To save man, He became one

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To save man, He became one

My friend, a priest, tells this tale at Christmas. It is, after all, set on a December day. But I think it's a Good Friday story, too. It goes like this: A farmer lives with his wife and children somewhere off the beaten path. Picture Robert Frost country, a house, a field, a barn. It is Christmas Eve and the wife and two children are dressed for church. "Come with us," the wife says to her husband as he walks her to the car. He shakes his head. He's not a believer. "I'll see you when you get back," he replies. The man goes inside, pours some coffee, opens the newspaper. And then it starts to snow.

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Mom knows it's time to let go

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Mom knows it's time to let go

It's been all dress rehearsals until now. I left, she left, but we always came back to one another. That was the ending. When she was an infant, I left her for the first time to go to a party at the Ponkapoag Civic. I didn't want to go. But everyone said "She'll be fine." So I went and kept looking at the clock.

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Life teaches us lessons that cannot be found in any book

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Life teaches us lessons that cannot be found in any book

A schmaltzy, feel-good thing came over the Internet this week. I printed and saved it because sometimes feel-good schmaltz is nice, a kind of flannel for the heart, soft and warm and comforting.

It's a long piece, however, three typed pages, so this is just a sample. The theme is "I've learned." "I've learned - "That no matter how much I care some people just don't care back. That it takes years to build up trust and only seconds to destroy it. "I've learned - "That it's not what you have in your life but who you have in your life that counts." I got to thinking that I've learned a few things too. Some not so soft, but warm still, and useful, rather like an itchy wool scarf.

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In a breeze, a memory found

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In a breeze, a memory found

I imagine 20 years or 40 or a lifetime later, a person driving by the spot where a loved one had died would slow down, look at the landscape and remember. That person might feel not the sharp pain of new loss, but the memory of sorrow. The time might never come when that bend in the road, or that cross walk, or that grown over path, the place where life permanently changed, was simply another part of the road…

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We can't turn back time, but we can remember, move on

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We can't turn back time, but we can remember, move on

What you want is to turn back the clock, to make it Tuesday morning again, early, and make the accident not have happened, to change the confluence of things - the rain, the timing, a car being where is was? A few seconds sooner, a few seconds later and what is would not be. What you want is to give three dead children and one broken one back to their parents, whole…

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On life's rocky road, another pebble

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On life's rocky road, another pebble

The backpacks look alike. This is my sole defense. But I don't mention this as we drive silently along. The Berlin Wall was just a picket fence compared to the wall between us. When in trouble, remain mum, that's the rule. I learned this from the leader of the free world, President Clinton, who is an expert on at least one virtue. But silence is difficult for me. What I'd like to do is talk - argue, plead, say to the man who promised to love me for better or worse (and this is definitely worse) that I made a simple, run-of-the-mill, everyday, garden-variety mistake.

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We walk through life not seeing

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We walk through life not seeing

The child was 3, maybe 4, and walking hand in hand with his mother down Charles Street on a beautiful August day. Boston Common was to his left, the Public Garden to his right, The Four Seasons Hotel ahead and the State House behind. The sky was blue, the sun bright and every tree in the city was in bloom. The people were in bloom, too, little kids, big kids, tourists and natives, colorful in their shorts and baseball hats, suits and sundresses. The streets teemed with cars and trucks, bikes and bikers, busses and trolleys and in the distance, there were even more buildings and people and things. It was a page right out of "Where's Waldo."

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The Lies our Children are Absorbing

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You look at her and see a child still, because that's what she is, a slim, pretty girl in a T-shirt and jeans, 12 and in no hurry to be 13. “I don't want to grow up,” she tells me as she's beating me at Spit, a card game I have yet to win. “I like being a kid.”

“You'll like being an adult, too, I promise. It comes with some tremendous perks. You get to pick out all the food at the grocery…

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A mom leaves behind her best

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When I asked the priest to pray for Beth's mother and he said, "What's her name?" I answered, "Mrs. O'Connor."

Her first name, Mary, didn't come to me until hours later because, it's "my mother" that Beth always calls her.

"My mother's on the other line. Can I call you back?"

"My mother and father are here. My mother's staying a few days. "

"The twins are with my mother."

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Revisiting Summer with a Child

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She had a chart in her room and was marking off days. I had a chart in my head and was doing the same. Then Sunday finally arrived. Xena didn't pack much for her summer at my house. She didn't need much - just shorts, jeans, a few T-shirts, a book, writing paper, some craft things. She set up camp in my daughter's old room. Then she was beside me talking about her friends Elspie and Amaran and schoo…

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A dad writes what is unsaid

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A dad writes what is unsaid

He writes things that he would never say in person. Not that they're intimate things. They're not. They're brief statements that come right to the point.

But his written words are different from his spoken ones. He writes from a place he seems to go to only in print, a room he has kept under lock and key for so long that it's only with pen in hand or with a keyboard in front of him that he can enter.

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Motherly Love Never Departs

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Their images come to me by day and by night. I'll look in the mirror and see not me in the deep plum dress that I will wear at my daughter's wedding, but my own mother in the teal blue dress that she wore at mine. Sometimes I see the three of them: my mother, my aunt and my mother-in-law. My own holy trinity. They were the three women who loved me and mothered me and were there for me, one or the other, or all of them together, for too short a while a very long time ago…

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Dog Turns Noontime Ritual into a Walk on the Wild Side

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It's noon and it's raining and the dog wants to go for a walk, but I do not.

I tell her I'm not going. "No walk today, girl. It's too awful outside."

But she will have none of this. She's pacing and prancing and moaning and groaning and all but pointing to the ticking clock in the front hall. It has just chimed, one, two, all the way to 12 and Molly, who doesn't know what "Get off the couch this instant" means and who can't even process the one-syllable word down, knows exactly what time it is.

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Sometimes the song must end

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Sometimes the song must end

My mother used to sing. Every morning I'd come downstairs and there she'd be standing at the kitchen sink, singing some tune, even if it were winter and dark and the coffee hadn't yet perked. She'd hum as she put on her makeup and sing softly as she dressed, and in the car she would always turn up the radio and sing along with Peggy Lee. She cleaned the house to music, the record player at full volume, as she belted out tunes from "Gypsy" or "Annie Get Your Gun."

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