Comforting lesson in the face of fate

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Why? That's what you want to know. You look at the list of names divided into those killed and those who survived the crash of USAir Flight 405 and you think, why?

Why one person and not another? Why does a man die and his wife survive? Is there something that connects the survivors?

If a woman with tickets for a different flighthadn't insisted that her tickets be exchanged, she and her husband would still be alive. If a couple coming back from a cruise had spent an extra day, even a few extra hours, in Florida, they would be alive. If an Ohio surgeon had sat where his wife sat, he would be alive, but she might not be.

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Nobody thought Jerry Brown would prevail.

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"Some of you are saying to yourselves that there is not much that one person can do. But I tell you that together, we can prevail." - Jerry Brown, Oct. 21, 1991, announcement speech.

Politicians dismissed him. The press disparaged him. The pundits - the self-acclaimed experts who make their living telling us what we've just heard and what we should think - totally disregarded him.

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Dealing with coma victims

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They're in there but you don't know how to reach them. You know it. You believe it. You cling to the fairy tale that a kiss - or something like a kiss - will wake them. You cling to everything.

You bring in a stuffed animal, a favorite thing, and you take it and rub it up and down against a cheek.

"Do you know who this is? Can you smell it? Can you feel it?"

And you pray that they can.

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One year later, a mother mourns

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There is no warning. The earth doesn't tremble. The sky doesn't darken. A siren doesn't sound so that you can run for cover, so that you can steel yourself for pain.

It's a direct hit every time and the pain is like nothing you've ever felt before. It burns, rips, chokes, suffocates and inundates every limb,every muscle, every cell, every thought, every breath.

It strikes the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives, children, family and friends of 23,000 Americans every year.

The pain doesn't pause. It doesn't sleep. It doesn't abate.

And it never goes away.

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Life full of `little' adjustments

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Let's see if I have this straight. This is how we must live our lives: We must never talk to strangers, must in fact, walk with our eyes down as if we are deep in thought, while we stride purposefully on our way. Purposefully is the key. We want our body to give out the message: don't mess with us. That's what the experts say.

We must walk on brightly lighted streets in groups, never alone in the dark. We must constantly be on guard. Is there someone behind us? Is that someone too close? Quick, cross the street and walk more purposefully. We must walk alone through parks or alleys or even sparse woods.

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Mother, daughter gap wide

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"All we do is argue," the woman tells me over a cup of coffee. Her 16-year-old daughter has just stormed out the front door ("I'm going for a walk.") because her mother suggested in front of "company" that she might want to shut off the TV and go upstairs and clean her room.

"I didn't yell at her," the mother says. "I was simply making a suggestion.

"My daughter and I are like oil and water these days. I tell myself to be calm and patient and understanding. I try to remember how I felt when I was her age. I know I was a slob, too. But it isn't just her room we fight about. It's everything. She looks at me like I'm a fly on her dinner plate. She sighs every time I try to talk to her. She shuts herself in her room and talks on the phone for hours, and I can hear her up there laughing and giggling and having a great time. Then she hangs up and comes downstairs and thumps around here like she's in prison and I'm the guard.

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Candidate offers best of the past

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A man phones and says, "What's with this Jerry Brown, anyway? I'd never vote for a man who wears a turtleneck."

Truth. What can I say? There's nothing wrong with wearing a turtleneck? He looks great in a turtleneck? What's the hang-up with the turtleneck anyway?

I say all these things. The man insists the tur-tleneck looks stupid. "Don't you care about the issues?" I ask.

"I care about how the president of the United States looks. That guy looks like a dippy hippy."

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It's time we all got involved

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The contrast is everywhere. It's in the newspapers, in the ads for designer clothes and expensive skin creams laid out right next to reports of American children who go to school hungry.

It's in the landscape, in the sagging tenements that line the edge of American highways, where shiny new cars with deluxe audio systems and cruise control speed indifferently past.

