I am age 3 in the picture, or maybe just turned 4, sitting beside my mother who is leaning against a boulder in the great outdoors. Scrub pines and scraggly trees surround us. A lake is in the distance, gray-white, the same color as the gray-white sky.
The photo is black and white and lacks depth and texture and clarity. No matter how I stare, I can't bring it to life. The grass looks like fuzz. My mother…
Read MoreIt reminds me of when I was a little kid, stealing a snuffed-out cigarette from my father's ashtray, lighting up, taking a puff and feeling dizzy and giddy and grown up all at once. I hated the taste of cigarettes. I have always preferred Oreos and ice cream. But there was something so seductive about the idea of smoking that I worked on liking it for a while. This was what grown-ups did and I wanted to be a grown-up. Logging on to the Internet the first time gave me that same heady feeling…
Read MoreThey bought the house in 1953 with a GI loan for $ 10,200. It was their dream house, far away from the city's three-deckers and bus fumes. The house had a yard, a cellar, a dining room, and an unfinished upstairs…
Read MoreToday is her birthday. She would have been 10. At school they would have sung to her. At home there would have been presents and cake and a party. But she died in June so there is no celebration. In the house not far from Wollaston Beach where Leanne lived with her mother and grandparents, though there are photos of her smiling on the walls and shelves, there are few real smiles anymore. Her absence fills the place. There are no feet pounding up the stairs. No books flung on a chair. No "Mama! Nana! I'm home!" Two women who loved and raised a child are empty without her. They try to put into words their loss, their love and their pain. But words can't hold these things and so as they speak, tears fall…
Read MoreIt was a party game, that's all it was. New Year's Eve, 1994. Our hostess passed out sheets of paper with 10 questions on them. She separated husbands and wives and created new pairs. Let's see how much you remember from 1994, she said. Piece of cake, we all thought. We were a group who knew our news. Lawyers, bankers, teachers, librarians, we devoured newspapers. We watched news shows. We subscribed to Newsweek or Time. Hit us with your toughest question, we thought. We were ready…
Read MoreA few days before Christmas I saw them walking along the street near the viaduct. It was sunset. The sky was red. The trees were black. There was no sidewalk and no other pedestrians except these two young boys. They were brothers, you could tell. They had the same straight, sandy hair. They wore the same knit stocking caps and the same loose-fitting jackets, only in different sizes, and they walked in the same loping way. One was about 12 and the other 5…
Read MoreThis always happens. In the aftermath of tragedy, we look for someone to blame. If we can, we blame the victim. What was Sharon Tate doing with all those people in her house when her husband was out of town? Why would an intelligent woman ever jog through Central Park after dark? Why was Nicole Simpson with Ron Goldman anyway? Blame insulates us from tragedy. Blame gives us a kind of control…
Read MoreIf you're feeling a little overwhelmed because Christmas is four days away and you've been shopping and wrapping and writing cards forever and you still have more to do - stockings to stuff, cookies to bake, more gifts to buy, plus a dinner to plan and cook - take a break. Head to your nearest bookstore and grab a copy of Lois Edgerly's "Women's Words, Women's Stories." You won't have time to read it until after the holiday, of course, but that's OK. It's meant to be read then…
Read MoreIt was Thanksgiving week, a time when kids, especially young kids, tend to be off the wall. Holidays do this to children. They're like horses on the home stretch who know the barn is just over the hill. All they want is to break into a gallop and keep galloping until they get there. A teacher's job isn't just to keep them trotting along…
Read MoreI have come to know Julia slowly, a young woman whose husband died of cystic fibrosis a few months before their son Jeffrey was born. After his death, the priest at our parish spoke of Julia's faith and courage. But she was a stranger then. I had no idea she was my mother-in-law’s next door neighbor. It was after that day in church that my mother-in-law began mentioning Julia, but I didn’t connect the dots. I didn’t realize that the priest’s Julia and my mother-in-law’s Julia were one and the same. Because Julia, then, was just a name…
Read MoreShe eats things. Not just ordinary dog things like newspapers and Coke cans and gardening tools, which she pilfers from the garage. Not just brooms and rakes and speaker wire and toilet paper and paper towels. Molly's preference is cotton - woven or unwoven, plain or printed, new or old. It doesn't matter. She's into all kinds. Dustcloths and facecloths. Cloths that you use to
Read MoreIt was sudden. A small heart attack had been a warning, doctors said. Slow down. Take it easy. His wife was to pick him up and drive him home from the hospital late on a Saturday morning. He died before she arrived.
I knew him only a short time, for a few years as my boyfriend's father, for a few years as my father-in-law. I never called him by his first name. I was too young and he was too old for that informality…
Read MoreSix of them came for the weekend, five children and their mother. The mother and the two littlest ones left Sunday afternoon, and three stayed. Ages 12, 10 and 8, they are still sleeping at 9 o'clock on Monday morning.
I have tiptoed around the house since dawn, sneaking down the steps, shushing the dog, whispering to my husband, soundlessly making coffee…
Read MoreThere were two of them, one about 9, the other 11 or 12. Brothers seeing a baseball game. They sat in front of us, beside their parents in a front row. They were nasty kids, poking at each other, spilling their drinks, yelling insults at the players, throwing their candy, getting ice cream all over the place.
When they got their Cokes, they put them on the wall in front of them. An usher came along and told them food wasn't allowed there. The 9-year-old put his Coke right back where he had it seconds after the usher walked away. His parents looked and said nothing. When the usher returned and told the kid once again to move his Coke, his mother just rolled her eyes.
Read MoreShe's the dog you can't resist. She does terrible things. She terrorizes the cats. She eats their food, drinks their water, plunks her hulking body in the front hall, and pretends to sleep there until, in need of litter or the great outdoors, they come tiptoeing by.
Read MoreDottie Scott took the framed print off her wall and gave it to me the summer before my first child was going off to college. "There are two things you give your children. One is roots, the other is wings.” I hung this saying in my office, above my desk, so I've been forced to think about it regularly over the years. Roots have never been a problem for me. They have been easy to give. Wings, on the other hand, continue to elude…
Read MoreWe had lunch with Sophie and Sam one day. It was open-seating on a two-week cruise. We were led to their table and for an hour we made small talk Where are you from? What do you do? From Montreal now, they were both European born. Sophie had been a doctor…
Read MoreIt never lost its magic the way most things do. You get older, you look up close and you see the strings on puppets, cards up the trickster's sleeve. Childhood pleasures seldom stand up to adult scrutiny. Except every once in a while, the magic lingers, and a long-awaited moment doesn't disappoint.
When my friend Beth was in fifth grade, she prayed for the one thing she wanted more than anything in the world to crown the…
Read MoreHow I hate contests. I hate them because they divide people into winners and losers and there are always more losers than winners, more people walking away with their heads bowed than with their heads held high.
Maybe I'd feel differently if I had been the first kid always picked for a team. But from Red Rover to kickball to softball, I never was…
Read MoreThey all come back. Every time there's another delay in the still pending drunk driving legislation. Every time someone shrugs off drinking and driving as something everyone does. Every time some judge who should know better treats drunk drivers as good guys who've slipped up a little, but didn't really mean to do anything wrong. Then, every parent…
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