He was my mother's uncle, not mine. I hardly knew him. But I knew about him. He was part of the family lore. "Stop slouching. You'll look like Uncle Pete." "What are you doing staring at the ground when you walk. You don't want to be like Uncle Pete."
Read MoreDear Lauren, Here it is, certainly the most important day in your life so far, and I find myself thinking in cliches - "It seems like only yesterday. Where did the time go?" - because I really don't want to think at all. I'm fine as long as I don't look back or ahead - as long as I live only this day. But this day invites reflection. You are graduating from college. You are officially grown up. You have been for a while. But now the world will know it. In a few hours you will have a diploma; you will have proof. How can I not stop at this juncture of your life and of our life together, and remember what brought us here?
Read MoreLet me see if I've got this straight: I live in a country in which it's perfectly OK for college professors speaking in classrooms or graduations or anywhere else they choose, to promote hate and racism; but where clergy are warned, when they take the podium at school events, that if they say the G word they're breaking the law.
No wonder this country is so messed up.
Read MoreI love this story: A Colombian scientist who has developed the first vaccine against malaria announced last week he is refusing offers of millions of dollars from American drug companies and giving his vaccine to the world.
Dr. Manuel Elkin Patarroyo has turned over all legal rights for the vaccine to the World Health Organization. His is a selfless act in a selfish world.
Read MoreIt isn't news anymore, because it isn't new. It's a fact of life. Bad service is standard. Good service is rare. And it's getting rarer every day.
You walk into a store in search of a particular item and you see salespeople, but they're talking to one another. They ignore you. You wander from rack to rack - it's obvious you're looking for something - but no one comes near you. The salespeople continue to talk.
eopSo you leave. You go to another store. But it's the same there. Salespeople standing around neglecting customers.p
Read MoreI read a few weeks ago that the hottest home videos these days are the X-rated kind. Absolutely normal Americans are setting up cameras and performing all kinds of sex acts for the not-so-private eye, then selling these feats of fancy so that others can observe and maybe get in the act, too.
There was no hint, of course, that this behavior might be slightly abhorrent. There was not a single syllable of moral wrestling in the piece. It was straight news. This is what people are doing.
Read MoreIf I had my old high school diary, which I read and tore into a million pieces when I was in my early 20's (Why did I write only when I was miserable? And why did I write so much about boys?), I would see pages and pages of musings about Richard.
There'd be a lot of nasty stuff, I'm sure. Not because I didn't like him. I did. I do. But I was jealous of him. I didn't like that he was so important to my best friend Rosemary. I wondered whether he would be good for her and good to her, and what would happen to me if they became a permanent pair.
Read MoreThree of the children are out in the field with their father when I arrive.
It's a Kodak moment: The girls run with their arms outstretched through spring grass under a cloudless sky, their dog loping along beside them. Tabitha's hair flies behind her like a kite's tail. Xena runs double-speed to keep up. Shiloh, 2 1/2, walks and runs, stopping every few steps to hike up her long, cotton dress…
Read MoreI 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.
Read MoreI went to find it the other day and it was gone. Where did it go and when? Every other time I've reached for it, it has been there. It's just a tacky, little poem I memorized in high school. But it lived in my head my whole life. And now it has vanished, leaving behind a sole stanza: "Lonely as an island/ blue as the sea/ nothing to live for/ that's me."
Read MoreIt's the weirdest thing, preparing for a son to come home. Cleaning the house as if he were a guest. Counting the days until he arrives. "Rob's coming home,” I've been telling everyone for a month.
But the words are wrong. "Coming home" implies he is staying home. And he's not. He's just visiting. He'll be here a few days…
Read MoreSome 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.
Read MoreSo, 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.
Read MoreThe 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 More
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