I wasn’t with Lucy when she got her longed-for curly hair. Her mother took her to the appointment — which lasted for hours — where Lucy’s hair was washed and combed and cut, then set in rollers and squirted with solution. Then there was sitting and waiting and waiting and waiting, then more solution and more waiting, and washing and conditioning and drying.
Read MoreA few months ago my daughter Julie was worried about her daughter, Charlotte, who, though almost two, wasn’t talking.
“Charlotte points and says ‘unk. It’s the only thing she says. She calls everything ‘unk,’” she told her pediatrician. He nodded his head and said not to be concerned but if at her next visit Charlotte still were not talking, then they would begin to look for reasons why.
Read MoreHard to believe. Isn’t that what we say about time? Hard to believe it’s almost May. Where did April go? Hard to believe the boy who just left for college has already finished his freshman year. Hard to believe my daughter and her husband are about to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. Didn’t my husband and I just celebrate ours?
Read MoreIf anyone had told me that one day in the twilight of my life I would be obsessed with girls’ volleyball, I’d have shaken my head and laughed out loud. Obsessed with a sport? Not a chance. I have tolerated sports only for the Town Spa pizza after.
And then last year, everything changed.
Read MoreThe words always come. That’s what I tell myself when I can’t find them. I sit. I think. And I wait. And when the words still won’t come? I ask myself what it is that I am struggling so hard to say?
Maybe this time what I’m struggling to say is simply thank you. Thank you, world. Thank you, Canton High. Thank you, friends and relatives and neighbors and teachers and doctors and dance instructors and used-to-be strangers who have walked this road with us, sometimes many times, leading the way.
Read MoreI can see the Christmas tree from where I sit. It’s in the front hall, and because my office looks out on the hall the tree has been my companion since early December.
It’s artificial, of course.
Right now it is decorated for Easter, festooned with Peeps and chocolate eggs and small, fuzzy bunnies and forsythia plucked from a neighbor’s yard.
Read MoreAmy has called me Mimi since the afternoon we met. She was 5 then and though I wasn’t her Mimi, my grandson Adam, who also was 5, called me Mimi so she did, too. I’m still not Amy’s Mimi. Not officially. But unofficially, in our patchwork quilt of a family, I am. I am Mimi and Amy is my granddaughter because she is the daughter of my daughter’s partner, and until the world comes up with better words for what we mean to each other, we’re stuck using words that don’t quite fit. Which is ironic considering that Amy Hylen is a stickler for words.
Read MoreThe picture is like the moment it captured. There is nothing special about it. No one is dressed up and fancy. No one’s hair is styled. No one is intentionally posed, and there’s no warm light softening the background or making the images pop…
Read MoreHe’s a toddler and he lives next door and because I have been nowhere for months, I watch him more than I would have pre-COVID. I watch him with wonder the way I watched the trees this spring grow from spindly, gray sticks into the lush, green canopies they are now. Pre-COVID, I wouldn’t have been dazzled by the slow, daily growth of both the trees and the boy. I would have noticed spring in all its beauty, of course. And I would have noticed the toddling boy, too, smiled and waved at him before I got into my car. But my head would have been elsewhere. I’d have been thinking about traffic, and where I was going, and did I have my phone? These things would have been my focus, not the little boy next door…
Read MoreCharlotte has been home from school for two months now, shut in with adults and her 16-year-old brother. She turned 13 last month. A big birthday, 13. Her mother sent out an e-mail to family and friends. Let’s have a surprise drive-by parade! It rained on her birthday. But Charlotte didn’t care. She woke to balloons and cake and presents and hugs and smiles and Happy Birthday signs strung everywhere. Outside was raw and ugly but inside was just about perfect…
Read MoreSometimes, when I am trying to cross the street in front of my house, I count the cars that whiz past. Forty-eight is my all-time high. Mostly it’s about 30 before someone lets me cross. I live on what used to be a country road but is now a busy cut-through. By the time I get from my front yard to the sidewalk across the street, I’m generally sour on the human race. That’s one reality. Here is another…
Read MoreI keep looking at them. They arrived in a 12-by-16-inch manila envelope, addressed to my husband. So, technically they are not mine.
“I hope 73 brings you joy and happiness!” Megan, who is 11 and our son’s oldest child, wrote on a card she made for her grandfather. “For your birthday,” she continued, “I made you 73 paper cranes. Each one represents one year of your life.” My husband spreads them out on the couch. They are colorful things…
Read MoreMy granddaughter Lucy was born in June 2003, not so long ago, but it was before Facebook, before World Down Syndrome Day, before companies hired models with Down syndrome, before the TV show “Born This Way,” before Google was a verb making it easy for people to network and learn. Lucy was seven hours old when a doctor, who didn’t identify himself as a doctor, walked into my daughter’s hospital room, unswaddled Lucy and announced…
Read MoreMy grandson, Adam, who is 14, is annihilating me. We are playing "Words with Friends 2." a game similar to Scrabble, only it's faster and more fun because it can be played on a phone, tablet, or a computer, anywhere, any time. Sometimes we play…
Read MoreMy family teases me about how much I love Davis Farmland. I visited for the first time in 2009 and…
Read MoreI wasn't there. Only the parents had tickets. Schools aren't big enough to accommodate all the grandparents and aunts and uncles and friends who would like to be present at an eighth-grade graduation. So we get pictures and…
Read MoreI swear I am not snooping. My granddaughter Charlotte leaves her essays open on my computer, and when I log on there they are, big as life, right in front of me. How can I not read them? Her essays, FYI, are not a private diary. They are part of…
Read MoreThe knobs are long gone, so turning on a television isn't quite as easy as it used to be. Charlotte is on the telephone instructing me. She's trying…
Read MoreThey insulate me from the world. They keep me away from network TV and the barrage of bad news, which is incessant. They make me pay attention to what is happening right in front of me because they are in front of me, children singing a song, reciting a poem, telling me about a book I have to read or a movie I have to watch…
Read More'You plant black-eyed peas, that's what you git," my daughter's friend says in an Oklahoma drawl she exaggerates whenever she wants to make a point. I laughed when I first heard this phrase some 20 years ago, but it's a saying our family quickly adopted.
I found myself thinking these words while listening to my granddaughter Lucy belt out the score from "Gypsy" on our drive home from seeing…
Read More
ABOUT COLUMNS ARCHIVES WHAT’S ON MY MIND GALLERY IT’S NEVER TOO LATE BOOKS CONTACT
Copyright © 2020 Beverly Beckham
Web Design by: SKILLARA | Marketing + Media
