Let's get serious about drunk drivers

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The stories make headlines, then go away; you don't think of them for more than a few days because there are other stories to read and other issues to ponder, plus life to live, bills to pay, appointments to keep, children to care for, parents to tend to, and on it goes.

But if you consider that the line in the middle of the road that divides traffic is just a line not a barrier; if you acknowledge that the sidewalks on which your children walk to school, and the yards in which they play are only psychologically removed from the roads on which cars travel; if you realize that highway safety is a personal responsibility and not something the state can actually enforce, then you'd remember the stories and work for and demand stricter anti-drunk driving laws, because you'd know just how vulnerable you and every one of the people you love really are.

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Parents have only themselves to blame for classroom chaos

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God help the teachers. I used to teach, a lifetime ago when kids actually had respect for adults. They learned this respect at home. "You do what your teacher tells you," parents said. If a teacher told you to stand in a corner all day, you did. And if your parents found out, they yelled at you, not at the teacher.

Now, of course, kids challenge everything. They know that teachers have no real authority, so they have little respect for them.

This makes teaching difficult.

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After the mammogram comes the fear

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Two years ago, it looked like a rich grandparent's parlor. The carpet was thick, the upholstered couches and chairs, elegant. Everything matched: furniture, drapes, end tables, lamps. The room evoked a sense of calm and comfort.

And yet it was all pretense, mental Valium, because the Sagoff Center at Faulkner Hospital was never a parlor. It is, and always was, a waiting area for women who've come for mammograms. A door opens and on the other side of a designer wall women sit in thin, cotton hospital robes on hard, armless chairs, waiting to be X-rayed and told they can go back into the land of the living - at least for a while.

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We are all to blame for death of Samore

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I'm looking for someone to blame. If I can blame someone or something, then I can put the death of 13-year-old Samore Vassel out of my head and get on with the pretense that life is manageable, and we can keep the wolves from our doors.

Samore Vassel lived in Dorchester with his father and younger brother and sister. Last week he was in Brooklyn, visiting his mother, when he was shot and killed. The boy had told his mother he was going to a movie with a friend. But he and his buddy went off to meet a couple of girls instead.

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Mother Teresa: Her message is love

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Mother Teresa: Her message is love

I think of it as myth, now, as a fairy tale I once believed. Truth has been downsized to fit a package I can carry around with me. The whole truth grew too heavy and cumbersome with age. The whole truth demanded a responsibility I continue to shun.

But I remember the child who accepted the whole truth, the child I was, who knew that life on Earth was only a test, that Heaven was the reward, not anything we might win here on Earth, and that the sole purpose of existence was to love God in this world and be happy with Him in the next.

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Letting go doesn't get any easier the third time around

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The youngest just got her driver's license. Another day. Another benchmark. They come so regularly lately that I have trouble keeping up with them. The oldest graduated and moved to Florida. Then the middle one turned 21. Then the youngest turned 16 and got her driver's permit. Then the middle one graduated and moved home. Now there is this. The birds have grown up and have all flown away…

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Just another day in TV `news'

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Just what we need. This one is called "Now" and airs Wednesday nights. First there was "60 Minutes" Now there are 60 clones.

What's the purpose of all this purported news?

The premiere of "Now" featured an interview with Bette Midler and a report on the case against the Idaho white supremacist, Randy Weaver. No points here for originality - or depth.

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`Ordinary Times'

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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.

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Things that go bump in the night - or crinkle and crunch

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Things that go bump in the night - or crinkle and crunch

I 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.

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Capital meanness claims a victim

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It 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.

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It's Blacks who should protest `Rising Sun,' not Japanese

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Thousands 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.

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High heels, hairdos and dates will never take away `my baby'

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High heels, hairdos and dates will never take away `my baby'

NEW 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.

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Is that a demon? No, just a little boy

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I 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.

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Kristen Wasn't a Superstar But Her Story Must Be Told

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What 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…

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She was lucky, she got out alive

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Even 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.

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We're all really `Blood Brothers'

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You 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.

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Racism blamed in Quincy slaying

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"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.

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