When my kids were little, I used to notice these things: The way the sky in winter looks as if you could skate on it; the way the evergreens, laden with snow, look like they belong next to a gingerbread house; the way the world looks when the snow stops and the sun comes out and everything seems fresh and newborn…
Read MoreIt is snowing and I am late, the traffic on Route 138 backed up for miles. When I arrive at New England Sinai Hospital, Laurie Kelly is gone because the traffic will make her late if she waits for me. She cannot be late. She has driven all the way from Monument Beach to Stoughton with her 6-year-old daughter so that the child can see with her own eyes that her father is still in the same room, in the same hospital bed, where he was yesterday, and the day before yesterday and dozens of days before that.
Read Morehere are 12 days of Christmas, Father Coen says every year.
And every year I sit in church and hear the words and dismiss them, certain that while in theory this may be true, in fact if everything isn't done by Christmas Day, the season will be ruined.
This year, everything wasn't done. I hardly did any shopping, never bought even one stocking stuffer, never sent Christmas cards or made a gingerbread house…
Read MoreWaiting. That's what we've been doing. Waiting for the drugs to work, for the infection to abate, for the pain to go away, for the snow to fall, for Christmas to come. Waiting. That's what we continue to do. Monday we heard the forecast: a major winter storm. Monday we heard another forecast: my mother-in-law’s foot has to be amputated.. Silence then, and terror, too. Not the artificial kind buoyed by hysterical newscasters who caution people to bottle water and stock up on batteries because of some potential danger. Butl terror fueled by the inevitable…
Read MoreI 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."
Read MoreORLANDO, 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.
Read MoreShe had thin, blond hair that curled slightly on the ends where it just covered her neck, and blue eyes that were a little too close, and a tiny pug nose, and she was sucking on a binky, and clinging to a white teddy bear. The sight of her in the dim light at church took my breath away. She looked, at that moment, so much like my youngest daughter…
Read MoreMy 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.
Read MoreWhen 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…
Read MoreThe 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."
Read MoreI 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…
Read MoreEverything until now has been a dress rehearsal - kindergarten, first grade, middle school, high school, even that month away last summer.
It was all play. At the end of the day, at the end of the month, my youngest child would always come home to me. She'd race in the front door, drop her books on the floor and yell, "Mom! I'm home," then go looking for me…
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreThe 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…
Read MoreIt'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?
Read MoreHer 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…
Read MoreDepending 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.
Read MoreShe didn't get top billing. Actually she didn't get any billing at all. In theater terms, I suppose you'd say she has a bit part. The press release gushes about Bambi and Tootsie and Nicki and Todd. But there's not a single word about Molly. Still, you know the old saying: There are no small parts, only small players. And Molly, when she's on camera…
Read MoreNot long after my parents moved from the house in which I grew up, I took my son back to my old neighborhood. We walked up the flagstone walk my father built, climbed the concrete stairs where Janet Butler and I used to sit and dream away summer nights, and I rang the bell and asked if I could come in…
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