Catholics will sing when there's only one `Amen,' one `Alleluia'

/

I don't know if an ambassador can do this. Probably not. It will probably take divine intervention on a grand scale. An edict by the pope or something. But maybe Ray Flynn can get the ball rolling. Or put a bug in the pope's ear, to coin a cliche or two.

"Here ye, here ye, Catholic Americans. Get your act together. Learn how to open your mouths, raise your voices to Heaven and praise the Lord."

We're bad at this, you know. Catholics do not sing. Protestants belt out hymns with the passion of converts, but we Catholics don't even bother to mouth the words. We stand silent in our churches and let the organists and the one vocalist who substitutes for a choir do all the work.

Read More

McGinniss regales with scissors, glue

/

Listen up, folks. Have I got a hot tip for you. Forget about those lottery tickets. Forget about Suffolk Downs. You want to strike it rich? Here's how.

Go to the library, borrow "Gone With the Wind" or "The Firm" - pick a book, any book you choose, but make sure it's popular - copy the words in a notebook and then move them around a little. Change a verb here, a noun there, embellish, enhance. Invert a couple sentences, but don't deviate too much. You don't want to mess with a winner.

And you don't have to. Plagiarism isn't a bad word anymore. It's a way to fame and fortune.

Read More

A sister killed, another mourns

/

There is no anger in Virginia Suozzo's voice. There's pain, sorrow, even bewilderment.

But no rage.

Her 25-year-old sister, Dawn, was killed last weekend, shot in the head as she walked into their parent's house with her boyfriend, Mitch, and her 12-year-old nephew, Michael.

Dawn Brown grew up in a nice, safe Wollaston neighborhood with four sisters and a brother. The family remains close. All were at their parent's Royal Street home last weekend because Kimberlee Brown, 23, is getting married in August, and last Saturday was the ritual wedding shower.

Read More

Rating the ratings

/

So what is the American media telling the American public about the agreement - worked out with Congress - of four major broadcast networks to voluntarily provide warnings prior to violent television shows beginning in the fall?

"The networks' new parental advisories are almost pathetically beside the point," writes Kurt Andersen in "Time."

"All they're doing is applying a Band-Aid. It's just a sham," says Dr. Carole Lieberman, a psychiatrist who heads the National Coalition on Television Violence, in "Newsweek."

Read More

If New Yorkers are always this nice, we'll take Manhattan!

/
If New Yorkers are always this nice, we'll take Manhattan!

NEW YORK - I awaken to sirens these days and horns blaring and scrapes and thuds, trucks picking up or dropping off something. City sounds, foreign sounds to me.

There's an air-conditioner in the bedroom, but we sleep with it off and the window open. Closed, this place is hermetically sealed. We could be anywhere - in a barn, in a bubble.

I want to remember where I am: New York City.

Read More

So that's life in the Big City!

/

The news is full of mayhem - all over the country, all over the world. That's what news is. Man bludgeons man. Man hurts and hates and avenges and rebukes and betrays and alienates.

We drive from Boston to Manhattan and as the local radio station fades and the New York one becomes strong, only the names of the victims change. The stories are the same: Child shot; man stabbed; woman raped; teens killed; girl attacked by gang; terrorists vow revenge.

Bad news is like the moon at night. You can't get away from it. It follows us all.

Read More

Daughter's `new' clothes show '70s fashions are right on

/
Daughter's `new' clothes show '70s fashions are right on

The 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 More

Fate takes the next step

/
Fate takes the next step

In 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 More

The more we listen, the less we really hear

/

My 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 More

A father's ordinary kindnesses make extraordinary impression

/

You 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 More

Nuke test return will poison earth

/

Tuesday, 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 More

A place that gave women a chance closes shop

/

Celeste 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 More

Years melt away as stranger's face recalls timeless memory

/

It 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 More

The real problem is rotten parents

/

It 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 More

Neatness doesn't count when your room is full of memories

/

She 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 More

Drunk drivers steal tomorrow

/

Todd 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 More