I had a birthday recently. It’s a number I would love to hear come out of a meteorologist’s mouth tonight on the local news. “Tomorrow is going to be in the mid-70s, folks. A preview of summer. If you have a vacation day, take it.”
Read More“The moon is slowly drifting away from us.”
I am at my desk reading this in “Interesting Facts,” an e-mail that pops up in my news feed every morning. I’m a sucker for interesting facts. I copy and paste the best of them into my notes because as interesting as a fact may be (100 lightning strikes hit the Earth’s surface every second!), I forget it minutes after I’ve sworn I’ll remember it forever.
Read MoreSometimes we shared a cake. I have a picture that proves this. It’s of my father and me, blowing out candles on a double-layer birthday cake festooned with confectionery flowers, which my mother made for the two of us when I was 6 and he was 30.
In the picture, I am seated before the cake doing more looking at than blowing out the candles my mother has arranged. Thirty-one for him, seven for me, the extras for good luck. My mother was always courting good luck.
Read MoreI was 10 and in sixth grade when I got hooked on a TV Western. My father got hooked, too. Every chance we could ― but not always because my father was a police officer and worked the night shift — we would sit side-by-side on the green living room couch and trade 1957 for the late 1860s. That’s what “Wagon Train” did. It transported us.
Read MoreHis TVs were ancient, the screens small, the images dull, the words that scrolled at the bottom impossible for him to read.
“What you need are new TVs,” my husband and I told my Uncle LeRoy last week when we landed on his doorstep for a two-day visit.
Read MoreWhen we were kids, I was jealous because Janet Butler’s birthday came three weeks before mine. It was a big deal back then, growing older, growing closer to what we called “grown up.”
Janet, who was born on Jan. 29, lorded it over me when she was 9 and I was still 8, when she was 10 and I was still 9, when she turned 13 and I was still 12. “Baby,” she’d say, but not in a mean way. She was never mean. She was a tease. She was funny. She’d sing-song the word “baby” and then laugh.
Read MoreI tell people all the time that I can’t draw, can’t paint, that I am not an artist. If they are at my house, I show the disbelievers proof: a sketch of a bird I drew years ago during a game of Pictionary.
My friend Anne rescued the sketch from the trash (after everyone stopped laughing), had it framed, and gave it to me one Christmas. It hangs in my office as a reminder to never play Pictionary again. I shake my head every time I look at it.
Read MoreI told her I loved her coat, which was an almost-to-the-floor black and gray wool that seemed to be embracing the woman who was standing before me. That’s the feeling I had, that the coat was hugging her.
We were leaving a Christmas party, my husband and I, saying our goodbyes and there was Harriet, leaving, too. And I said, “Your coat is so pretty,” and she smiled and stroked the soft wool near the collar. “It was my daughter’s,” she said, and there it was, out in the open, something we seldom talk about, something we back away from every day: death.
Read MoreBack when I was child, I watched a Christmas show I have never forgotten. It aired on Dec. 21, 1951 (Thank you, Google), which means I was two months shy of 4 when I sat between my mother and father and learned that all over the world for a few hours every Christmas Eve, animals are given the gift of speech.
Read MoreI had an epiphany last week. I looked in the bathroom mirror and realized that I couldn’t see my face clearly until I put on my reading glasses. Which led me to wonder: How do you put on makeup while wearing glasses? Lots of people must do this because lots of people wear glasses. But how? And is it normal to wake up one day and suddenly not be able to see your face in the mirror? What else am I not seeing? And what else, dear God, is next?
Read MoreHe was a boy when I knew him, a friend of my son’s, 14 or 15 the first time he knocked on our door. I don’t remember the day or even the season, the days and seasons so much the same back then, teens in different shapes and sizes always at the door, knocking or ringing the bell. I can picture him clearly, though, as if it weren’t 40 years ago that he came calling, as if the boy he used to be had stood in my kitchen just yesterday.
He had a mop of dark, shiny curls. Big brown eyes with a shine of their of own. A shy, sweet grin. And a solidness, a compactness that made him seem sturdy, even older at times. Mike Ippolito. He was funny and shy and polite and indiscriminately kind. For me, he is frozen this way in time.
Read MoreBEVERLY BECKHAM
Commuters who live west of Boston wait to get on the train to South Station.MATTHEW HEALEY FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
It is Saturday, Oct. 22 at 9:15 a.m., and there is not a cloud in the sky.
I am driving my granddaughter, Lucy, from Canton to Boston to her adaptive ballet class when I notice him, a man in a wheelchair making his way down Mass. Ave.
I am heading north and he is heading south, on the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street inching himself along. I see him even before I stop for a traffic light, his bright red jacket and white hat standouts against the backdrop of dull, brick buildings. The traffic light gives me time to more than just glance at this man. It gives me time to watch him.
I see that he doesn’t sit straight and tall in his chair, that he isn’t a young guy sporting tattoos on his toned and formidable arms. He is old and he is slumped, his pale face under his white cap slumped too, like a balloon deflated. There are IV poles attached to his chair, no IVs, just the poles catching the morning light. I watch as the poles and the wheelchair and the man crawl along, the man’s arms, which propel him, deflated, too.
And then the light turns green and I drive on. But I think about this man. And what I think is that I am on a street that is always on the news. Always getting bad press. Always associated with crime. But look. See? No one is hassling this man. No one is beating him up and stealing his white hat or his red jacket or his IV-equipped wheelchair. No group of someones is surrounding him and threatening him.
And, see? At the next light there’s a woman holding a little girl’s hand. They’re crossing the street. They are serious as they cross, all business, but on the sidewalk on the other side the child looks up at the woman and grins.
