Some lives you have to imagine. Billions of moments lived, a million experiences are often reduced to a few words:"I met her when she was 19 and I was 23." The eyes shine, old eyes, but bright, still, when he talks about her. He doesn't say she was the prettiest girl he'd ever seen. He doesn't say…
Read MoreI write words and the words mean nothing, because I write about what's here and not what isn't here. And it's the void, the emptiness, that is the story. A man and a woman sit in the living room of their immaculate suburban home. On a table there are ceramic sneakers. On the couch there is a stuffed dog. Underneath the coffee table there is a real dog, a basset hound. On the walls there are pictures, and on the credenza more pictures. None of these things matters. They are weights which keep the people from floating away. They are props from a play long closed.
Read MoreShe called last week, upset, frustrated, furious. Her husband walked out on her 12 years ago leaving her with four children, 10, 9, 6 and 5. He still loved her, he told her then. He was just tired of being married. "But don't worry," he said. "They're my children and I intend to provide for them. Don't you think for a minute that I'm deserting you." Yet that's exactly what he did.
Read MoreTake a simple thing like directory assistance: You dial 411, give the name and address of a person whose phone number you want and an operator asks, "Are you sure you're spelling the last name correctly? We show nothing under that spelling." And before you can say, "I'm sure it's correct," there comes a click followed by a recorded recitation of a wrong number, all for the bargain price of 34 cents. If the recording were a live person, you could interrupt at this point…
Read MoreHe was a clean-cut, bright, on-his-way to Annapolis kind of guy. She was his female counterpart: pretty, smart, studying to be a reporter. They were just high school kids, but they were mature, sensible kids. No need to worry about them. They were in control. They knew what they were doing. Before they made love, he told her that she was the first girl he had ever been with. He was the first for her, too, and so they weren't worried about something like AIDS. Pregnancy was their only fear and since they were mature and sensible, they were careful - eventually.
Read MoreI used to think it was congestion that made people mean. People living too close to one another. People squeezed into tiny apartments. People made to share small rooms. But it isn't that at all. People huddle together in tents and rooms and apartments all over the world, and most don't wind up killing one another with guns or with knives, or the way many of us do in small, hurtful ways.
Read MoreI didn't know him before the accident. Not his name. Not his face. Not his words. The accident is what introduced me to him. A man, a writer, had been seriously injured while stopping to help two people whose car had broken down on the highway. The man was a hero. He had saved a woman's life.
Read MoreThey drove from New York, New Hampshire and Vermont, and from cities and towns all over Massachusetts. They came after soccer games or before football or on their way to the supermarket. Some came directly, on a glorious September weekend, when they could have been anywhere else - visiting friends, golfing, shopping, watching the Red Sox. Dozens came, alone and in pairs, young and old, male and female, to the gymnasium at Brockton High School to fill out a form and wait in a line and have their arm pricked and blood drawn, when they didn't have to, when no one forced them.
Read MoreHere are a few statistics clipped from Thursday's newspaper: The healthiest people in the United States live in Hawaii and the sickest live in West Virginia. West Virginia has twice as many smokers proportionally as Utah. You're twice as likely to get killed in a car accident in Arkansas than in New Jersey.
Read MoreWhen my mother was 44, the age I am now, none of her friends had cancer, none of her friends' children had died of the disease, she didn't have a long list of sick acquaintances, she didn't come home from work at night with yet another story about someone she knew who had just been diagnosed. Cancer was not an epidemic
Read MoreLast March, I defended you in this space. You were 16, then, just a kid, and you did a stupid thing: You didn't pull over when police motioned for you to stop. Instead, you hit the gas pedal and led Braintree police on a wild, high-speed chase that resulted in the deaths of two Braintree police officers, Lt. Gregory Principe and Sgt. Ernest DeCross…
Read MoreWhat amazes me is how civilized it all is. The way men can stand on a stage in front of a podium within arms reach of their enemies and shout nasty things to them and about them, things you wouldn't even whisper about someone you hate, because you really don't hate anyone that much. Yet there they are, in front of an audience, in front of reporters, screaming, berating and accusing one another of terrible things. Sometimes they yell so hard that the veins in their necks bulge and…
Read MoreHe told the story earlier this week and he told it well, the way he tells all his stories, because he is Irish and strings his words together with a natural lilt and good humor. He told it matter-of-factly though - it was almost a "by the way." And yet within the tale there was a story-teller's sense of plot and tension and, of course, the inevitable, inescapable moral: There he is on a glorious September Sunday, he says…
Read MoreThey called him Negron in all the news stories and referred to him as a two-year-old boy. The words "Negron" and "boy" made the crime of his death appear less horrible, almost routine. In fact, the boy was just a baby who, until his death two weeks ago, had always been called Angel.
Words are supposed to be tools which dig out the truth, which allow us to understand one another. But the truth in the short and sad life of Angel Negron, whose foster father, Andrew S. Sesselman has been charged with his death, is that words just got in the way.
Read MoreThey called him Negron in all the news stories and referred to him as a two-year-old boy. The words "Negron" and "boy" made the crime of his death appear less horrible, almost routine. In fact, the boy was just a baby who, until his death two weeks ago, had always been called Angel…
Read MoreMost days I can read the news, even the most hideous, horrible news, and rationalize and think things like: "It's not for me to judge," and "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone," and know deep within myself that people behave in certain ways because they were abused or deprived or maltreated and are therefore, many times, not totally responsible for their own aberrant behavior. Most days I can do this because I believe that…
Read More"Give Time," the letter suggested. "Time is the ideal gift.”
Would that we could give time, not the magazine, but the real thing, all wrapped up and held together by a shiny red bow. Happy birthday, Dad. These are the days of your life. Open the package and you're young again…
Read MoreShe did it for her children. You listen to her and you know that there is good in people, that the good is innate, a gift from God, because she didn't learn good in her house, she wasn't exposed to it there. There she learned evil and hurt and hate. Her father put her on a pedestal, called her his little princess, bought her party dresses, then he got drunk and sexually abused her…
Read MoreThis is not a big thing. Unfortunately it's just a small sign of the times. If you don't listen to rock music or watch MTV, either voluntarily because you're insane or involuntarily because you have kids, then you don't even know this is going on. All the screaming and crotch-grabbing have passed you by…
Read MoreThis is the way it was supposed to be: The neighbors would be gathered in the driveway and he would appear, his car just polished, and he would step out of it, dressed in a white tuxedo jacket holding roses that he bought for her. He would ring the bell, and her mother would answer and he would walk into the front hall and there she'd be, poised at the top of the steps, a vision in satin and lace. Her beauty would make him shy, suddenly, and he would tremble a little putting the corsage on her wrist…
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