I'm feeling a little better, but only a little better, because (A) my daughter, who is decades from qualifying for a senior discount, cannot remember the gist of a seminar she attended last week. She came home singing its praises, full of…
Read MoreThe knobs are long gone, so turning on a television isn't quite as easy as it used to be. Charlotte is on the telephone instructing me. She's trying…
Read MoreElizabeth Dawe is a beautiful little girl who doesn't realize how much she's been through, that life's been harder for her than it's been for her siblings and cousins and friends. The soon-to-be 9-year-old — her birthday is Feb. 12 — was born with…
Read More'I'm sorry," my friend Michael said. He wasn't even in the room yet. He had just opened the door and was in mid-step when…
Read MoreI was Beverly Theresa Curtin back then. Twenty years old. A senior at Bridgewater State, the college my father chose for me. I commuted. He bought me…
Read MoreThey have been my surprise silver lining in 2017, Facebook posts from a guy I barely know about a baby I've never met. Words and photos that gripped me from the start, that made me hope and gave me hope, and that continue, every day, to make me smile.
Read MoreIt's a little book called "Yellow Star." Not many words. Written for young adults. I found it at a book sale at Rockport Public Library in October. The cover lassoed me. It's a photo of a small, somber child with cropped brown hair and clear brown eyes wearing a double-breasted pinkish coat trimmed in brown velvet. When I was small, I had a similar coat. It was plaid, but the same style and the same kind of collar. It itched my neck. I wore it the Christmas Day I was 5. I know this because my father dated the photo he took…
Read MoreAll the things I've wanted. Saved for. Had to have. Bought. Loved in my life. Then, one day, abandoned. That's what happens with things. Ginny dolls. Cabbage Patch dolls. Elsa and Anna. All history now, passion turned to indifference, generation after generation after generation.
My first real purchase? I was 12. It was summer. I'd baby-sat for an entire week, Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, three kids. I'd earned…
Read MoreInside my house, it is still Halloween. A giant bat hangs over the sliding glass door. Scary Man, laden with chains, shrieks in the hall. The kitchen witch cackles whenever a dish is clanked or someone bumps into her.
Outside my house, Halloween was over weeks before it arrived. Christmas pushed it aside in the middle of October, wreaths and Santas and holiday deals dwarfing pumpkins and ghouls and candy corn. There was Christmas music…
Read MoreYou can't make up these things. It was last month. A weekday. I was meeting Rosanne Thomas for lunch to talk about her new book, "Excuse Me — The Survival Guide to Modern Business Etiquette," because Thomas teaches manners in these mannerless times, and, God knows, a course in civility and kindness and an awareness of others are things our culture could use a dose of right now…
Read More'Why don't we talk on the phone anymore?" Anne and I say to each other when we do talk. When we're sitting across a table from each other playing cribbage and chatting about life and books and movies we've loved and places we've been. Across a table from each other, we never stop talking.
But we don't pick up the phone…
Read MoreThey insulate me from the world. They keep me away from network TV and the barrage of bad news, which is incessant. They make me pay attention to what is happening right in front of me because they are in front of me, children singing a song, reciting a poem, telling me about a book I have to read or a movie I have to watch…
Read More'You plant black-eyed peas, that's what you git," my daughter's friend says in an Oklahoma drawl she exaggerates whenever she wants to make a point. I laughed when I first heard this phrase some 20 years ago, but it's a saying our family quickly adopted.
I found myself thinking these words while listening to my granddaughter Lucy belt out the score from "Gypsy" on our drive home from seeing…
Read MoreThey stopped speaking to each other decades ago, two cousins who lived within walking distance of one another, cousins who had been good friends, who had a shared history, who'd spent holidays and weekends and countless family celebrations together, who always got along until one of them couldn't forgive what the other insists…
Read MoreYou'd think, having lived a long life, that I would know some things. And I do. I know facts. Lots of them. But not nearly enough. And I understand so few of the "why's" behind what I know.
For example: I have been reading about the Second World War since I was a child, both fact and fiction, and still I don't understand the reasons for all that happened. Last month, I read yet another book, "The Holocaust — A New History," by British historian Laurence Rees…
Read MoreI never called her Carmela. She was always Mrs. Denneno to me. "Hi, Mrs. Denneno?" "How are you, Mrs. Denneno?" "What's new?" "How are the kids?" These are the questions you ask people you know, but don't really know…
Read MoreMy favorite holiday isn't a holiday. Yet. But give it time. August is the only month in which there is no national celebration, no reason to pause or give thanks or remember. And shouldn't there be? Isn't August, even by definition, grand and majestic and impressive? Doesn't it deserve to be honored? Plus, don't we love holidays, especially the ones…
Read MoreToday it's eyeshadow I can't find. Clarins. Four shades of gray in a small, gold compact, my go-to-for-the-moment favorite. This eye shadow lives in my makeup bag, with all the other paints and potions I keep falling for.
Except it's not there now…
Read MoreMy daughter met a man at Chicago's O'Hare Airport last week who gave her a Virgin Mary medal. And perspective. "Sometimes there are miracles," he told her.
She met George because of a flight delay. She'd had too many flight delays. This one was three-plus hours, which meant she wouldn't be arriving home in Boston until after 1 a.m. She was not a happy camper…
Read MoreMy father is the reason I said yes to an e-mail asking whether I wanted a review copy of "Love Letters from World War II." But I didn't think this at the time.
The book's cover is what I thought drew me: photographs of a man and a woman looking like characters in an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, lean and beautiful, and of a time, both staring outward but looking inward, too, separate, facing away from…
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