In the church calendar, these days are called "Ordinary Times" - life as usual, without anything "extra" ordinary. The church is neither looking forward to nor back at Easter or Christmas. Therefore the name "ordinary."
But it is a great misnomer, for these days are anything but ordinary. They are long, lush, lazy, lovely summer days, the best days, the most extraordinary days of the year.
Read MoreI can hear it clearly, very clearly, a kind of crinkling, crunching like cellophane or a taffeta dress being eagerly devoured. The sound is coming from the bedroom. I get up and turn on the air conditioner and the radio. I cover up the noise with other noise. I don't want to go into the bedroom. I don’t want to look under the bed or behind the bureau.
Read MoreIt has been weeks now since Vincent Foster, President Clinton's boyhood friend, put a loaded gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
His death rocked Washington.
Few could believe, or wanted to believe, that every-day life in the nation's capital could be so mean-spirited that it would drive a man to suicide.
And so the news stories were speculative, rife with unanswered questions.
Read MoreThousands of Japanese- Americans protested outside theaters across America a few weeks ago when "Rising Sun" debuted as a movie. Having read the book, they no doubt expected the movie to portray the Japanese as author Michael Crichton had - as conniving, manipulative entrepreneurs buying up American property and American businesses as fast as they could.
But the movie is not a political polemic. It's a second rate thriller full of loud music, dumb dialogue, gratuitous violence and nothing else.
Read MoreNEW YORK - I still call her "my baby," and she puts up with this and with me, with an understanding that goes beyond her 16 1/2 years. She allows me this indulgence, this solitary pretense, though we both know she isn't a baby anymore.
The knowledge for her is old. But for me, it's new. I have seen her through such myopic eyes. Even dressed up for a formal dance, she has seemed to me just a little girl pretending. All of the outward signs - her learning to drive, her staunch independence, the bedroom door closed while she talks on the phone for hours, the calls from boys, the flowers, the whispers, the cogent arguments about right and wrong, good and bad, the talks about college, about careers, about the rest of her life - should have alerted me to the truth.
Read MoreI have never seen him, the child who lives upstairs. I heard him for the first time the morning after we moved in. Elephant hooves awakened me at 6:45 a.m. I anticipated that the beast overhead would crash through the ceiling and fall in my lap. But apartment floors are apparently constructed of sturdy wood. Good thing. It is only a floor that separates us from him.
Read More“How did you start? When did you begin? Did you go to school for this?" People constantly ask these questions of public figures, artists, artisans - of anyone whose talent and work they admire. "Where did you learn what you know?”
Often what's in their hearts…
Read MoreWhat you want, when someone you love dies, is to make the world understand all that was lost by a single person's passing. You wish the Earth would stop spinning, the sun would stop shining, if only for a minute, because for life to go on as it always has just adds to the hurt. Yet most people die the way they live, quietly, without fanfare, special only to their families and the people who loved them…
Read MoreEven now, she doesn't understand why it happened, why it's happening still. The politics elude her. She is 33, a wife, a mother of two young boys. Until two years ago, her life was urban ordinary. She lived in an apartment in a bustling city, worked as an attorney for a bank. Her husband was a businessman, her parents lived close by. Her children went to good schools and on holidays and weekends she socialized with family and friends.
Read MoreThe 16-year-old says I stole her idea. She has been keeping what she calls a "common place book," for half a year now, since her English teacher, Mr. Schauble, introduced the concept to her class.
It's really a very UNcommon book, a journal augmented by other things, more like a scrapbook than a diary.
Read MoreYou don't have to come to New York to see "Blood Brothers," the hit London musical about twins separated at birth, one raised with money, one raised without. The story's an old, familiar one. It has been playing for centuries in cities and towns all over the world. The chasm between the haves and the have nots has always been the Great Divide.
And the chasm is getting wider.
Read More"Don't waste your tears," my mother used to say when I was young and moping around the house because John W. didn't talk to me at CYO, because John W. didn't notice me at school, because John W. didn't like me though I liked him more than I liked any other boy in the world.
"Save your tears for real sorrow," my mother said the afternoon I came racing into the house, sobbing because John had finally asked me out and I couldn't go. I thought she was heartless. I'd already accepted a date to the Victory Dance and I had to turn John down.
Read MoreI 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 MoreListen 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 MoreThere 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 MoreSo 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 MoreNEW 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 MoreThe 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 MoreThere 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?"
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