It's in our cities and our towns, people in dress coats walking next to people in rags; the privileged hurrying to the theater and to symphony, the underprivileged going nowhere that isn't free.

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Childhood joy: It can't last

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There's this little girl, just 13 months old. Her birthday was Valentine's Day, her father tells the woman next to him. She is toddling around the doctor's waiting room totally unconcerned that everyone else is sitting. She races to the TV, stares at it for a minute, then turns away. She picks up a book she finds on a chair, looks at it, then puts it down. She approaches a stranger, meets the stranger's eyes, grins, then runs back to her father who hasn't for a second taken his eyes off her.

She is a tiny thing, a baby, still bald, the blond fuzz on her head barely visible. She wears pink pants and a teal green sweater and a grin that shows off her teeth. Her mother is in the doctor's office because within weeks she will be having another baby. But it's clear the father is totally enthralled with this one.

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Sexual Preference is not the issue

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The most gentle people I know are gay. A woman who lives with her mother, and takes care of her and anyone else who needs her. A man who lives alone but is never alone because he is always helping someone out. Two men who have been with each other for 17 years. Another man, who is 49, and still hasn't told his parents, because they're old and wouldn't understand and he doesn't want to break their hearts.

The most disgusting people I've seen are gay. Two men having sex with each other in front of a crowd at Mardi Gras last year. Gays throwing condoms at priests' mothers at the priest's ordinations a year before that. Gays defiling the Eucharist at St. Patrick's Cathedral.

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After the wedding, real life goes on

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OK, so I'm a sucker for sentiment. Plunk me down in front of a carousel on a hot summer day, give me some cotton candy, let me hear the calliope and the yelps of excited children and I get all filled up inside, although I may know no one, although I may be among strangers.

Give me a seat at a recital. Let me hear children sing. Put me behind a school bus and let me watch as the bus stops and the kids spill out, and I get a lump in my throat.

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Divorce, Sesame Street style

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The saddest story in the news last Friday had nothing to do with crime or politics or the economy. It had to do with the way we live our lives, and the way we treat our children. It was a heartbreaker, yet relegated to the back pages, as if it meant nothing at all.

Sesame Street announced that it was putting its new episode about divorce on hold because the preschool children who had previewed it had become upset and had found it too painful to watch. The Snuffleupaguses were splitting up and the kids didn't like it a bit.

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Beware of evil, but be aware of the good in life

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There it is. On my bulletin board. Someone sent it to me. The rules for life. "Share everything. Play fair. Put things back where you found them. Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody. Flush."

I always smile when I read this. Most days I marvel at the wisdom in such brevity. But today I think they were rules for a gentler time.

A woman tells me that her father began sexually abusing her when she was 11 years old.

"Do you mind?" he asked her.

"You're my father," she said.

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American dream needs a new look

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The Boston Herald

February 28, 1992

BEVERLY BECKHAM

Newsweek's cover story this week is titled "America's Lost Dream" yet it isn't about a lost dream at all.

It's about a dream come true, about a country that grabbed for the gold ring and got it, that got everything it ever wanted, and then some, and now must decide what it wants next.

Since the end of World War II, life in America has improved in countless ways. Jet travel, air conditioning, interstate highways, direct long-distance dialing, television, automatic washers and dryers, antibiotics - all these things have made our lives more comfortable.

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Letting go: The toughest job

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I embarrassed her the other evening. I didn't mean to. The problem with me is that I look at her and see a child, a little girl, although she is 15 now and hardly a little girl at all.

I walk into a restaurant and there she is, somewhere I don't expect her to be and I give her the third-degree. I say she should have phoned and told me where she was going. I say I don't want her in a car with a driver I don't know. I overreact. I behave like my mother.

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`Soon has a way of slipping by'

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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.

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Adoption meant life

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Adoption meant life

She 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.

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Gun lovers blind to consequences

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Nine 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."

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A hollow victory for a brainwashed battler of the bulge

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I 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?

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