The bedrooms are what I continue to see: Teddy bears on a child’s bed. A young woman’s calendar red-marked with celebrations planned. Back to school shoes still in their box. Running shorts tossed in a corner. Books on a night table, one with a bookmark midway. Different bedrooms full of different things, all stark and empty without the lives that gave them life.
Read MoreI did not flush my mother’s anniversary ring down the toilet. I know this for sure because I have not wrapped jewelry in tissue for 44 years. It is missing, because I hid it and I have no idea where.
I flushed the necklace down the toilet. Not on purpose, of course. I’d wrapped it in tissue to keep it safe, then tucked it into the zippered part of my pocketbook where I kept lipstick and loose change. It was 1979 and I was traveling. I was protecting the necklace from thieves. No one would be able to steal it now, I thought.
And no one did.
Read MoreI didn’t invite my father on our family vacation. But there he was anyway, everywhere I went, front and center, pointing, explaining, reminiscing, sharing, reflecting, the way he never did in life. During our two-week stay in Sicily, my father, who died 18 years ago, never left my side.
Read MoreI wasn’t with Lucy when she got her longed-for curly hair. Her mother took her to the appointment — which lasted for hours — where Lucy’s hair was washed and combed and cut, then set in rollers and squirted with solution. Then there was sitting and waiting and waiting and waiting, then more solution and more waiting, and washing and conditioning and drying.
Read MoreIt was a Saturday in the summer of 1962. I remember because it was the year before I would get my driver’s license.
My mother was my chauffeur, driving us home from South Shore Plaza in Braintree where we worked, she as the manager of Wethern’s, a hat shop, and I as a part-time “salesgirl” (that was the word back then) at Cummings, a woman’s clothing store.
Read MoreA few months ago my daughter Julie was worried about her daughter, Charlotte, who, though almost two, wasn’t talking.
“Charlotte points and says ‘unk. It’s the only thing she says. She calls everything ‘unk,’” she told her pediatrician. He nodded his head and said not to be concerned but if at her next visit Charlotte still were not talking, then they would begin to look for reasons why.
Read MoreMy husband is the one for making lists. For years he’s been singing the praises of writing things down and crossing things off. It’s satisfying to draw a line through something that’s been done, he tells me. It’s exhilarating, he says.
When our children were young, his lists included chores expected of them. On Saturday mornings when they padded into the kitchen and saw him at the table, pen in hand, hunched over his yellow legal pad, composing, they groaned.
Read MoreYou know those questions that pop up on Facebook? The kind we used to ask at dinner parties, when we had dinner parties. Questions like, if you could spend a day with one person living or dead, who would it be?
For years I chose famous people because of all I could learn from them. Jesus Christ. Mozart. Queen Elizabeth II. Today, though, if asked this question, I would choose my unheralded, very much missed mother.
Read MoreHard to believe. Isn’t that what we say about time? Hard to believe it’s almost May. Where did April go? Hard to believe the boy who just left for college has already finished his freshman year. Hard to believe my daughter and her husband are about to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. Didn’t my husband and I just celebrate ours?
Read MoreI was at the gym, hard to believe, because since COVID I’ve counted bending over to tie my sneakers a workout. But there I was, turning over a new leaf, headphones on, stretching to the music of the 1930s (I love old music), wondering what makes the wah-wah sound in these recordings. (I took a break and googled and learned that a trumpet or trombone makes the sound).
Read MoreI 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?
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