NEW ORLEANS - This time I walk to Decatur Street to find it. It used to be on another street, in the middle of the French Quarter, just around the corner from the Place D'Armes, where we have stayed every other time we've been in New Orleans. This time we are lodged at the Prince Conti and when I ask how to get to Beckham's Bookshop, I am told…
Read MoreIn the movies you root for the underdog. You enjoy seeing the bully put down. When Superman comes back to the diner after he has regained his super strength, and punches the man who pummeled and humiliated him when he was just a man, not Superman, you cheer. When the hobbled and shackled writer Paul Sheldon calls his No. 1 torturer Annie Wilkes "sick' and "twisted," then stuffs paper in her mouth and drops a typewriter on her head, you applaud.
Read MoreTheir eyes are dry when they talk about him. Father, mother, brother, all are composed. In 21 years, you learn composure. You learn to tell what happened in a voice that doesn't betray your soul. You learn polite phrases that put strangers at ease. "He was always a happy-go-lucky kind of kid." "He never gave up."
Read MoreAn article that ran in this paper last Sunday confirmed what I have long suspected: that it is impossible to keep up with life. That in the end the dust motes, empty soda cans and old newspapers win and all the sweeping, filing, sorting, labeling and chronicling we do in the name of order are a total waste of time. The headline stated just the opposite, of course: "Getting Organized Isn't Impossible." But after reading the stuff underneath, I'm convinced that…
Read MoreI don't get sentimental over the closing of stores anymore. Things change. Things change so often and so fast that change itself isn't as dramatic as it used to be. One store pulls down its shades, and a few weeks later another opens its doors, and for the most part, I hardly notice. But I used to. I used to mourn the passing of the places I frequented as a child. I carried a mental picture of the way things were, the way I thought they always would be, and I expected life to honor that picture. I wanted the places I loved to stay just as I remembered, untouched like the room of someone on a vacation, who at any moment may return.
Read MoreAt the end of the dinner, after hundreds had approached him to shake his hand; after tears and hugs and dozens of "Thank yous" and "We'll miss yous" and "We love yous;" after speeches by colleagues and friends; after joyful applause and a standing ovation; after hearing himself described again and again as good and warm and selfless and kind, he stood at the microphone and looked out over the crowd and smiled and said: "I'm nothing special. It's all you people working together who've made me look good. "I only pray I become something like the priest you good people have described," said the Rev. John Mahoney, pastor of The Family Parish of St. Martha's in Plainville for 18 years, to the crowd of 800 who had come to honor him.
Read MoreThere's Michael Jackson doing his best, singing his heart out, spreading the message that skin color is superfluous, that people are people and "it don't matter if you're black or white."
And it doesn't. That's what most of us start out believing. There are exceptions, of course. Some people teach their children from the day they are born to hate anyone who's different from them. But this isn't about these people. This is about people whose hate is new, whose hate makes them uncomfortable, but whose feelings are born of frustration, anger and fear.
Read MoreThey told me I wouldn't like the movie. Too corny, the 21-year-old said. Too predictable, the 15-year-old added.
They had been disappointed so I assumed I would be, too. But I wasn't. I loved "Forever Young." It was a trip into yesterday, a love story, not a sex story, corny and predictable, yes, but who cares? It was tender instead of lewd. Imagine that in the 1990s!
Prior to the movie, I'd overheard a conversation. A girl, no more than 20, home from college for Christmas, was telling some friends about a guy she'd picked up at a New Year's Eve party. They were strangers who met around 11 p.m. and were bed partners a few hours later.
Read MoreThey talk about these things in whispers if they talk about them at all. The act of describing diminishes, trivializes, what they hold dear. "It sounds strange, I know, but it happened. When I was at my lowest, she came to me. I wasn't thinking of her. I wasn't thinking of anything except that I couldn't take it anymore." And then someone who this woman had loved, who had cared for her as a child, and who'd died a decade before, came and sat beside her. "I didn't see her. Not with my eyes. I felt her with my heart. She was in the room with me."
Read MoreIt's my daughter Lauren's analogy, not mine. "I don't know what to write for New Year's," I told her. "Write about being the last bird," she said. I knew instantly what she meant. The last bird. The one struggling to keep up with all the rest, who fly so effortlessly in formation, and zig-zag from left to right as smoothly as a singer climbs and descends a scale.
