A yard sale is mostly sport
/It's a curious custom, taking things you don't want and no longer need, dragging them to the front lawn, marking them with a price tag, then selling them.
But that's what we do. A dime for a Johnny Tilliston record. It's not high finance. It's trading.
At the end of the day, all you have is a pocketful of change, but it's like when you were a kid and shook coins out of a piggy bank. It's found money. And it's fun.
Read MoreWhere did you go? Nowhere
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It wasn't a real vacation, not the kind you write home about. "Dear Family, Today we saw the Eiffel Tower and toured the Louvre and tomorrow we're headed for Versailles. Gotta hurry and get this in the mail because we're off to dinner." No, it wasn't like this at all.
Read MoreA wish at the top of summer
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“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 in 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. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring moons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after." - Natalie Babbitt
Read MoreProverbs' power can touch the heart and stir the soul
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It takes awhile for me to notice things.
The billboards have been gone for months, but I didn't start missing them until this week.
I looked for them on Route 128, then on the Mass Pike and was suprised when I didn't find any.
Read More'A Summer Place' Revisited
/The last time I saw them they were two kids, in love, newly married, kissing in front of God and everyone as the boat that dropped them off at Pine Island sped away. The music soared, the lights came on, the film went black and that was it. Johnny and Molly were together.
Fast forward 38 years.
To celebrate the start of a summer season of classic films, American Movie Classics dusted off the 1959 Warner Brothers hit "A Summer Place," and showed…
Read MoreAdmire yes, but also follow Mother Teresa's example
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'Smile at each other - it doesn't matter who it is - and that will help you to grow up in greater love for each other.' - Mother Teresa
She is the antithesis of everything we worship in this country. She is old and we revere young. She is wrinkled and stooped, and we admire smooth and tall. She is humble and we're used to boastful. She is poor and we idolize wealth.
She is a bent, old woman who drapes cloth on her body only to cover herself, who doesn't dye her hair or work out or wear makeup or jewelry or spend even an ounce of energy worrying about what she looks like.
Read MoreThe incredible wonders of life
/'What I wish is that I could do all the things I used to hate to do - cut the grass, wait in line."
That's what he said. And that's what I've thought about since Thursday night when he said it.
The young man was on "48 Hours," a boy from Milford who caught a wave on Martha's Vineyard the wrong way last Labor Day weekend and is now a paraplegic. "48 Hours" filmed his long, slow days of recovery and therapy and adjustment. It was a superb documentary because it didn't gloss over pain.
Read MoreMother's Day Hokey, but Love Is Real
/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 MoreMissing the Kids They Used to Be
/It'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's an everyday kinda hero
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She 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 More'If I want to be good, I have to practice'
/Every 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 MoreWhen music makes magic
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He 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 MoreMedicare's pound-foolish rules
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She 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 MoreAdult Game Brings Out Child in Us
/The 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 MoreWatching the Clouds Roll By
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BANFF 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 MoreOne more day to live in the sun
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Five 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 MoreA Walk in the Woods for Two
/The 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 Saran Wrap Moment
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A 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 MoreA Hat, a Memory, a Moment
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Sitting 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,…
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