The stamp is what did it: "Duxbury Free Library" in bold print on the first page of a book I picked up in Canton.
You can do that now. Go to one library, request a book, and have it sent to another.
The word free startled me. I hadn't seen it on a book since I was a kid borrowing from the Turner Free Library in Randolph .
Read MoreShe was drawn into it. She was the moth, and it was the flame. It warmed and burned and consumed and ignited her.
It became her passion and her cross.
Another woman's words. Another woman's life. Lived 50 years ago, half a world away. A stranger, yet kin.
As we all are.
Read MoreA friend, a newspaper reporter who'd retired to write books, set up the interview. It was a long time ago and a long drive away. I hadn't thought about that interview for years. I’d buried it in the place where hurts and humiliations get locked up.
I don't even remember the interviewer's name. But his words live in granite.
Read MoreThe world is too much with me. Or too little.
It's out of control. Or I'm out of control. I can't figure which.
It's the small things that are getting to me. Like the sticker on the license plate of my car.
"Do you realize your car isn't registered?" a friend asked the other day. It's registered, I assured him. I mailed the check months ago.
Read MoreThe tree man said he'll come and fertilize the dogwood, which has been a pink umbrella in my backyard every spring for the past 20 years. Last May the tree bloomed in sparse, uneven patches. I knew it was sick. A smaller dogwood had withered and died a few years before. When we cut it down, it was as dry and splintered as driftwood.
I didn't want to believe that this other tree, one I have watched grow tall and thick, a tree that shades the patio where I sit and turns the world surrounding it into a pink haze for a few weeks each year, could suffer the same fate.
Read MoreAnd on it goes. The news in brief. Three stories, six short paragraphs on page 18 last Friday, tell more about life in America today than all the front page headlines combined.
A 19-year-old Roxbury man was hospitalized in serious condition after an unknown gunman fired at least 11 shots at him, striking his chest, stomach, buttocks and both legs. The victim was taken to Boston City Hospital. The gunman fled in a black Camaro.
Read More"Before and After." It's a book I haven't been able to get out of my head.
Before and after. It's how we mark our lives. The befores and afters are turning points. Before we got married. After we got married. Before someone got sick. After she got sick. Before he died. After he died.
Something comes from without, something good or bad, and permanently changes the structure within. And forever after there is a division between then and now.
Read MoreOne December day, when I was about 6, my mother announced, "Christmas is right around the corner."
I took her at her word, grabbed my coat, raced out the door and ran all the way to the end of our street. I expected to see a parade - Santa and his reindeer, a walking Christmas tree, and a bunch of elves marching toward me.
Read MoreIt's a wonder the news didn't break on the business pages: "Violence Has Miami Tourists Wary. Florida's Top Industry Fears a Deadly Image."
A mark, a yen, a buck, a pound - it's these that make the world go 'round.
Read MoreLove thy neighbor. This is what we're called to do. Every day of our lives. But most especially this week, Holy Week.
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. This is what we pray. But how do you forgive? How do you let go of hurt and anger and hate?
Petty things cause such wide rifts. A neighbor invites a dozen kids to a birthday party, but excludes your son. How could she be so insensitive?
"Why doesn't anybody like me, Mommy?" the child asks. And anger hardens and becomes cement around the heart.
Read MoreMaybe it's just nostalgia. Age kicking in. A longing for something I never knew I wanted in the first place.
So what if "People Are Talking" is going off the air in June. What impact will this have on my life? None. I hardly ever watch the show. I hardly watch any TV. What do I care what airs and what doesn't.
I don't.
Read MoreHe was my first real love, a flesh-and-blood boy, not a creation, not someone Rosemary and I invented on a Saturday afternoon as we walked downtown, or on a Saturday night as we babysat.
Those heartthrobs - Val Poche and Jimmy Weber - were actual people, but people we didn't know. They were older boys Rosemary saw at church or at school, around whom we invented a life.
Read MoreI wanted her to put it in writing. I asked her, but she thought I was joking. I wasn't. She was remembering a me I no longer am. She was remembering a me my children have never even known.
"You made the best clothes in the class," she told me at the gym the other day. In my new incarnation, I work out. In my other life, I sewed.
"I was making a bathrobe and you were making a plaid jacket. I was impressed," she said.
Read MoreAh, for the days of arranged marriages.
That's what a friend of mine wished for about 10 years ago. He was dead serious. His parents had a great marriage, and it had been arranged. His aunts and uncles had been married 40, 50, even 60 years, and all their marriages had been arranged.
Read MoreImagine, if you will, a movie, embraced by critics, hailed as "brilliant," "extraordinary," and "a cause for celebration," about an SS officer, who kidnaps, tortures and kills Jews - but is portrayed as a guy with a kind heart. He kills without glee, you see. He's troubled by his actions.
If this is hard to envision, don't worry. The movie will make you see the goodness in this man. The camera will linger on the killer's sensitive eyes as he's interrogating his prisoner. The music will swell as Mr. Nice SS Guy lifts the hood off a shackled Jew so that he can more easily breathe. If you still can't see past the officer's actions to the purity of his soul, the movie's manipulative subplot and eye-for-an-eye ending will take you there.
Read MoreSince 1987, March has been designated National Women's History Month by the U.S. Congress. That's what Thomas Mann, a sixth grader at the Davis School in Brockton, wrote and told me. "It is a time set aside to honor women, both past and present, for their accomplishments," he said. I'd read a blurb a few days before I received his letter, which mentioned National Women's History Month, but that's been it. There have been no in-depth feature stories; no "women of the day" highlighted every day throughout the month. No widespread recognition at all…
Read MoreShe was a shadow figure for years, made up of parts, never a whole. Her hands washed dishes, scrubbed pots, filled pans with oils and meats and spices. Her feet walked from the table to the countertop to the stove. Her voice was soft, and always friendly. "Do you two want something to drink?" Even when it was firm, it was never harsh. She suggested; she didn't demand.
Read MoreNo doubt about it, television rots kids' minds.
But it's not children's programming doing the corroding. It's "Inside Edition" and "Hard Copy" and "Rescue 911" and cable TV with its dozens of stations, on which a person can push a button and watch, at any time of day, someone being beaten, tortured, raped or murdered.
Read MoreCross-dressing, men dressing as women, is the in thing these days, the media's newest obsession.
It's on all the talk shows; it's the linchpin of the hottest movie; it's even the theme of the Institute of Contemporary Art's new show "Dress Codes."
From androgyny to hodgepodgegyny, it's just a great, big, anything-goes, totally Mardi Gras world.
Read MoreNew to this city, to this country, he wanted to know about suburbs. What they are, exactly? What they are like?
"They're safer than cities, are they not?" he asked. And though I said, yes, they are, I didn't explain that this is not their essence; that suburbs weren't born out of a need for safety. Suburbs, after all, have their roots, not in today's fears, but in yesterday's dreams.
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