Read MoreShe used to live with them. They took her in when no one else would. She'd been staying with her mother, but the mother, one morning, looked across the kitchen table at this pregnant daughter and her young husband and said, "Go. I don't want you here anymore. Find someplace else to live." And so the couple packed their belongings, left the house, bought a newspaper, sat in the library and pored over the apartment-for-rent ads. They phoned a few, but got no results. They didn't have money for a down-payment; they had no collateral except themselves.
Read MoreWe were months away from Christmas when she said it. There was no self-pity in her tone. She was matter-of-fact. "I've never done much of anything with my life. I'm just another face in the crowd. The world would have gotten along just fine without me." She then went on to explain how ordinary she was. She was just a wife, just a mother. She worked in an office with a dozen other people who did the same job she did. There was nothing special about her. She didn't have a great mind or a great talent. Her existence was, she said, not necessary.
Read MoreThey keep asking me what I want for Christmas. "Do you want a book, Mom? Do you want a gift certificate to the movies? Gloves? A sweater? Give us a hint." I keep telling them that what I want they can't buy. I want time. An extra day between Monday and Tuesday. Two extra days. Ten extra nights. A dozen hours added to today. Huge chunks of time between now and Christmas Day to slow down, enjoy, luxuriate, bask in the smells and sounds and feeling of this season. I want time to sit in front of the Christmas tree and re-read "The Gift of the Magi," and "A Christmas Carol" and "A Christmas Memory."
Read MoreThe woman was hassled. You could see it in her eyes, in the way they darted about the place, and in her footsteps, quick and impatient, eager to keep walking past. But the storefront intrigued the little girl at her side. "What does the sign say, Mommy?" the child asked. "It says, `All items $1,"' the woman explained. "You mean everything in that store costs a dollar?" the child said.
"That's right," the mother replied.
Read MoreThe OxFam banquet was a month ago, an event associated with Thanksgiving, not Christmas. And yet the image created there lingers, because what was glimpsed isn't seasonal. It's constant, the way things are every day. That night hundreds of people came to the great hall at the Park Plaza Castle to either dine at a table dressed up for a celebration, to have a good meal, sip wine and be feted; or to sit on the floor and eat rice. It was the luck of the draw that divided the group. Everyone paid $25. But everyone wasn't treated equally.
Read MoreI should have counted the steps from the Herald. It couldn't have been many. It was no more than a five-minute walk. And yet the walk took me to the other side of the world. The Pine Street Inn isn't on Pine Street. It's on Harrison Avenue, in an old building that looks like most old buildings in this city, brick on the outside,cinder block on the inside. I arrived there with preconceptions. The homeless are alcoholics, drug users, people who have…
Read MoreThings aren't supposed to matter. I know this. Possessions don't define a life. And yet they bring back life, resurrect small moments, at least.
Every Christmas I am struck by this. I expect to unearth dusty boxes of Christmas decorations, carry them upstairs, open them and find just faded things. I was sure that once my children were grown, once they no longer clamored to help unwrap the creche and the reindeer…
Read MoreIf they walked into the room on crutches or wheeled themselves in chairs; if they had missing arms and legs or wore bandages, or screamed in pain, then they would be noticed. But they do not scream, at least not in public, and if their eyes are red no one knows why. They look like everyone else. The men wear jackets and ties. The women wear dresses or suits and make-up. The kids look like kids anywhere. Nothing appears to be wrong with any of them. And yet everything is.
Read MoreSometimes you don't want to hear it. You want to drive past the house, away from problems that shouldn't exist at all.
He said this. She said that. He has a lawyer. She has a lawyer. Two adults who vowed to love each other now spend their time tearing each other apart. And in the middle there is always a child, a bewildered child, who loves them both. This time the child is not even 3 when Mommy leaves.
Read MoreMy mother-in-law makes her bed the minute she gets out of it. So does my friend, Anne. Pat keeps Windex and paper towels in the bathroom and wipes down the sink in the morning before she leaves for work. Caryn folds clothes when the dryer buzzes. A different Ann vacuums her garage once a week. Each insists that what she does is easy. "If you make your bed right away, it's done for the day," my mother-in-law likes to say. "Plus it tidies up the room." "If you empty the dryer when it buzzes, then you don't have to iron the clothes," Caryn continually tells me. "It only takes a second. And it saves so much time."
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