When my daughter Julie was 5, I caught a flu, took to my bed, closed the bedroom door, and told everyone to leave me alone.
Her older brother and sister, as well as her dad, were fine with this, but Julie kept slipping me notes: “I hope you feel bedder.” “Want me to make you a baloney sandwich?” “How about if I read you a story?” Each note was accompanied by a drawing of me looking sick and her looking sad.
Read MoreIt makes me happy to think about them, two people I don’t know, a man and a woman with whom I shared a waiting room for a little over an hour a few weeks ago.
There were six of us in the room, five waiting for the same doctor who’s been known to run a little behind, not because he’s on a break somewhere, reading a John Grisham novel, but because he spends extra time with people who need extra time. And don’t we all need extra time these days?
Read MoreI didn’t mean to fall in love with him. I came to Florida to rescue him. That was the first time. It was March and his wife had just died. And there were COVID-19 restrictions: No wake. No funeral Mass. No funeral. No friends stopping by.
Leroy, my uncle, was alone in a home he had always shared. And then his knee gave out and he fell. An ambulance raced him to a hospital. After a few days, he was given a cortisone shot. After a few more days, he was transferred to a facility for rehabilitation.
Read MoreIt had been 311 days since I’d seen my youngest grandchildren. We’d said goodbye the Monday before last Christmas in a parking lot in Connecticut. My son had rented a car for the occasion, and driven from Manhattan. His wife was back at their apartment packing. Two weeks later, they, their three children and Daisy, their dog, moved to Scotland.
That day in the parking lot of a strip mall, we spied a small restaurant, which was still serving food outside. It was a mild day for winter, but still chilly. We sat at separate, metal tables, with our jackets zipped and scarves around our necks. The kids ordered hot chocolate and chicken fingers. The adults drank coffee. All of us chatted about Christmas and the new year and what it would bring.
And we pretended to be happy.
Read MoreNext time, I will tell you what it was like getting to be with my grandchildren after not seeing them for a year. Next time, I will tell you about Euan, the 8-year-old, and how big he’s grown, how he is devouring Harry Potter books, having seen all the movies and how, as we were out walking one day he paused in midsentence to point out a single, pink rose. “Isn’t it beautiful, Mimi?” he said. Next time I will tell you, too, about the 12-year-old and the 14-year-old.
For now though, COVID-19 continues to steal the show.
Read MoreBefore I was an adult, I never heard my father swear. Not even damn or hell.
I’m sure he knew his share of curse words but he didn’t use profanity around me. Nobody I knew did except for my friend’s mother who said things like, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, give me patience,” and “Sweet God in Heaven, don’t make me have to come upstairs and get you,” which she claimed were prayers of intercession, not curse words. And my Uncle Frank, whom my aunt started to date when I was around 8, and whose language was salty because, my father explained, “Frank is in the Coast Guard,” leaving me to believe that the sea, which to me was Nantasket Beach, was as full of colorful words swimming about as it was of fish.
Read MoreHe 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.
Read MoreIt’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.”
Read MoreMy 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.
Read MoreIn 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?
Read MoreI 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…
Read MoreShe counts among the people I could call at three in the morning, a surprising fact even to me, because I don’t call her, not even at three in the afternoon. We haven’t talked in five, maybe 10 years.
And yet.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreOn 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.
Read MoreA letter arrived a few weeks ago, an honest-to-God old-fashioned letter tucked in an envelope and delivered by the US Postal Service. Among the bills, it stood out because there it was, a plain, white envelope, with my name and address spelled out in actual handwriting.
Read MoreI 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.
Read MoreThe 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...
Read MoreFor 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.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreA man died suddenly on February 25th. His name was George Thomas IV. He was 38, married, the father of two boys who are 5 and 3, and a baby daughter who is due in August. It was early evening. He was working out in his basement. And he collapsed. His wife, Marissa, found him.
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