CELEBRATING TODAY'S DO-IT-ALL DAD

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CELEBRATING TODAY'S DO-IT-ALL DAD

We watch them and are amazed. They are like the Internet and Velcro and DVD players and cellphones, everyday staples that weren't even imagined when we were young. My husband and I gawk. "Unbelievable," he says. "Fascinating," I add. Different, we say, and agree that this time different is, indeed, better. It's a few days before Father's Day, and we are watching our sons-in-law father. We are watching them make lunch, change diapers, read stories, give baths, sing lullabies, tuck their children into bed, clean up, load the dishwasher, and unload the dryer.

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WHERE IS THE LOVE IN THE AIRWAVES?

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WHERE IS THE LOVE IN THE AIRWAVES?

I wonder if the old songs were true. If "It Had to Be You" and "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home to" came straight from the heart. Or were they just sentimentally tweaked to sell? Was love 60 and 70 years ago as tender and innocent as the music made it seem? Or were all the songs “I'm wild again, beguiled again, a simpering, whimpering child again” a lie, truth sacrificed for meter and rhyme?

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WORDS ESCAPE HER BUT LAUGH IS STILL THERE

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WORDS ESCAPE HER BUT LAUGH IS STILL THERE

She has lost her words. Last year, I could feed them to her. Fill in the blanks. "How is . . . the bald one?" she said when I came to visit. She exaggerated bald, drawled the word, made a joke, covered up. I covered up, too. "How is Bruce? He's great. Definitely bald, but great."

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`Baby Talk' contest takes down a barrier

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No hurt was intended. In fact, the young woman from the modeling agency was apologetic. In New York, it's different, she said. In New York, babies with special needs model for lots of companies. Boston just isn't there yet.

I didn't expect that Lucy would be chosen. I just didn't expect that she wouldn't be given a chance solely because she has Down syndrome.

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We're right to close the book on reading

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We're right to close the book on reading

Americans are reading less. Never mind Oprah and her book club. Never mind that you can never get a parking space at Barnes & Noble in Braintree, and that there's always a line at the checkout. According to a new survey, ``Reading is in decline among all groups, in every region, at every educational level and within every ethnic group.''

The worst statistic? Only slightly more than half of us read even one book in all of 2002.

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Love, not laundry, makes marriage work

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Love, not laundry, makes marriage work

``You're not doing the job you did when I first married you,'' my husband chides, turning to me with a grin and dangling from his hand a thick tangle of unmatched socks, which he has pulled out of his drawer. They are different textures, different patterns and different lengths. But they are all black. Why are all of his socks black?

On the floor, next to him, in a laundry basket, under a stack of towels, are his golf shirts, five of them, not ironed. Around him, there is more disarray.

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Meet the modern dad: A guy who really knows his kids

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Meet the modern dad: A guy who really knows his kids

She never laid out a suit for him. He didn't wear suits. He wore a navy blue police uniform - wool pants, wool jacket, long sleeves even in the summer. And my father pressed his uniform himself.

He ironed in the dining room, probably because we hardly ever used that room. I would sit on a chair, my back to the window, and watch as he placed a wet handkerchief up and down each pant leg and meticulously steamed in a crease.

``You don't ever put an iron directly on wool or you'll end up with shiny pants,'' he told me.

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The memories stay put, even if we don't

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The memories stay put, even if we don't

It occurred to me as I was sitting in the Great Hall in Codman Square, Dorchester Thursday morning, a guest at a breakfast celebrating this treasure's 100th anniversary, that a building really is more than brick and wood and everything it takes to hold it together. And it's not just sentiment that draws us back to a place.

Sure, we come back to places to say, ``This is the house where I grew up.'' Or ``This is my old school.'' Or ``This was my library.'' But usually we come back because there's something of ourselves, and others, that was left behind.

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Snake oil can't rejuvenate a soul

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It was tucked into the news Wednesday. Something about a treatment called "Gentle Waves" that can make old skin look young. You sit in front of a flashing light for 40 seconds and you can reverse the aging process. Except that it takes at least eight treatments at $ 100 each to begin to see a difference and the difference is, even then, subtle…

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Foundations remain constant

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The house I grew up in has changed hands again. I saw the new owner standing in the yard as a friend and I drove past. I do this sometimes, drive by to look and to remember. My father paid $ 10,000 for this house in 1954. The new owner paid $ 280,000. But the house isn't just more expensive. It's changed in many ways. It's bigger. One of the owners built on and up. And because of this, the yard is smaller. The trellis is gone, along with the rose bushes my mother planted and coaxed to grow. And the sprawling, silvery spidery things that lined the front walk have disappeared, as have the shrubs that separated our yard from the neighbor's, my mother's rock garden and the green awnings she scrimped and saved for.

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Parent's age is measured not in years, but in memories

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Parent's age is measured not in years, but in memories

My father was sick last week. The heat ambushed him. He has never been able to tolerate heat. He blames the malaria he had in the war for this. Before Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower marched him through Africa, he was fine, he says. After the war, he wasn't. The heat, since, has always slowed him down.

But it has never stopped him before.

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Dear Abby misses a beat with answer to 'Trying'

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Dear Abby misses a beat with answer to 'Trying'

I think you've been kidnapped. I think someone from the school of It's All About Me has commandeered your computer. It must be. I've been reading you since I could read, which makes me certain that you could never have written the response to "Trying to Do the Right Thing" in last Friday's paper. Can we talk about this? What's happening in Los Angeles? Are you at the controls or have you been replaced? Or is it that you've been in L.A. so long that the Me, Myself and I culture has finally worn off on you, too?

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For those of a certain age, good manners make the man

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For those of a certain age, good manners make the man

He didn't know me from Adam. We'd just met, talked a little, exchanged the usual pleasantries. He used to write sports for the Herald, he said. He was originally from Somerville. He was married for 43 years. He was man of a certain age. We left the university together because we were both going home instead of staying for a dinner. He was taking the T back to Melrose. I was hailing a cab back to the paper…

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Today's sound of music

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Today's sound of music

They are called "audio systems" now, micro component systems or mini component systems or full-size systems with separate components. Micro is small. Mini is bigger. Full size is the biggest. Boom boxes, portable things that people take to the beach, are neither micro nor mini, (though they're smaller than both) and are sold in a separate department, next to water-resistant sports Walkmen and clock radios. All I wanted was a small stereo for a friend who's in a hospital. Something with an off-on button, a tape deck and a three-disc CD player. Something that a nurse or a nurse's aide wouldn't have to call maintenance to use. On. Off. AM. FM. Simple? Hardly.

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No time to stop to let a funeral drive on by

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No time to stop to let a funeral drive on by

I cut her some slack, the not-so-young woman who gave me the finger and mouthed the companion epithet. I thought, OK, maybe she's from another country and doesn't know the rule about funeral processions having the right of way. Maybe this cortege of cars with headlights on in the middle of a sunny day, funeral flags on each roof, was a new experience for her.

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