A street sign shows the way

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A street sign shows the way

The intellect arches its eyebrows, denies it, demeans it. The intellect says, What? Are you serious? The dead do not speak. The dead are dead.

But the intellect is wrong.

I am driving to Bridgewater State University, a sprawling Massachusetts school, which was a small college when I went there. I am meeting my bonus grandson, my youngest daughter’s partner’s son, who is a sophomore majoring in criminal justice. The last time I saw Matt in person, at Christmas, he offered to show me around the now sprawling campus. We made plans to meet at two o’clock in the parking lot near his dorm on the last Friday in January. The morning of our meeting, he texted, “Message me when you get here.”

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How Perry Como left a Christmas song in my heart

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How Perry Como left a Christmas song in my heart

It always begins with Perry Como. That’s what I tell my granddaughter, Charlotte. Until I hear a Perry Como Christmas song, I have no holiday spirit. But once “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” or (“There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays” plays on the radio? I’m all jingle bells and holly.

And Charlotte says, “Who’s Perry Como?” And I say “Can you imagine, 60 years from now, someone asking you, “Who is Taylor Swift?”

But of course, she can’t imagine. She is only 16.

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The bustle of city life descends on the suburbs

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The bustle of city life descends on the suburbs

It was a Saturday in the summer of 1962. I remember because it was the year before I would get my driver’s license.

My mother was my chauffeur, driving us home from South Shore Plaza in Braintree where we worked, she as the manager of Wethern’s, a hat shop, and I as a part-time “salesgirl” (that was the word back then) at Cummings, a woman’s clothing store.

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A modern-day take on the day the music died

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A modern-day take on the day the music died

I was at the gym, hard to believe, because since COVID I’ve counted bending over to tie my sneakers a workout. But there I was, turning over a new leaf, headphones on, stretching to the music of the 1930s (I love old music), wondering what makes the wah-wah sound in these recordings. (I took a break and googled and learned that a trumpet or trombone makes the sound).

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What else is drifting away from us besides the moon?

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What else is drifting away from us besides the moon?

“The moon is slowly drifting away from us.”

I am at my desk reading this in “Interesting Facts,” an e-mail that pops up in my news feed every morning. I’m a sucker for interesting facts. I copy and paste the best of them into my notes because as interesting as a fact may be (100 lightning strikes hit the Earth’s surface every second!), I forget it minutes after I’ve sworn I’ll remember it forever.

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The questions I wished I’d asked my father

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The questions I wished I’d asked my father

Sometimes we shared a cake. I have a picture that proves this. It’s of my father and me, blowing out candles on a double-layer birthday cake festooned with confectionery flowers, which my mother made for the two of us when I was 6 and he was 30.

In the picture, I am seated before the cake doing more looking at than blowing out the candles my mother has arranged. Thirty-one for him, seven for me, the extras for good luck. My mother was always courting good luck.

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Two little girls laughing until someone told us to stop

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Two little girls laughing until someone told us to stop

When we were kids, I was jealous because Janet Butler’s birthday came three weeks before mine. It was a big deal back then, growing older, growing closer to what we called “grown up.”

Janet, who was born on Jan. 29, lorded it over me when she was 9 and I was still 8, when she was 10 and I was still 9, when she turned 13 and I was still 12. “Baby,” she’d say, but not in a mean way. She was never mean. She was a tease. She was funny. She’d sing-song the word “baby” and then laugh.

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Like a warm coat, memories hug us like those we have lost

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Like a warm coat, memories hug us like those we have lost

I told her I loved her coat, which was an almost-to-the-floor black and gray wool that seemed to be embracing the woman who was standing before me. That’s the feeling I had, that the coat was hugging her.

We were leaving a Christmas party, my husband and I, saying our goodbyes and there was Harriet, leaving, too. And I said, “Your coat is so pretty,” and she smiled and stroked the soft wool near the collar. “It was my daughter’s,” she said, and there it was, out in the open, something we seldom talk about, something we back away from every day: death.

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Remembering how the animals spoke inspires the Christmas spirit

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Remembering how the animals spoke inspires the Christmas spirit

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.

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How many people could say they lived the life they dreamed?

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How many people could say they lived the life they dreamed?

