It made him sad, leaving before the ending. Not just the ending of “Lost,” a television drama he was hooked on. It made him sad to leave us, too, his family.But he knew there was more. “I think they are all in Purgatory,” he said a few weeks after “Lost” premiered. The popular weekly series, which aired on Wednesday nights…
Read More‘Why are we here?” I used to know. I used to be so certain.
“We are here to know, love, and serve God in this world and to be happy with Him in the next.” That’s what the Sisters of St. Joseph drummed into my 6-year-old head. That’s what I read in “The New Baltimore Catechism.” That’s what I recited day after day after day. So that’s what I believed. This life is temporary. The next is eternal. Sister said. Father Finn said. My mother said. So who could doubt…
Read MoreIf you look at statistics, you can convince yourself it isn’t so bad. What’s the chance of a child getting shot and killed at school? It’s less than getting hit by lightning. It’s less than being kidnapped. It’s less than dying in a car crash. So the numbers are with us, right? But it doesn’t feel right. And every time there’s another shooting, every time another child is murdered, it feels terribly, terribly wrong…
Read More‘What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence,” is a book propped up on a table under “New Releases” at Barnes & Noble. I pick it up. And can’t put it down. So I buy it. I’ve read only four of the essays so far. I want to absorb each. Maybe even more than absorb, I want to reflect, to think about these writers and their mothers, and to think about my mother, too, and all the things we never got a chance to talk about. Except that we did have a chance…
Read MoreI know I drive my grandkids a little crazy, gushing over every tree, pointing out every flower, oohing and ahhing over the yellow of forsythia and the world turned newly green. “Look at those tulips!” I say, letting up on the gas so that the 12-year-old in the front seat has time to turn her head and gaze at a small garden studded with red and orange and yellow. “Look how beautiful they are, Charlotte. And look, next door, at that dogwood…”
Read MoreMrs. X is lovely, a fellow passenger tells my husband and me. But she doesn’t speak much. When asked a question, her husband always answers. Even if it’s a simple question. We are seated with them one night at dinner and I meet her eyes. “Are you enjoying yourself?” I ask. And she smiles and nods and then turns to him to answer. Where are you from? And he says England. Is this your first cruise? And he tells us, no. It is one of many…
Read MoreI have a picture of me, at age 11, in my favorite dress. It was pink, not too pale and not too bright, and it was A-lined and buttoned up the front. I wore a crinoline under it, so the dress swooshed when I walked. In the picture, you can see my white ankle socks, but not my shiny black patent-leather shoes. It was spring. I was in sixth grade at Tower Hill School in Randolph. In seventh grade, I was sent to a Catholic school where I was made to…
Read MoreIf only you could wrap up a few happy moments and give them back to people when they are in need of happiness. If only you could freeze the best of times the way you freeze fresh-picked blueberries in June to savor again on a December day. We have memory, yes. But memory is a tease, a still shot, a small picture of what was, not all of what was. It’s a blueberry pie on the cover of a gourmet magazine, beautiful to look at but tormenting, too…
Read MoreI had never heard of Bryan Stevenson.
I heard his name for the first time in Montgomery, Ala., just last month. There, on top of a hill, sits the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the “lynching memorial,” locals call it. It opened last spring. It’s a somber site. Some 800 rust-colored steel rectangles, the size and shape of coffins, bear the names of more than 4,000 African-American men, women, and children who were lynched from 1877 all the way up to 1950 simply because of the color of their skin. The monuments hang lynched, too, suspended from a ceiling. They are the history I was never taught in school.
Read MoreI keep looking at them. They arrived in a 12-by-16-inch manila envelope, addressed to my husband. So, technically they are not mine.
“I hope 73 brings you joy and happiness!” Megan, who is 11 and our son’s oldest child, wrote on a card she made for her grandfather. “For your birthday,” she continued, “I made you 73 paper cranes. Each one represents one year of your life.” My husband spreads them out on the couch. They are colorful things…
Read MoreThe letters remain this morning. The tide hasn’t erased them. They’re not as sharp as they were yesterday, not as perfectly defined. The wind has blurred their lines. But the words are still readable. HAPPY 60 DAYS OF MARGARET, they say, a billboard in the sand. I watched yesterday from a balcony 11 stories above the ocean as a man using his sandaled feet as tools created these block letters. It seemed easy for him, as if…
Read MoreMy granddaughter Lucy was born in June 2003, not so long ago, but it was before Facebook, before World Down Syndrome Day, before companies hired models with Down syndrome, before the TV show “Born This Way,” before Google was a verb making it easy for people to network and learn. Lucy was seven hours old when a doctor, who didn’t identify himself as a doctor, walked into my daughter’s hospital room, unswaddled Lucy and announced…
Read MoreWhen I was in seventh grade, I memorized “If” by Rudyard Kipling because the Sisters of Notre Dame required us to memorize poems. Kipling wrote “If” to his son, Sister said, to teach him about the importance of picking yourself up and dusting yourself off whenever life throws you a curve. If you can “. . . watch the things you gave your life to, broken. And stoop and build ‘em up with worn out tools,” is a line I didn’t pay much attention to when I was young, but…
Read MoreThere is no peace on Earth. Never has been. Never will be. Not even now. Not even during this season when we sing about “Peace on Earth,” when the words, “joy” and “peace” and “good will” fill the airwaves, and are engraved on wooden plaques at Home Goods and greeting cards at The Paper Store. Peace on Earth, like the fairy-tale workshop at the North Pole packed with jovial, frolicking elves, simply does not exist. And yet…
Read MoreIt’s something I think of every Christmas and I don’t know why. I am sitting on the couch in my in-laws’ living room. I don’t remember the couch, though I should. I sat on it dozens of times. I am sitting on the end, in the corner, close to the dining room. My sister-in-law, Janet, is sitting on a chair to the left of me.
Read MoreIt started with Adam, who is 14 now. He was 4 then. He said “goed” instead of “went.” “I goed to the Walka Walka Mall,” he’d announce every time we took him to the Walka Walka Mall. (The Walpole Mall, where he walked and walked — “walka walka” — his favorite place.) Now it’s the favorite place of my youngest grandchildren.
Read MoreI don’t know if, when you’re in second grade, you can actually want to be someone else, erase who you are and become that other. Maybe what’s truer is that you want to stay who you are, but embellish yourself somehow, like store-wrapped chicken pounded and garnished, chicken still, but fancy now, dressed up as chicken piccata. Rosemary Jablonski was my chicken piccata…
Read MoreWhat I want to believe is that people are good, that when push comes to shove, even strangers have your back. Because, really, they do. How many times has each of us been helped by someone else?
“Have a seat.” “What can I get you?” A hug. A ride…
Read MoreThere is no cure for Rett syndrome. Nor is there an A, followed by B, followed by C, predictable, sequential decline. The genetic neurodevelopmental disorder is unpredictable and fierce. Bella Rutko is one of its victims. She’s 9 years old…
Read MoreI meant it this time. I told my husband, my kids, my grandkids, I told everyone I’m done with decorating for every occasion. When I’m dead and God says to me, “What did you do with your time on Earth?,” I do not want to have to answer that I spent my limited days on this planet packing and unpacking Easter bunnies and witches…
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