's hard to beat. Death not an end, but a beginning? We don't die, we evolve? Who doesn't want to believe this? "Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia."

All on its own, this promise, this certainty that we are not merely…

There’s a difference between ignorance and intent. This is what I want to say up front, that sometimes people use words they shouldn't because they don't know any better. When old words like "Indian" and "midget" get replaced by new words like "Native American" and "little person," it takes time for people…

Gerry Gottschalk once said: "Nobody just sits down and plays. You have to earn what you have. You have to experiment.” You would think that he never had to try. That he just sat down at a piano one day and, presto, out poured the notes. That he played the way most of us walk, without having to think about it…

They are in the back seat of the car singing something by Katy Perry. I don't know the song. But they do. They know every word. They sing the way they run, the way they draw, the way they swing on the monkey bars, the way they dance and play and pretend, the way they do everything. With energy and boundless joy…

I've called him "Mr. I Have a Better Way" since the dawn of time — well, actually since the dawn of us, affectionately, at first. "You are so smart to think of that!" I'd gush in my younger days when I'd be quarreling with something — the oil cap in my old English Ford, for example. It wouldn't budge for me, but he'd come along and patiently cajole it into turning. And I would gush in awe at his competence…

We are in our basement playing the "Pretend You Are Moving" game. It's my husband's idea. He read about it online in one of those "Fun and easy ways to organize your life right now" posts that cattle-prod you into action. Putting away the Christmas decorations was his poke in the arm. "We have too much stuff!" he bellowed while shimmying overstuffed boxes…

January 15, 2017

The Boston Globe

He doesn't have the skills or the money. He's not a private eye or a millionaire. So it's Herculean, what he's trying to do.

But it's a human need to want to know how your father lived and died. So Richard A. Fitts Jr. is on a mission to talk to men who knew his father, who trained with him, bunked with him, fought with him, who knew someone who knew him. Big things. Little things. Anything.

BODY

The most beautiful quilts are made of such scraps.

Fitts Jr. is 50 now, but was just 2 when his father, Green Beret Staff Sergeant Richard A. Fitts, then 22, was reported missing in action in Vietnam. Fitts Jr. does not remember his father. But he remembers knowing, even as a little kid, that his father had volunteered to be in the special forces. He remembers, too, the POW/MIA flag that flew at his grandparents' home in Abington, watching the news with his mother every night afraid that he would hear his father's name listed among the dead, and the nonstop effort his family made to learn exactly what had happened to the young soldier his father was, an outgoing boy everyone talked about and missed and loved.

Ordinary, working-class people, Staff Sergeant Fitts's parents, Walter and Rosella, went through all the correct channels to find out what had happened to their son. They wrote letters to the military and to politicians. They talked to the press. They kept Richard's name in the news.

For years and years they persevered.

And for years and years the military kept mum about the secret mission Fitts was on when he went missing.

"It was so secret," his son said, "that even regular secret forces didn't know it existed. The men had no dog tags. No American clothes. Nothing that could identify them or be traced back to the unit." The Fittses were told only that their son, along with six others, was aboard a helicopter that was shot down on Nov. 30, 1968, over Laos.

Because Fitts was classified as "missing in action" for seven years, the family lived with hope. I remember those days, sitting with Walter and Rosella at their kitchen table, taking notes for a story for the Patriot Ledger. They were full of fight then, sure that in time their son would be found. And he would come home.

In 1975, the military changed Fitts's classification from "missing in action" to "presumed dead." The Fittses still hoped. It wasn't until March 1989, when the wreckage of Fitts's doomed flight was recovered and human remains found and positively identified as Staff Sergeant Richard A. Fitts, that they stopped hoping.

On Richard Fitts Jr.'s Facebook page, there's a blurry picture of his father in uniform lifting, with one hand high above his head, the baby that Fitts Jr. then was. It's a picture of a young and strong and confident man.

The son is now making a documentary of this father he didn't know and is getting to know him along the way. Friend and fellow musician Rudy Childs, a documentary maker, is shooting the film. "We've been at it for almost a year," Childs told me last week. Both have full-time jobs and limited resources, but they are undaunted by this.

They've digitalized old VHS footage of news broadcasts that aired intermittently all the years Fitts was missing. They've interviewed local people who knew Fitts as a boy and as a young man. In October, they flew to Las Vegas for the Special Operations Association Reunion and filmed men who had served with Staff Sergeant Fitts. And on tap is a trip to South Dakota to interview a special operations soldier who ran missions with Fitts. "He is one of the only living people who knew my father on a day-to-day basis." said Fitts Jr.

Before he was in the military, Richard Fitts knew all about cars and scuba diving and archery and guns. He knew martial arts. He played the guitar and drums. "Learning this was like finding the Holy Grail," said his son, who is a musician, too.

Eighteen when he married, 20 when he became a father, 22 when he volunteered for special operations, and 22 when he died, Staff Sergeant Richard A Fitts lived a full life in a short time.

"I want people to understand what type of apple pie American kid my father was and how he is a part of what makes this country free," said his son. "And I want other sons and daughters who may be in my position right now to feel the pride and respect I feel."

Richard Fitts has a gofundme page. To learn more, go to www.gofundme.com….

The clear, glass jar sat on her kitchen island for days last January before I said anything. At first there was just a single piece of folded yellow paper inside. But then, come February, there were more pieces of yellow. That's when I got curious.

"What is this?" I asked my daughter, Lauren…

There's a Christmas song we won't be hearing on the radio this season, "All Those Christmas Cliches." It doesn't seem to be on any DJ's playlist, and that's too bad because it's a perfect song for this time of year. I first heard it sung by a stranger at a piano bar about a decade ago. Now, every December, I sing it out loud, parts of it anyway…

'It's raining, but it's still the beach!"

My cousin, Terry, posted these words on Facebook last week along with a photo of her and a friend smiling under a gray sky with a darker gray Atlantic Ocean in the background.

Both women are wearing scarves and jackets. Their hair is windblown…

Ann Marie and I were not close friends. I didn't walk to school with her. I didn't sit with her at lunch. We didn't talk on the phone every day. We never pinky swore, "We'll always be friends." And we didn't tell each other our every thought and dream. And yet, because we grew up in the same neighborhood, were the same age, and went to the same church and school, we played together many afternoons. Marbles in our dirt driveways. Freeze tag on our front lawns…

The son, who had grown up listening to his father's stories around the kitchen table, was the one to suggest that his father write a book.

"I could never do that," the father said, the thought of a book, all those words, daunting. "I never liked writing. I was more comfortable with math…

This happened nine years ago in a Roman Catholic church in a little town in the Canadian Rockies.

I should have shaken it by now. But the memory rears its ugly head at random times. Prejudice is like that. Or maybe the correct word is contempt…

My son was 14 and looking forward to going to a Red Sox game with his dad.But he talked back to me. He was disrespectful. And his father heard. And that was that. Instead of heading to Fenway Park, he spent the night in his room.

A generation later, my granddaughter…