The real miracle of Christmas

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The real miracle of Christmas

I walk down the cellar stairs and dig through boxes, unlabeled, packed in haste, the creche wrapped among Christmas glasses rimmed in green, and find the Santa Clauses, finally. The musical ones I wind up. Two play "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," but my favorite, a ceramic St. Nick with kind, blue eyes, plays "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," and I sing along to the thin, tinny notes. "Have yourself a merry little Christmas, make the yuletide bright. Next year all our troubles will be out of sight."

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It's too late to say thank you

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It's too late to say thank you

ORLANDO, Fla. - We met Tuesday in the hotel lobby on our way to somewhere else. It took a minute for me to match a name with his face because I hadn't seen him in a couple of years and then we were in another city in another hotel lobby. He was smiling, extending his hand, saying his name and when he did, I thought: of course. And it all came back then, the details of our last conversation.

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Memory: Where all is safe

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Memory: Where all is safe

My friend Anne e-mails me an excerpt from "Listening to Your Life," a book of daily meditations by Frederick Buechner. I find it on my computer at 5 a.m.

It is dark. The house is quiet, and I feel a little like the shoemaker in the old children's tale. I tiptoe downstairs to find that someone has been working while I've been sleeping, a pair of shoes on the workbench already made. An idea on the computer, already hatched.

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Turning 85 is a present for all those who love her

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When she was 80, we bought her 80 presents. It took a while to find 80 things that an 80-year-old didn't already have and could eventually use, but we did. We bought shortbread and jelly and notepaper and stamps and dusting powder and assorted teas, and wrapped all the gifts in silver foil and tied them with white bows then placed them in and around a pink hatbox. The presents, by their sheer number, made 80 look inviting. My mother-in-law, surrounded by family and friends, sat in the living room and talked and laughed as she unwrapped each present…

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Bring on the kids next door

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Bring on the kids next door

The sign is on the lawn "sale pending," so it's not a done deal yet. But I am pretending it is. I have my hopes high and my fingers crossed. I am thinking about cookies and cocoa with marshmallow and jars full of penny candy.

The priest who lived next door for 21 years moved last month and the house has been vacant since. It used to be my house before it was his. "Oh, you moved next door," people usually say when they learn this. "You were lucky. It must have been such an easy move."

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When the season finally ends, heredity, environment wage war

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When the season finally ends, heredity, environment wage war

I scrub the grout on the kitchen floor with a toothbrush, scouring with a paste made of Cascade and water, while, I know an army of ants munches away at the walls, the beams, the very foundations of my house.The ants will have to wait until later. I scrub the grout for hours, get half the floor done and then get distracted and involved in something else…

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A good man remembered

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A good man remembered

The present tense dominates the conversation:

"Brian's the most organized, disorganized person I know."

"He's my best friend."

"He's the kind of guy who, when there's an event coming, you hope he's there."

"He bought me a corsage. He called me up and asked what color my dress was. That's how he is."

They have come to talk about Brian Cody. They crowd around a conference table at Saint Patrick's rectory in Stoneham on a hot Sunday night. Some talk about Brian as a friend, teacher, brother, son. All talk about Brian as a man they love.

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Oh, to be a kid again in summer

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Oh, to be a kid again in summer

The 18-year-old calls from a pay phone after work, before play rehearsal and we talk about our day and then she says, "I miss summer." And though it is the middle of summer, hot and sunny and steamy, I know exactly what she means. She misses being a kid. She misses all those long, lazy days that when you're 8 or 10 or 12, you're sure will last forever. She misses staying up late at night watching movies and videotapes of school plays, and waking slowly in the morning, sleeping until she's no longer tired, not until some alarm wakes her.

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Some angels take human form

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Some angels take human form

The poster has been hanging on my office door for nearly two years now. It's an angel poster. I've read it a hundred times. "Angels are the guardians of hope and wonder, the keepers of magic and dreams," it begins. Angels, as in spirits, heavenly visitors who keep you from harm's way; phantoms, shadows, apparitions, guardians from another world. That's what I've always thought…

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Ease up - tourists are people, too

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Ease up - tourists are people, too

It's late July and time, it seems, for tourist-bashing. Last week in this paper, Joe Sciacca got all a-flutter over the Old Town Trolley and Beantown Trolley and the new Duck Tours, which he says are the reason you can't get from point A to point B anywhere in this city. Congestion and gridlock are the fault of trolleys and "lard butts from Nebraska," don't you know?

This week, in Boston's other major daily, columnist Patricia Smith wrote that tourists "clog the Artery, babble over maps in restaurants, snap endless pictures of sunbleached gravestones" (why this would bother anyone puzzles me), and continues on to bemoan their "maddening practice of standing directly in the middle of a downtown sidewalk at 5 p.m., their heads upturned and mouths open, gazing reverently at 'Look, another old building!' while juggling camcorder, bottles of Evian, and several hot squiggling children." Huh?

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We need to see all of life's road

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Her feet are cold and swollen and sore. She lies in a hospital bed, her legs elevated higher than her heart. Every morning her toes are painted with some antibacterial solution, then wrapped in small sausage-like pieces of gauze. Next her feet are shrouded in white. From her ankles down, she looks like a mummy. The problem is circulation…

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The night and the music help David fight his fears

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The night and the music help David fight his fears

Depending on how old you are, you'd call him a nerd, a dweeb, a geek. He's the square peg in a world full of round holes. He doesn't walk so much as stumble. He bumps into things. His dialogue, his everyday hellos and goodbyes, are as clumsy as his gait.

His dark curly hair covers his forehead, making him look, at times, like a standard poodle whose groomer has been on vacation too long. His soulful eyes are obscured by horn-rimmed glasses. He's out of shape, a weeble in a room full of Ken dolls.

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When did she really grow up?

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When did she really grow up?

Every night, after I tucked her into bed, I would sing to her, a silly song, a made-up song, our song. "Stay little, stay little, little little stay, little stay little stay little." She would giggle, and I would smile. The next morning I would say: "Look at you. You grew. The song didn't work." I sang that song for years, and every time I finished, she would cross her heart and promise she wouldn't grow any more.

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Remembering Amy, ever 11

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Remembering Amy, ever 11

I don't know why it felt so important to find the exact spot. She isn't there. I recognize this. And yet it didn't seem enough just to ride around and lump her together with DICKSON and HARRISON and WHITTENBERGER and all the other people I never met. I knew Amy - knew her for too short a time, too long ago. But I knew her well. She was my daughter's best friend; because of her, her mother and I became friends…

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