Shame's out; only celebrity matters

/

What has happened to shame?

Isn't anyone ashamed anymore? I know embarrassed is still around (see our president). And humiliated (see Peter Blute). And sorry because people (even Jane Swift, finally) are generally sorry when they get caught doing not quite the right thing. (There is, of course, no really wrong thing these days.) As for shame, it's a word so out of use that it will soon have "archaic" next to it in the dictionary. I can imagine a child a few years from now picking up an old book and reading, "He hung his head with shame" and thinking shame must have been some kind of heavy trinket people used to wear in the old days.

Read More

Frankie's snowman built with love

/
Frankie's snowman built with love

Michelle and Victor Clerico speak in whispers because sound hurts their son's ears and they touch him gently because pain comes with even the lightest touch. Frankie is 5 and handsome with thick red hair and smooth pale skin and a heart as big as he is small. He tells his parents that when he dies he's going to Heaven and that God is going to give him wings. He tells his little sister: "Don't be sad. When I'm in heaven you won't be able to see me but I'll keep an eye on you."

Read More

Codman center can celebrate its work, plans

/
Codman center can celebrate its work, plans

I never lived in Codman Square yet in every sense of the phrase, I grew up there. I was 11 and in the seventh grade, a commuter student at St. Mark's in Dorchester and as lonely as I would ever be. That's when I discovered the square and the library that overlooked it. Every day when the neighborhood kids went home to lunch and the other commuters ate their waxed paper-wrapped sandwiches in the gloomy auditorium, I walked up the hill past Girl's Latin to the Codman Square library.

Read More

Reaching 30

/
Reaching 30

He isn't all that old. And neither am I. That's what I've been telling myself. And I'm right, if I compare myself to Mrs. Lamb, who a few months ago flew from New York City, where she lives, to California to help celebrate  her son's 70th birthday.

"Did you dream when you were a little girl playing dolls that you'd ever have a 70-year-old son never mind be around to help him blow out the candles…

Read More

All aboard for yet another all-too-quick holiday season

/
All aboard for yet another all-too-quick holiday season

As if life weren't fast enough. Here it comes. A giant, speeding runaway locomotive, and what do you know? It's playing "Jingle Bells" and heading right toward us. What's our choice? We can stand our ground and get clobbered by the thing. Or we can take a leap, grab on and become human hood ornaments clinging to umpteen tons of metal and steel barreling along a set of tracks that lead directly to . . . Christmas Day. Some choice. How'd we get here, anyway?

Read More

Saying goodbye to childhood

/

I take the trophies off my daughter's bookshelf, earned in dance and gymnastics and softball, and wrap them in newspaper and put them in a box and write on the box in Magic Marker, "Julie's trophies." Then I do the same with the plaques on her wall and the dolls on her dresser and the stuffed animals on her bed and her schoolbooks and notebooks and photographs and Disney figurines.

I am cleaning out my youngest daughter's room, packing away her things because it is time. She doesn't live here anymore. I am converting her bedroom into a sitting room, taking down her posters and repainting the walls, emptying her bureau and desk drawers of all her childhood things to make room for new things.

Read More

There's No Way to Avoid Being a Molly Coddler

/

Here's what happens when I don't pay attention to my dog, Molly. She crawls under the kitchen table and eats paper. Constant attention is what she needs and constant attention is what she demands and since I am only human, I falter sometimes. And she makes me pay for it. Just now, for example, I was at the table reading the paper and thereby ignoring her. So she…

Read More

Davis-Mullen stakes her turf

/
Davis-Mullen stakes her turf

It's not news that Boston City Councilor Peggy Davis-Mullen is a thorn in the side of Mayor Tom Menino. Their relationship is adversarial. But this isn't a bad thing. In government as in a garden there need to be thorns - prickly someones who don't play a role as in "The Emperor's New Clothes," who aren't always telling the mayor what he wants to hear, who remind him that outside the royal buildings, things are not quite as rich or as rosy as they are inside.

Read More

A family grows yet forever stays the same

/

For years our two families went to the same church. The Thomas pew was down front on the right and ours was in the row behind them. They filled an entire pew because even 30 years ago there were a lot of them. I can picture them as they were: George and Barbara, the parents, old to me then, but not old to me now, sitting in their place at the end of the pew. Caryn, their eldest, was beside them. Then came Cheryl, Susan, George and Pam.

Read More

Examining old fantasy shows hidden riches of modern life

/

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…

Read More

Last summer of the century is one for the record books

/
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.

Read More

Still giving life to his father

/
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.

Read More

The Dog Days of Summer Are the Tops

/
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…

Read More

Doggie Shrink Puts Molly on the couch

/

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…

Read More

Radio host plants addictive seed in unsuspecting home

/
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…

Read More