He looms for me in death larger than he did in life. He was just my neighbor, after all, a man I saw only once in a while; a man whose company I enjoyed, but more of an acquaintance than a friend. I shouldn't miss him. Entire seasons would pass and I wouldn't see him. And yet now, just a week after his death, his absence feels huge, and my heart is strangely sore.
Read MoreShe is 17 and beautiful, not just on the outside, with her dark hair and Snow White complexion and her perfect teeth, which never needed braces; but on the inside where it counts.
She has always been beautiful: interested in other people, careful about their feelings, warm, considerate, a smiling, sweet, loving, gentle, wonderful girl.
Read MoreNine days ago, Jim Brady, the former White House press secretary who was shot in the head and left permanently disabled by an assassin's bullet intended for President Reagan, was booed off the stage at the University of Nevada by opponents of gun control.
He and his wife, Sarah, had traveled to the school to give a speech in support of gun control. The pair have dedicated their lives to this effort, trying to talk sense into people who look at Jim Brady and think, "poor guy; but that could never happen to me."
Read MoreElaine Maganello, who lived behind the house in which I grew up, and who was a whole year older than I and, therefore, infinitely more mature, told me her Betsy-Wetsy doll, which she took for a walk every day, was real.
And I, of course, believed her.
Read MoreI thought I had gotten past the body thing. I thought I had my priorities straight. Better to work on the mind than the thighs. Better to read a book than work out. Age is a natural part of life, after all. What sense is there in fighting the inevitable?
What's a little cellulite? What are a few sags? What's a dimple or two among friends?
Read MoreThe dream was a subconscious effort to hold on. I dreamed about flowers, fields of vanda orchids, red hibiscus, pink plumeria, hibiscus, anthuriums, birds of paradise. The scent of the flowers followed me out of the dream, along with the heat of the sun, coconut trees rustling in the breeze, waves crashing against the shore.
My husband told me I sang in my sleep. "Hello, sweetheart, aloha. Aloha from the bottom of my heart." "You were actually in tune," he joked. I have never sung in my sleep before. I have never sung this song while awake before. But then I have never felt so removed from reality, so at peace with the world, so content - not in years, not since I was a child.
Read MoreIn the middle of exams she called from school to tell me that I am the only mother she knows who didn't send a survival package to her overworked, over-stressed, over-programmed daughter, that I am the only mother who never sends packages.
Why don't I bake brownies and rush with them to the post office, she demanded to know. Why don't I stock up on candy and granola bars and Advil and Nyquil and wrap them in tissue and pack them in a box and send them air mail, special delivery to the away-from-home daughter I say I love.
Read MoreI wasn't all that eager to meet him. His reputation preceded him. He is Mr. Southern California, Mr. Moonbeam, not a person to be taken seriously.
Not that many of the presidential candidates should be taken seriously. With the exception of Paul Tsongas, they are all the same. Same suits. Same smiles. Same empty promises.
Read MoreI don't think I'm biased. Well, maybe a little, but not much. I love her, that's a fact. But it's not the kind of love that blurs reality. I don't think she's perfect. She's just a typical 14-year-old kid.
But on the balance beam and on bars and on the floor when she's doing her routine, when her hair is in a pony-tail and her back is arched and her toes are pointed and her legs are straight, she isn't 14 at all. She is ageless; she is art, all liquid and grace with movements that are cool and smooth and satisfying.
Read MoreNEW 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.
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