There is something burning in my office. I smell it. Wires. Computer chips. Something electrical.
This is Day 3 of Trying To Get The Printer To Print. It's supposed to be a simple thing. Plug it in. Turn it on. Feed it some paper. Tell it what to print and sit back and relax.
This is not what has been happening.
Read MoreThe 21-year-old keeps appearing at my office door in clothes I know I threw away two decades ago.
"What do you think, Mom? Don't you just love this outfit?"
This "outfit," the one she's modeling now, is the worst of the lot. It's a black-and-white polka-dot-one-piece, who-knows-what-to-call it.
"It's three different fashions in one," she explains. "It's a bell-bottom jumpsuit with an empire waist and a halter-top front. Remember those halter tops you used to wear?"
Read MoreThis is a note-in-a-bottle-story with a new twist.
Instead of taking a group of kids to the ocean and floating their letters around the world in the hope that a few might reach some people who would write back, a teacher in Irvine, Calif., updated this age-old game.
Read MoreFerdinand Mahfood makes me uncomfortable. He is too earnest, too intense. I look into his eyes and want to turn away. I listen to his words and want to block my ears.
He tells me things I don't want to hear, about people I don't want to know, about a situation I cannot change.
Read MoreIn the morning, the gully between the trees into which the car had plunged, seems smaller than it did at midnight. I drive past and am amazed that an automobile fit in that spot, never mind landed there. A few inches either way, and the driver would have been hurt, might have been killed. The car windshield was smashed, the front end shattered; but the driver emerged unscathed. She'd been wearing a seat belt, and an angel no doubt was sitting beside her.
Read MoreMy favorite Bible story when I was growing up was the Tower of Babel. The tale intrigued me. Here were all these people working together, co-operating, pooling their talents and energy to build a stairway to Heaven, which I thought, was a brilliant idea.
I still remember what the page looked like in the book we used: people of all different shapes and sizes and colors were stirring mortar, gathering bricks and smiling.
Read MoreYou want something out of the ordinary for a Father's Day story.
You want a tale of tenacity: Jamie Fiske's father fighting for a liver transplant for his small daughter. Or a tale of courage: Ricky Hoyt's father repeatedly achieving, with his physically challenged son, seemingly impossible goals. Or a gripping melodrama: a soldier clinging to a picture of a child he has never seen, enduring great hardships, surviving deadly battles, fed by the need to go home and embrace his son.
Read MoreTuesday, June 8: I am at my computer moving words around a screen, but not seeing them. My mind is fixed on three people I know, at three different hospitals, all seeing doctors, all undergoing tests and procedures, all doing battle with cancer.
Caryn is having a check-up. She's examined every six months now. Three and a half years ago she found a lump, was diagnosed, had surgery and months of radiation and chemotherapy.
Read MoreCeleste House is quiet these days. The old convent, converted four years ago into a home for recovering homeless substance-abusing women and their children, is closing shop.
Most of the beds on the second floor have been stripped clean. Photographs that once covered the walls are gone. In the playroom there is just one child, for only one mother remains here. All the others have been transferred to other homes for substance-abusing women throughout the state.
Read MoreIt happened again a few weeks ago.
I saw him in a crowd, at a graduation, a boy I used to date in high school. I recognized him right away: the dark blond hair, just a little too long to be a crew cut; the thin face; the high cheekbones; the wide-set eyes. Even his clothes looked familiar: blue sportscoat, white shirt, striped tie. I started to wave to him and almost shouted, "Tom? How are you? How've you been?"
But then I realized it couldn't be Tom because Tom would be 49 or maybe even 50 by now and this Tom was just a boy, not even 18.
Read MoreI envy the kids who get out of school in a few weeks. Summer vacation - even the words sound luxurious. "One more week and then finals and then I'm free," my daughter said to me a few days ago. "No more chemistry and no more Spanish for two whole months."
Two whole months. Imagine not having to be anywhere or do anything you didn't want to do all summer long…
Read MoreIt is an idea born of frustration, holding parents criminally accountable for their children's violent actions. But Mayor Ray Flynn, fed up with violence, as are we all, is advocating just that: punishing parents who fail to keep guns out of their children's hands.
Last week he ordered Boston Police Commissioner Mickey Roache to convene a task force to draft legislation that would penalize parents whose children carry guns. Should the plan win final approval, it would affect only those living within city limits.
Read MoreShe is upstairs cleaning her room, the 21-year-old. The new college graduate is out, out, damn spotting childhood and adolescence to make way for the working woman she has become.
Necessity has forced her to do this. She can't fit what she brought home, what she has collected in the past four years, in a room that is a storehouse for her first 17.
Read MoreTodd was playing in a yard. Kristen was jogging on a country road. Michael was driving to work. Chris was driving home from work. Lisa was getting in her car. Michelle was crossing the street. All of them children. All of them alive one minute, dead or soon to be dead the next.
Christopher Baldwin, 19, back home in Somerset after his first year of college, was rollerblading last Sunday night when he was killed. Police say a 1985 Camaro struck him from behind, pitched him onto the car's roof and hurled him into a stone wall.
Read MoreHe 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 More
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