A daily phone call, and the love that endures

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A daily phone call, and the love that endures

He never complains. I call him between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. every night and he is always upbeat.

“Hi Beverly,” he says and I hear a smile in his voice.

“Hi LeRoy,” I answer, and because he’s smiling, I smile, too.

LeRoy is my father’s youngest brother, the last of the Curtin clan, my grandmother’s baby, my only living uncle. He was born 94 years ago this Sunday, on Oct. 17, in Cambridge when Cambridge had more factories than universities.

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Finding common ground by looking up at the sky

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Finding common ground by looking up at the sky

It’s a week old, ancient history in today’s fast-paced, frantically frenetic world. And it’s superfluous, too. What’s a rainbow anyway but the sun’s rays distilled into colorful arcs? Nothing magical or newsworthy about this. It’s science. It happens. And yet, Saturday’s rainbow must have worked some magic because it cast a spell. “Go outside and look up at the sky,” my daughter texted. “There’s the most beautiful rainbow.”

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I’ve watched him grow up, but it caught me by surprise

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I’ve watched him grow up, but it caught me by surprise

My daughter Julie has an app on her phone that makes it simple to create a digital collage. So I am used to getting photos from her, which juxtapose images of last summer with images of this summer or that show her children at multiple ages on multiple first days of school. She recreates poses, too, driving to a spot where a picture was shot and taking a photo of the same people in the same pose, from the same angle a year or two later.

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A song, a pond, or a good book can make the pandemic feel far away

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A song, a pond, or a good book can make the pandemic feel far away

In the midst of this pandemic, which, like a monster from a 1950s horror movie feigns death but then springs to life again, I made a few discoveries. Because we didn’t travel this summer, I found some things close to home that made me forget, for at least a little while, this shape-changing creature that refuses to go away. I’ll start with Shirley Horn. I googled a song, “Here’s to Life,” because I love it and it led me to YouTube. And YouTube led me to her. I watched a clip from 1993, when this pianist and jazz singer performed with John Williams and The Boston Pops. And for a solid five minutes, I didn’t think about anything except this song because Horn infuses so much feeling into her lyrics that you feel as if you’re watching a movie, not simply listening to a person sing. Why had I never listened to her before?

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In this Land of I Don’t Know, I know all that I am missing

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In this Land of I Don’t Know, I know all that I am missing

I say out loud, every day, that I am so grateful for e-mail and FaceTime and WhatsApp, for all the technology that lets me see and talk to my grandchildren, though they are in Scotland and I am an ocean away. I try to remind myself how lucky I am. My son sends me photos of the kids in their school uniforms. They started school last week. He takes pictures on his phone and…

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After 16 long months, we’re finally getting to live again

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The bars were invisible, but they were there. In front of us. Behind us. Beside us. Inside us. We didn’t live in actual cages, but we were caged. For 16 unpredictable and unparalleled months, so many of us lived hunkered down in fear of the unknown. Our homes were our cages. We felt safe at home. We had groceries delivered and we disinfected them before putting them away. We wiped down everything: doorknobs, bannisters, remotes, our phones, the mail. We binge-watched TV. Played games. FaceTimed. Read books. Cooked. Baked. Ate. Slept.

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At a beautiful prom night, I began to believe in the future again

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At a beautiful prom night, I began to believe in the future again

On June 1, my daughter Julie asked if i would take pre-prom pictures of some Canton High seniors and I said yes, although I hadn’t picked up my camera in more than a year. I charged the battery, cleaned the lenses, formatted my SD card, packed my bag, and set off to the house where the seniors were gathered.

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Searching for the heart of the matter

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Searching for the heart of the matter

I am so busy taking care of things, that sometimes I forget to look at him. Doctor’s appointments. Medications. Physical therapists, occupational therapists. Who is scheduled this week? What day? What time? Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? I see him, of course. I see his thin, white hair, his faded blue eyes, his false teeth that sometimes slip when he’s talking, the way his mother’s did, his hearing aid that shrieks its presence but is as useless as a bandaid behind his deaf ear. An old man in an old chair, struggling to see, to hear, to keep up, to get up, and to not give up.

