Examining old fantasy shows hidden riches of modern life

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I used to have this fantasy, when my children were small, that one day I would walk into the kitchen and it would be clean. Scrubbed clean, the way my mother used to do her kitchen. Not just a quick wipe here and a spray of Windex there, but waxed and "Jubileed" to high gloss, the counters free of stuff, the curtain washed and starched. Starch. Now that's a word from another era. It was blue and you added it to the wash during the final rinse and…

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Last summer of the century is one for the record books

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Last summer of the century is one for the record books

I didn't hear the song a single time this summer, but it played in my head anyway, buzzing around like a pesky bee: "Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer." Nat King Cole's smooth-as-honey voice trailing me all the way through June, July and August. Most years summer never lives up to this song. This year the song didn't have a prayer of living up to summer.

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Still giving life to his father

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Still giving life to his father

Robert sits on a chair next to his father's bed. He holds his father's hand and talks to him just to talk. He tells him about the day's news, about a weekend they spent in Maine, about all the people who have come to the hospital to visit. When an aide arrives to take his father's temperature with a thermometer she has to put in his ear, Robert explains the procedures. His father motions and Robert understands. "You want some water?" he asks. The older man nods and Robert adjusts the bed and holds his father and puts a cup to his lips and says, "It's coming," as he tilts the cup so that just a tiny bit of liquid drips into his father's mouth. More than a little will make him choke and cough and struggle for breath. And he is struggling hard enough as it is.

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The Dog Days of Summer Are the Tops

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The Dog Days of Summer Are the Tops

This column was written a long time ago, when my dog, Molly, was alive and my cousin, Xena, was a child, not a mother of two. Before I had grandchildren. Before Katherine moved away. But the first week of August is now as it was then. The Top of the Ferris Wheel.  And I still celebrate it every year on August1st.  Here’s why:

The dog days of summer are the tops, the best life gets. So on August 1, every year I stop what…

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Doggie Shrink Puts Molly on the couch

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t's official. She suffers from separation anxiety, which is why she eats socks and scarves and those cloth-covered scrunchies you put in your hair. She loves us and can't stand to be separated from us and by devouring what is ours she is, in a very real way, keeping us with her always. Welcome to Doggy Psychology 101. Or man's relentless effort to find a rational explanation for irrational behavior…

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Radio host plants addictive seed in unsuspecting home

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Radio host plants addictive seed in unsuspecting home

At first it was background noise, nothing more, I swear. I wasn't really listening to the man on the radio talking about root balls, and even if I were, I was only half listening. I was curious, that's all. Not addicted. Not yet. But now I am. Come 7 a.m. on Saturday mornings I'm up and tuned in to 99.1 FM, sitting at the kitchen table listening to Paul Parent tell me things like "clematis requires sweet soil" and the way to make soil sweet is to sprinkle a little lime into it, but not bone meal because that attracts animals…

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Tragic, trivial share space, help us cope

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Tragic, trivial share space, help us cope

The tragic shares space with the trivial. It's how we cope. It's how we absorb what is: bitter coffee diluted with cream. "Crisis in Kosovo" the computer reports, right next to "Roof leaking? Bank One - Home equity lines. Apply on-line before the flood." "Kosovo Albanians Forced to Help Lay Mines." "First USA Platinum VISA on AOL only." What to worry about? Life and death or low-interest loans?

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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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