He was a boy when I knew him, a friend of my son’s, 14 or 15 the first time he knocked on our door. I don’t remember the day or even the season, the days and seasons so much the same back then, teens in different shapes and sizes always at the door, knocking or ringing the bell. I can picture him clearly, though, as if it weren’t 40 years ago that he came calling, as if the boy he used to be had stood in my kitchen just yesterday.

He had a mop of dark, shiny curls. Big brown eyes with a shine of their of own. A shy, sweet grin. And a solidness, a compactness that made him seem sturdy, even older at times. Mike Ippolito. He was funny and shy and polite and indiscriminately kind. For me, he is frozen this way in time.

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Paraselene, peignoir, and the mysterious power of words

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Paraselene, peignoir, and the mysterious power of words

There’s a webpage that lands in my e-mail every day. Maybe I signed up for it. I must have but I don’t remember. It’s called Word Thirst (wordthirst.com) and I love it, not only because it has nothing to do with all the bad things happening in the world, but also because some days it introduces me to words I don’t know, like paraselene, (Definition: a bright moonlike spot on a lunar halo; a mock moon). It also includes a graph, which shows when the word was most popular (in 1811, paraselene was very popular); and if it is popular still (it is not).

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Manners cost nothing, so why are people stingy with respect?

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Manners cost nothing, so why are people stingy with respect?

My glasses were dirty, they’re always dirty, and I was in a parking lot rummaging around in my ridiculously giant pocketbook for the little blue microfiber cloth, which should be where it belongs in the zipper part of my bag, but never is. That’s when my uncle, whom I went to visit last week in Florida and whose car I was driving, handed me a handkerchief.

He pulled it out of his pants’ pocket and smiled.

“You have a handkerchief?” I asked, as surprised as if he had pulled a coin out of his ear.

“I always carry a handkerchief,” he said. “I put a fresh one in my pocket every day.”

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Wouldn’t it be nice? Fifty-four years after we married, it still is.

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Wouldn’t it be nice? Fifty-four years after we married, it still is.

Everything has changed since that day. The house in which I grew up. The neighborhood. People I knew. The music we listened to. The way we listened. TV. Movies. Manners. The way we communicate.

I picture the day. It lives in my mind. January 20, 1968, a Saturday. The wedding was at 3. My mother wore a long, teal green dress with three-quarter-length sleeves. My father wore a black tuxedo with a gray vest. There were six bridesmaids and six groomsmen. Do people say bridesmaids and groomsmen, now? The words feel antiquated, stale on the tongue. The bridesmaids wore red velvet gowns, fur hats, and fur muffs. It was very Doctor Zhivago, which was a style at the time.

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Turning my mother-in-law’s house into home sweet home

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Turning my mother-in-law’s house into home sweet home

I moved into the house I have lived in for nearly half a century kicking and screaming. Not physically, of course. But in my head I was railing. I did not want to move from the small, two-bedroom ranch that was my husband’s and my first home. I loved everything about that house — the kitchen cabinets we painted yellow a few months before our wedding, the living room with its 1970s green, wall-to-wall carpet (which I loved to vacuum), the family room my Uncle Frank fashioned from our one-car garage when I was newly pregnant and making plans to turn our TV room into a nursery…

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If only we could reshuffle the days of our lives

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If only we could reshuffle the days of our lives

Random is what I would choose. If I could choose.

Life no longer sequential. Instead, all of our days would be shuffled like songs on a CD played out of order. No order. No growing up. No growing old. Imagine? Random. You wake up on a Monday and you’re 23 years old and there’s not a wrinkle on your face. Lying next to you is your spouse who is years younger than your adult son, whom you saw just the day before when you woke up and were 70…

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Somewhere Between Pretty in Pink and the Lady in Red

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Somewhere Between Pretty in Pink and the Lady in Red

I have a picture of me, at age 11, in my favorite dress. It was pink, not too pale and not too bright, and it was A-lined and buttoned up the front. I wore a crinoline under it, so the dress swooshed when I walked. In the picture, you can see my white ankle socks, but not my shiny black patent-leather shoes. It was spring. I was in sixth grade at Tower Hill School in Randolph. In seventh grade, I was sent to a Catholic school where I was made to…

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