Leaving part of my heart so far away

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Leaving part of my heart so far away

I’m in Florida visiting my uncle LeRoy. He’s sleeping as I write this, although it’s nearly 10 a.m. and he is always up and about by 7. But it’s dark as night in his house. And quiet. The air conditioner makes some noise but not much. He has it set to 80 degrees.

There’s no reason for my uncle to be up early. That’s what I think. It’s a Sunday morning so there’s nowhere he has to be. And then I think there’s nowhere he has to be every morning.

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Charlotte’s Sweet 16 happened as suddenly as spring

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Charlotte’s Sweet 16 happened as suddenly as spring

Hard 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?

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When should you call a doctor? Who stole my waist? And other questions we older folks want answered

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When should you call a doctor? Who stole my waist? And other questions we older folks want answered

I had an epiphany last week. I looked in the bathroom mirror and realized that I couldn’t see my face clearly until I put on my reading glasses. Which led me to wonder: How do you put on makeup while wearing glasses? Lots of people must do this because lots of people wear glasses. But how? And is it normal to wake up one day and suddenly not be able to see your face in the mirror? What else am I not seeing? And what else, dear God, is next?

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Keep doing whatever prompts you to say, ‘I love the journey’

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Keep doing whatever prompts you to say, ‘I love the journey’

“One step in front of the other until the road runs out!” That’s what a friend texted a few weeks ago.

I had texted her. (Why do we not talk to our friends anymore? What has happened to long, meandering conversations?)

I had done what we all do now, picked up my phone after watching her woo a crowd, after a night of smiles and applause, typing to this friend who is a singer, “Bravo!” and “Great job!” the things you say when someone blows you away.

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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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She dances for the two of them, with grace and love

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She dances for the two of them, with grace and love

It makes me happy to think about them, two people I don’t know, a man and a woman with whom I shared a waiting room for a little over an hour a few weeks ago.

There were six of us in the room, five waiting for the same doctor who’s been known to run a little behind, not because he’s on a break somewhere, reading a John Grisham novel, but because he spends extra time with people who need extra time. And don’t we all need extra time these days?

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Cherishing porcelain angels, and the real ones in our lives

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Cherishing porcelain angels, and the real ones in our lives

I didn’t mean to fall in love with him. I came to Florida to rescue him. That was the first time. It was March and his wife had just died. And there were COVID-19 restrictions: No wake. No funeral Mass. No funeral. No friends stopping by.

Leroy, my uncle, was alone in a home he had always shared. And then his knee gave out and he fell. An ambulance raced him to a hospital. After a few days, he was given a cortisone shot. After a few more days, he was transferred to a facility for rehabilitation.

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A daily phone call, and the love that endures

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A daily phone call, and the love that endures

He never complains. I call him between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. every night and he is always upbeat.

“Hi Beverly,” he says and I hear a smile in his voice.

“Hi LeRoy,” I answer, and because he’s smiling, I smile, too.

LeRoy is my father’s youngest brother, the last of the Curtin clan, my grandmother’s baby, my only living uncle. He was born 94 years ago this Sunday, on Oct. 17, in Cambridge when Cambridge had more factories than universities.

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I’ve watched him grow up, but it caught me by surprise

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I’ve watched him grow up, but it caught me by surprise

My daughter Julie has an app on her phone that makes it simple to create a digital collage. So I am used to getting photos from her, which juxtapose images of last summer with images of this summer or that show her children at multiple ages on multiple first days of school. She recreates poses, too, driving to a spot where a picture was shot and taking a photo of the same people in the same pose, from the same angle a year or two later.

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At a beautiful prom night, I began to believe in the future again

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At a beautiful prom night, I began to believe in the future again

On June 1, my daughter Julie asked if i would take pre-prom pictures of some Canton High seniors and I said yes, although I hadn’t picked up my camera in more than a year. I charged the battery, cleaned the lenses, formatted my SD card, packed my bag, and set off to the house where the seniors were gathered.

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Searching for the heart of the matter

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Searching for the heart of the matter

I am so busy taking care of things, that sometimes I forget to look at him. Doctor’s appointments. Medications. Physical therapists, occupational therapists. Who is scheduled this week? What day? What time? Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? I see him, of course. I see his thin, white hair, his faded blue eyes, his false teeth that sometimes slip when he’s talking, the way his mother’s did, his hearing aid that shrieks its presence but is as useless as a bandaid behind his deaf ear. An old man in an old chair, struggling to see, to hear, to keep up, to get up, and to not give up.

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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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When my Aunt Lorraine was young, beautiful, and all mine

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When my Aunt Lorraine was young, beautiful, and all mine

My cousin Darlene sent the photo in a text message. Our cousin Jan had e-mailed it to her. I had never seen it before. It’s a black and white shot of two girls on a beach, young women you’d call them today, but girl is who each was back then, in the early 1950s. Beautiful girls, both of them. One salt, one pepper, the blonde in a black bathing suit, the raven-haired one in white…

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A blown kiss kindles memories of the young mother I once was

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A blown kiss kindles memories of the young mother I once was

He’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…

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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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He Was My Hero. He Was My Father.

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He Was My Hero. He Was My Father.

It made him sad, leaving before the ending. Not just the ending of “Lost,” a television drama he was hooked on. It made him sad to leave us, too, his family.But he knew there was more. “I think they are all in Purgatory,” he said a few weeks after “Lost” premiered. The popular weekly series, which aired on Wednesday nights…

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Dancing to Remember the Music of the Past

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Dancing to Remember the Music of the Past

Mrs. X is lovely, a fellow passenger tells my husband and me. But she doesn’t speak much. When asked a question, her husband always answers. Even if it’s a simple question. We are seated with them one night at dinner and I meet her eyes. “Are you enjoying yourself?” I ask. And she smiles and nods and then turns to him to answer. Where are you from? And he says England. Is this your first cruise? And he tells us, no. It is one of many…

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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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