Two guys are drinking to-gos, walking and talking and laughing. There’s a delivery man on a bike. There’s a bus, letting people off, letting people on. A car horn beeps. A man pushes a baby in a carriage. Two women jog in rhythm. It’s like Sesame Street. Not like the news.
And I think, not for the first time, that we get too much news. And that it’s all bad all of the time, in print, on TV, on our phones, on the radio, and it’s killing us slowly, killing our trust and our joy and our spirits. Killing our souls.
Look. See? Everywhere. Every day. People at crowded restaurants, everyone eating, laughing, having a good time. Look. See? People waiting at bus stops. Queuing up. Boarding. Sitting down. Look. See? Young people waiting in line to get into a club. The line is long. It goes around the corner. But no one is pushing. No one is cutting in. No one is shouting.
I take the commuter rail into Boston. I’ve taken the train or the bus or driven into the city all of my very long life. And what I always hear from people who don’t go into the city is, it’s so dangerous.
Steps are dangerous. People fall down them every day. Falling down steps is the second leading cause of accidental injury in the US. (Car accidents are the first.) But we are not subjected day in and day out to horrendous tales of steps and how they’ve ruined people’s lives. We don’t wake up to headlines that scream “Woman, 33, seriously injured after falling down stairs.” We are not told over and over, every day of our lives, of the countless injuries all over the country and all over the world due to steps.
Yes, we have to know about shootings and stabbings and rapes and robberies and murders and wars and social injustices. But this world is not all shootings and stabbings and rapes and robberies and murders and wars and social injustices.
Look at what is right. Raise your hand if you didn’t get robbed yesterday. If no one broke into your home. If no one stole your car. If no one held you at gunpoint.
Raise your hand if instead someone helped you. Let you merge on the highway. Stepped aside to give you room to board the bus. Held a door.
About a month ago, a girl no older than 12 gave a small package of cookies to my granddaughter, Lucy. Lucy and I were out walking. We had seen this girl and her friend coming out of the corner store the day before. All of us had said hi and smiled.
The next day we saw the girls again, Samantha and Maggie, and Samantha gave Lucy a pack of cookies.
The world is a dangerous place, yes. But the world is also a place full of unexpected kindnesses and unpublicized, quiet love.
Beverly Beckham’s column appears every two weeks. She can be reached at bev@beverlybeckham.com.
A friend, just back from a week in Arizona and still on Mountain Standard Time, was saying that he felt tired. But it was more than tired. He shook his head. He couldn’t explain.
He followed up with a description of Phoenix with its flat streets and the mountains surrounding it and his trip to the Grand Canyon and the joy of being with family after so long a time. He was animated talking about these things. But it’s his first observation that stayed with me. He was tired, yes, but he was more.
Read MoreIf anyone had told me that one day in the twilight of my life I would be obsessed with girls’ volleyball, I’d have shaken my head and laughed out loud. Obsessed with a sport? Not a chance. I have tolerated sports only for the Town Spa pizza after.
And then last year, everything changed.
Read More“One step in front of the other until the road runs out!” That’s what a friend texted a few weeks ago.
I had texted her. (Why do we not talk to our friends anymore? What has happened to long, meandering conversations?)
I had done what we all do now, picked up my phone after watching her woo a crowd, after a night of smiles and applause, typing to this friend who is a singer, “Bravo!” and “Great job!” the things you say when someone blows you away.
Read MoreIt’s easy to dismiss statistics. Statistics are numbers. Not people.
But the numbers are jaw dropping.
An estimated 42,915 people around the country died in motor vehicle traffic crashes in 2021, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That’s nearly 43,000 ordinary people driving to work or home, to school, to a store, to a friend’s.
Think about this: In the nearly 20 years the United States was fighting in Vietnam, fewer Americans were killed in action (40,934) than were killed on our roads last year.
Read MoreI bought the book “I’M DEAD. NOW WHAT?” the summer before COVID-19. I was in a general store in Bristol, Maine, and there it was, an 8-x-12 behemoth in the self-help section. It spoke to me. As if the eye-catching title were not enough, the subtitle, “Important Information about My Belongings, Business Affairs, and Wishes,” sealed the deal.
Read MoreThere’s a webpage that lands in my e-mail every day. Maybe I signed up for it. I must have but I don’t remember. It’s called Word Thirst (wordthirst.com) and I love it, not only because it has nothing to do with all the bad things happening in the world, but also because some days it introduces me to words I don’t know, like paraselene, (Definition: a bright moonlike spot on a lunar halo; a mock moon). It also includes a graph, which shows when the word was most popular (in 1811, paraselene was very popular); and if it is popular still (it is not).
Read MoreI cannot pronounce Luhansk and Lysychansk, because I have stopped watching television news. And because I no longer hear these names spoken, I don’t know how to say them.
I stopped watching the news every night because it is all calamity and conjecture interrupted by ads paid for by pharmaceutical companies, which would go bankrupt if, tomorrow morning, we all woke up well. And because the nightly news teaches me nothing I can’t learn by reading, I switched to print months ago.
Read MoreThe words always come. That’s what I tell myself when I can’t find them. I sit. I think. And I wait. And when the words still won’t come? I ask myself what it is that I am struggling so hard to say?
Maybe this time what I’m struggling to say is simply thank you. Thank you, world. Thank you, Canton High. Thank you, friends and relatives and neighbors and teachers and doctors and dance instructors and used-to-be strangers who have walked this road with us, sometimes many times, leading the way.
Read More
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