In Mass. you pay and pay

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In Mass. you pay and pay

I was going 75 mph in a 65 mph zone. It doesn't matter that other motorists passed me at faster speeds and didn't get caught. It doesn't matter that millions of people drive more than 10 mph over the speed limit every day. I was breaking the law and the police officer who stopped me was doing his job.

I didn't beg or cry or plead when he pulled me over, though I would have if I'd know what was going to happen. I didn't even tell him that my father had been a police officer.

"You want to hear my excuse?" I said.

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Letters and unending guilt

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Letters and unending guilt

Some are piled in a box on a table. Some sit in a black plastic tray on my desk.

I divided them when they arrived. The to-be-answered-immediately, I placed in the tray. The to-be-answered-later, I stacked in the box.

I shouldn't have put them in either place. I should have stopped what I was doing and written back right then, but I didn't for a million reasons. I was in the middle of something. I was walking out the door. I wanted to think about what to say. I wanted to write more than a quick note. Something or someone else needed my attention.

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`Family values' vs. Blue Laws

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`Family values' vs. Blue Laws

So, how long have we been listening to our politicians pontificate about "family values?"

The phrase has been on everyone's lips for the past year, but the concept has existed forever. The family - it's sacrosanct. It's the bedrock of the nation. If we could get the family back together, make it strong, then the country would follow.

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Support your local library, the jewel in every community crown

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Support your local library, the jewel in every community crown

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 .

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Time to see what's before us

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Time to see what's before us

The 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.

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And crime no longer shocks

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And 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.

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Right and wrong no longer shocks

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"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.

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A season of forgiveness...

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Love 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.

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True first loves never really leave

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He 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.

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Here's to who we used to be

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I 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.

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Terror's not entertainment

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Imagine, 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.

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