So it's a hokey holiday. All those mushy cards. All that cold coffee and burned toast served on makeshift trays to tired mothers who would prefer to skip breakfast and sleep just a little longer. All the overpriced flowers that are dead in two days and perfumes that smell like bug spray and sweaters that are too big and pants that are too tight and housewares that you never use…
Read MoreIt's my fault. I always liked them too much. I never understood when people said, "Aren't you glad vacation is over?" or "Oh, no, another snow day. The kids are home again.” Even when they were small and awoke ready to play in the middle of the night, even when they cried every time I attempted to go out, I always thought how lucky…
Read MoreShe has always rebounded. That's the thing. Push her down and she comes popping back like one of those weighted inflatable toys that kids can punch but can never topple over. She has persisted like the Energizer Bunny, and rallied like the Six Million Dollar Man, and though life has taken her breath away, time and time again, it has never been able to stop her. Just one more trip to the hospital. Just one more close call. Just one more step back from the starting line, but that's okay because we've been here before…
Read MoreEvery afternoon she races in from school, raids the refrigerator, then heads for the piano.
"So how was your day?" I shout over Jimmy crack corn and I don't care.
"Fine," she answers, distracted, immediately lost in the notes of a song she has been drumming on her desk and rehearsing in her head throughout the day.
Read MoreHe takes you back to a night you thought you'd forgotten, when there was laughter and champagne and glasses clinking and young people laughing, and you were one of the young people, dressed to kill, out for an evening, out on the town.
He whisks you to Broadway, and ushers you to a front-row seat where you heard, maybe for the first time, Judy Garland, John Raitt, Mary Martin.
Read MoreShe doesn't say, "I can't" or "I won't," or "Why me?" She simply doesn't complain. She wakes up in the morning, puts a smile on her face and plays the hand she's been dealt. She has to use a slide board to get from her bed to her wheelchair. The middle-of-the-night transfer is the toughest. It's dark and she's tired and it's a huge effort to shimmy onto the board, position the board onto the wheelchair, ease her body into the chair and wheel out of the bedroom into the bathroom…
Read MoreThe masks stumped everyone. They were beautiful, artfully decorated, thoughtful, clever representations of who we are. They had been our pre-party assignment. Ellen had bought them, full-faced white things, and given them to us with instructions to decorate them, in secret, in a way that would say something about our inner selves. We were then to bring our finished product hidden in a paper bag to her annual neighborhood ladies night…
Read MoreBANFF SPRINGS, Alberta - I am watching the clouds roll by. Literally.
Pale pink in some places, bruise blue in others, they are thick, substantial things, far more lethargic than clouds generally are. They have draped themselves across the mountains. They hug the craggy tops and cling to the creviced sides and linger there…
Read MoreFive weeks after she had her second leg amputated the doctors sent her home with health aides coming in just a few hours a day. I was terrified for her and for me. How could this 85-year-old woman live without constant help? How would she get from the bed to the wheelchair, from the wheelchair to the bathroom? How could she maneuver the wheelchair through an opening so small that I had trouble when I pushed the chair? Where would she get the strength and the patience to perform such a task?
Read MoreThe first time we went walking, Al took us. It was spring and the earth was soft, the trees new green and the path that leads from the street to the football field was a straight, clean line. Al's been walking his dog Dante for years, twice a day, no matter what the weather. I've watched him from my office window. A man and his dog. I envied them…
Read MoreA pretty little blonde walks down the street, a young teen, ponytail bopping, legs pumping, arms keeping rhythm, a happy, purposeful walk. And I who have looked up from my desk and out the window have "Hey, Em!" in my throat and it's on my lips when I remember: Emily's away at school. She's in college. She isn't 14 anymore. It's like stepping out of movie theater at noon - going from black to bright, from story to reality…
Read MoreSitting in church, I remembered. But not until then. Not all morning as I read the papers, did laundry, cleaned the kitchen. Not even as I dressed for church, overdressed really. Who wears a hat anymore, especially for a noon Mass on a hot August day?
My mother wore hats. She sold them. That's what she did for a living, first at Wethern's in Quincy and then later at Sheridan's at the South Shore Plaza. She ordered them, unpacked them, fussed with them so that they would sit just right on mannequin heads, and she wore them home every day. The quiet, sedate ones, straws and whimsies, were for weekdays; the more riotous ones, flowered and feathered,…
Read MoreBefore they arrived, summer lived outside my window. I could see it, but I couldn't feel it. Even when I cut the grass, even when I walked barefoot early in the morning, even when I unleashed Molly and let her race down the path and across the football field, even as I raced with her, grass and woods and sky our only companions, summer didn't touch…
Read MoreIt will take work this year. It won't come automatically. The temperature is too cool and the mood too hot. The world, always unsafe, feels even more so. Bad news stalks us, and there's no place to hide. "The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless and hot."
Read Morehe wouldn't let them into her house. She stood on her dilapidated porch, in the middle of a well-kept neighborhood, her back to the door and insisted that she was fine, that they could go, and that she was going nowhere.
She was 82. She lived alone on the first floor…
Read MoreXena turns 10 today. If there is a perfect age, it is 10. Ten is still a child, but not a little one like 8 and 9. Ten doesn't have to be watched or coddled. Ten is self-sufficient. Ten is, after all, double digits.
But 10 is still a bit too young for heavy-duty responsibility. So 10 doesn't have to wash dishes or change sheets or babysit…
Read MoreShe moved out the way she was born, in the midst of a crisis that overshadowed her. So her leaving was hardly noticed. She left home amid, "What's the prognosis on Gram?" and phone calls and tears.
She slipped into the world pretty much the same way. Then it was her other grandmother who was fighting for her life. She was born quickly, as if she knew there were other things to be done. We have pictures of her older brother and younger sister at their births. But there is not a single photograph of her.
Read MoreI have never called her “Mother.” She isn't my mother. She's my mother-in-law.
Such an awkward, stiff word, as if the law is binding us, as if the vows her son and I took nearly three decades ago are our sole connection.
We had nothing in common when we met
Read MoreIt's different this year. There's no school schedule to keep me on track, so I find myself bumping into holidays. First it was Valentine's Day that caught me by surprise. Then it was St. Patrick's Day. Now it's Easter. How did it get to be…
Read MoreI walk cross the street to chide Al about washing his car on the first nice day in months.
"What," he says, "you've never seen me out here in the cold? You never saw me in my rubber gloves? I've been doing this all winter long. Where've you been?”
I must have been in the kitchen still sipping coffee or upstairs getting dressed. He must have done all his rubbing and scrubbing long before dawn because I totally missed him in his rubber gloves. But there is no missing him this day. He is in his…
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