Two Irish jokes:
What's a well-balanced Irishman? A guy with a chip on each shoulder.
What's Irish Alzheimer's? It's when you never forget everything except the grudges.
It's not nice to tell these jokes, I know. They perpetuate a stereotype and make light of a terrible disease.
But the jokes make a point. I've never met an Irish family where everyone gets along.
Read MoreThe ad has been running in newspapers for more than a month now. "Rediscover the Catholic Church." It isn't a bad ad. The words are all in the right places. The intent is clear.
But the message is strained, because the tone is formal and distancing. "More than anything, we can show you how to rekindle your relationship with God. We can show you an approachable God, a merciful God, a God who gladly welcomes those who come back to Him."
Read MoreShe told me, when my children were babies that once I started picking up after them I would never stop. "If he's old enough to get a toy out of a toy box, then he's old enough to put it back when he's done with it," my mother-in-law said.
And I said, "You're absolutely right.”
But when she wasn't around, I didn't heed her advice. I'd look at the mess on the floor, Fisher Price people everywhere, Legos under…
Read MoreIt was just another breakfast. I didn't want to go.
Eight a.m. is too early for small talk and smiles. I enjoy sitting at my kitchen table, reading the paper in silence, then facing the day.
But Karen Schwartzman from the Bank of Boston called and lured me. She said I'd get a chance to meet Margot Stern Strom, who is not only the executive director of Facing History and Ourselves but one of its two founders.
Read Moret must be a byproduct of age. It must develop like a taste for lobster or pate, or like gray hair, slowly, but inevitably. How else to explain it? When I was young I used to hate working in a garden; now I'm old and I love it. Why?
When I was a child, you couldn't lure me outdoors. My mother tried. She bought me a package of bachelor button seeds and a planter at the five-and-ten and brought in from outdoors a pail full of loam and said, "Here, now you can grow your own garden." She must have believed that once I saw life spring forth from seeds I had personally buried in dirt I would be awed and treasure all life that emerged from the ground. But it didn't work that way. I didn't have any interest in the seeds…
Read More"How come you don't write about Molly anymore? Does she still jump on people? Is she still devouring the back steps? Does she still drool?"
McSoley trains dogs. He sent me his book, "Dog Tales" when we got Molly. I read the book, studied it, memorized it; I even tried to follow it. "Yes, Molly still jumps on people," I told Mr. McSoley. "Yes, she still drools and as for the back steps - no, she doesn't eat them anymore but that's because they're practically gone."…
Read MoreThe discussion is philosophical, conducted over dinner and wine.
"Matthew Rosenberg has paid for his crime. Marilyn Abramofsky is wrong to keep attacking him. Rosenberg is not the same person he was 10 years ago. He's changed. Don't you believe people can change?" my friend asks.
Read MoreI have accepted his words and his love, the way an infant accepts food. I've never wondered at them before. His letters have arrived sometimes in clusters, sometimes separated by weeks. I've relished them all. They are breezy, newsy, funny, warm, full of joy and wonder and life. I've shared them with my husband and children and answered some, but not all.
Read MoreYour column in Wednesday's Globe was impassioned and well-written. You know how to squeeze the most emotion from every word. You're good at what you do. But you don't do much good.
You hate too much. Your words divide. They make the chasm between whites and blacks grow just a little wider. They deviate and they deceive.
Read MoreComplaints about New Medico Health Care System of Lynn, the nation's largest chain of head-injury rehabilitation facilities, have led to investigations by the United State's Attorney's office in Boston, the New York State Health Department and a congressional sub-committee. Adelaide Powers is a patient at Lenox Hill, one of New Medico's 36 facilities.
Her voice is a rasp on the phone. "Can you come?" she whispers. "I have things to tell you."
Read MoreWhy? 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.
Read More"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.
Read MoreThey'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.
Read MoreThere 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.
Read MoreLet'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.
Read More"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.
Read MoreA 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."
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreThere'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.
Read MoreThe 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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