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In a world of tornadoes, remember the rainbows

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In a world of tornadoes, remember the rainbows

The tree in my front yard looks dead. It’s an eyesore, an ugly twig, not even 5 feet high, held upright by an equally ugly pole. Think Charlie Brown tree only without a hint of green. But take your fingernail and scratch the bark from the tree and a pale green line appears. Even in the tiniest branch, there is green. The tree is alive. What appears to be dead isn’t. It’s the lesson that spring teaches us over and over...

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Vaccinated, but still feeling stuck in pandemic purgatory

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Vaccinated, but still feeling stuck in pandemic purgatory

For months, I imagined what freedom, post-pandemic, would feel like. For many more months, I couldn’t imagine freedom at all. When lockdown began 13 months ago and we were all shut inside, confined to our homes, wiping down groceries that were delivered, disinfecting the mail, scrubbing our hands every five minutes, peering at the world through closed windows, all of us prisoners of something we could not see, I thought: I never imagined this. I never anticipated a virus that would change our lives.

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Birds and squirrels got us through, but now we long for humanity

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Birds and squirrels got us through, but now we long for humanity

A long time ago, there were oak trees in my front yard. Three of them in the beginning. And then one got sick and died and we had it cut down and carted away.

I loved those trees. They kept me company as I wrote. For years I watched birds nest in them and squirrels catapult from one to the other. The trees muffled the sound of traffic, too, though traffic was light then, so scarce that on warm days, with my window open, I could hear not just birds cawing and squirrels skittering, but leaves, even tender, spring leaves, rustling.

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As the endless days drift by, who can remember a thing?

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As the endless days drift by, who can remember a thing?

My brain is acting out. It is in high dudgeon. I say “Help,” and it says “No.” I say “Please,” and it slams a door. I put a stick of butter in the microwave to soften and then forget to add it to the blueberry muffins. I decide to take a walk and then walk in and out of my house a half dozen times because I forget first my scarf, then my AirPods, then my phone, my glasses, my mask, a tissue, hand sanitizer. If I didn’t forget so much, if I weren’t always searching for things, my Fitbit would have nothing to record.

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Watching and escaping the world from a favorite chair

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Watching and escaping the world from a favorite chair

The chair was Judy Taylor’s idea. She has one in her bedroom, a big, comfortable chair. It’s where every day she sits for a little while and reads. We were with our husbands on a cruise ship, on vacation. Remember vacations? Lying around reading something compelling? We were both reading “The Couple Next Door,” sipping some sugary drink and thinking about nothing except how great the sun felt and what we were going to eat next. This is exactly what Judy and I were doing — reading and drinking and talking — when the conversation turned to her “reading chair” and how much she loved it. “You need to get one,” she told me.

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Turning my mother-in-law’s house into home sweet home

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Turning my mother-in-law’s house into home sweet home

I moved into the house I have lived in for nearly half a century kicking and screaming. Not physically, of course. But in my head I was railing. I did not want to move from the small, two-bedroom ranch that was my husband’s and my first home. I loved everything about that house — the kitchen cabinets we painted yellow a few months before our wedding, the living room with its 1970s green, wall-to-wall carpet (which I loved to vacuum), the family room my Uncle Frank fashioned from our one-car garage when I was newly pregnant and making plans to turn our TV room into a nursery…

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When there’s no way around it, we’ve just got to go through it

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When there’s no way around it, we’ve just got to go through it

“We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” is a children’s board book that my friend Anne gave me to read to my first grandchild, Lucy. I read it to her for years. It never captured me. I liked “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” much better. But Lucy liked the repetition of “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt,” and when Adam came along, he liked it, too. “We’re going on a bear hunt. We’re going to catch a big one. What a beautiful day! We’re not scared. Uh-uh! Grass! Long wavy grass. We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!”

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What we will remember about a year we’d just as soon forget

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What we will remember about a year we’d just as soon forget

I am trying to put a spin on it, trying to look back at 2020 and cherry-pick some good things that happened in this god-awful year. There have been good things, right? Babies born. So many babies. I see their pictures on Facebook: Haley’s son, Carter; Ali’s son, Benjamin; Emily’s daughter, Maeve; Meryl’s twin grandsons, Leo and William. In all the pictures the babies are beautiful and everyone looks happy…

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