Back when I was child, I watched a Christmas show I have never forgotten. It aired on Dec. 21, 1951 (Thank you, Google), which means I was two months shy of 4 when I sat between my mother and father and learned that all over the world for a few hours every Christmas Eve, animals are given the gift of speech.
Read MoreI am escaping the present. I didn’t mean to leave the here and now. But, really, the here and now is not such a fun place to be. So why stay?
I was on Facebook sipping my morning coffee, scrolling through reposted news stories, reading the comments of people I don’t know (Why do I do this?), getting more and more annoyed, a too typical morning, when up popped a post with a slightly blurred photo of the Randolph Movie Theater, the one that was on North Main Street in the 1950s. And just like that, the present was gone and I was at that old theater, the box office right in front of me, my best friend Rosemary beside me…
Read MoreThe clear, glass jar sat on her kitchen island for days last January before I said anything. At first there was just a single piece of folded yellow paper inside. But then, come February, there were more pieces of yellow. That's when I got curious.
"What is this?" I asked my daughter, Lauren.
Read MoreI wanted to be like my grandmother. So I wrote out stories for my grandchildren, short, rhyming "Good Night" stories. Later, I decided to publish them. I would write some letters. I would make some phone calls. I would not give up. I would get this done. This is what I told myself. I wrote one letter. And got some great advice about structure and how to tell a better story. Then I went on line for the next step and learned that it can take up to five years to have a children's book published. Five years? I didn’t want to wait five years. Now it is six years later…
Read MoreIt used to be easy. More than easy. It was like breathing. It happened without thought. I'd be driving - past my old school, Tower Hill, where my best friend, Rosemary, and I used to play; past the halfway point, where Rosemary and I used to meet; past St. Bernadette's Church, where my husband and I were married. And I'd see these places exactly as they had been, 10, 20, 30 years before - Tower Hill School hidden behind a hedge of lilacs so thick you could smell them from the next block; the halfway point all woods and swamp and orange lilies; St. Bernadette's so new it looked placed, not built, on the black macadam…
Read MoreA long time ago, when my daughter was 14, she had a homework assignment: Choose six people, dead or alive, real or fictional, with whom you would want to be stuck on a deserted island.I assumed I'd be one of them. Her brother was, and her godfather, and Mary Poppins and Matafu, a resourceful young boy in a book she was reading, and Doogie Howser, a TV doctor.
Read MoreBLACK HILLS, S.D. - You'd think that we'd know his name. You'd think if a man from Boston, born on Harrison Avenue, orphaned at the age of 1, beaten and abused his whole childhood, grew up and did something great something no one else has ever done we'd have at least heard of him. You'd think that conceiving and working for 35 years on the biggest sculpture in the world, bigger than the pyramids in Egypt, would be a shoo-in to fame.
Read MoreHe would say it's a reach because he never believed in these things. And I admit it is a reach. There is no direct connection between Pope John Paul II's announcement Thursday that he has added five more mysteries to the rosary and my friend Father Coen. Except for the connection in my mind….
Read MoreI've been reading Harry Potter slowly, not because it isn't good, but because it is. Because it isn't just one great, compelling, I-can't-put-this-down story, but a series of great stories, each chapter a complete tale. It's nice not to rush through the words. It's fun just to read. Fun? It's a kid's word isn't it? Adults don't have fun. They have weekends off. They take vacations. They go to movies. They walk, run, ski, read biographies. "Was it fun?" That's not what we ask each other. We say, "How was the movie? The snow? The weekend? Did you have a good time?"
Read MoreI can hear it clearly, very clearly, a kind of crinkling, crunching like cellophane or a taffeta dress being eagerly devoured. The sound is coming from the bedroom. I get up and turn on the air conditioner and the radio. I cover up the noise with other noise. I don't want to go into the bedroom. I don’t want to look under the bed or behind the bureau.
Read MoreMy favorite Bible story when I was growing up was the Tower of Babel. The tale intrigued me. Here were all these people working together, co-operating, pooling their talents and energy to build a stairway to Heaven, which I thought, was a brilliant idea.
I still remember what the page looked like in the book we used: people of all different shapes and sizes and colors were stirring mortar, gathering bricks and smiling.
Read MoreRosemary calls for directions Sunday afternoon as I'm sitting at the kitchen table clipping a story about "smart cars."
Smart cars - as opposed to dumb cars - are automobiles which have built-in computerized road maps on their dashboards. Little sensors in the car's wheels actually measure distance traveled and a built-in magnetic compass instructs the driver of a car, in an R2D2 voice, how to get from point A to point B.
Read MoreElaine Maganello, who lived behind the house in which I grew up, and who was a whole year older than I and, therefore, infinitely more mature, told me her Betsy-Wetsy doll, which she took for a walk every day, was real.
And I, of course, believed her.
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