He loves her and she loves him, and it is magic to see. Since she was a baby peeking out of her carriage, Lucy has smiled at Al. And Al, in his eighties, has smiled right back, their eyes locking, their hearts touching. You could say it's been love since first sight…
Read MoreI was such a goofy kid that I actually believed that when you grew up, life turned into a musical. I was raised on musicals - Judy Garland, Doris Day, and Gene Kelly singing and dancing on the small TV in our living room, ``The King and I,'' ``Annie Get Your Gun,'' ``South Pacific'' - blaring from a record player when the TV wasn't on.
Music filled our little house. My mother sang. I sang. My father tried to sing.
I thought everyone sang.
Read MoreChicago in 1830 was a military post and fur station where wolves prowled the streets at night and only 12 families lived. Just 30 years later, it had grown to a city of 100,000 and hosted the Republican National Convention.
I learned this the other day while listening to a book on tape, ``Team of Rivals'' by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which is really all about Abraham Lincoln, but became for me just one more affirmation that change is not endemic to now. Cities grow. Businesses fail. The sand we build our lives on is always shifting. That's life. Nothing stays the same and the world in which we grow up, the world we know, is never the world in which we grow old.
Read MoreWe were on vacation at Rock Harbor waiting for the sun to set - my grown children and their young children, all of us way out on a jetty, the sky pink, the night clear, the bugs, for the moment, somewhere else.
A steel band was playing, calypso music; not Old Cape Cod, but it was nice, festive.
The little kids didn't stay still for long, though.
Read MoreI took more than 200 pictures last Saturday morning. A few are OK. You take pictures of little kids in baseball uniforms and you're sure to get some decent shots. But not one of them comes close to capturing all that was really happening at Devoll Field in Canton last week.
It was opening day for Little League. T-ball division, the smallest players in town. The field swarmed with them, 5- and 6-year-olds in uniforms, sponsored by some of the town's businesses.
Read MoreThis is what "internationally renowned" Sherman J. Silber, M.D., writes in his "completely revised and updated" book "How to Get Pregnant," published by Little Brown and Co. last August: "The biggest fear of most pregnant women is that their child will be abnormal, and the most common abnormality they worry about is Down syndrome. ... These children are severely retarded mentally, and they usually die before their thirtieth birthday." He also writes: "We can prevent couples from having to face the horror of giving birth to children with otherwise devastating genetic defects such as Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, mental retardation, etc., that terrify every woman who ever gets pregnant."
Read MoreA few months ago, my daughter Julie was worried about her daughter, Charlotte, who, though almost 2, 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…
Read MoreChildren make the world go away. It's that simple.
The barrage of bad news on radio and TV, in newspapers and books, the endless deceit and fraud and abuses and lies, public and private, all the wars and broken hearts and broken bodies and broken dreams.
World without mend, amen.
Children displace these things. Not forever, but for a while.
Read MoreMy friend Rosemary is moving, packing up and downsizing. It's the American way. You scrimp and save to buy a house, spend a lifetime scraping and scrubbing, replacing and renovating, decorating and landscaping - and then you sell it. I wanted to say goodbye to Rosemary's big old house, stand in the foyer one last time, and breathe in the smells of old wood and new books and whatever was brewing in the kitchen. So I called and asked, "Can I come over?" But Rose said, "No. Richard and I are still packing."
Read MoreI don't know when the birds became important. Knowing their names and their sounds. And the garden. Working it. Growing it.
Once upon a spring, it was all about the boys, chasing them away through most of grade school, first, second, third, fourth, and fifth grade, then suddenly, one day, reversing the game and running after them. Lilacs enclosed my old schoolyard, huge hedges of them that were taller than the tallest sixth-grader. And every May they perfumed the air in our stuffy, overcrowded classroom…
Read MoreThis is what I tell myself as I watch a man not watch his child: Cut him some slack. Don't be judgmental. Maybe this is the one time of the week when he gets to sit and relax and read a newspaper.
Maybe the child in the pool playing by himself isn't even his. Maybe this middle-aged man is merely a friend of the boy's mother, keeping her company, doing her a favor, simply hanging out and not responsible for the boy in any way.
Read MoreAdam is learning to tell time in a place where time does not exist. The irony is lost on him. He is 3, a number as meaningless as 2 o'clock or 6 o'clock, day or night, last year or next year.
These things make no difference here.
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 MoreThey ate my Jack and the Beanstalk tree. From stem to leafy stem they felled it, devoured it, and made it disappear. Rabbits, I fumed. Bandits and thieves. And other names I cannot repeat. It wasn't, for the record, a real Jack and the Beanstalk tree. It didn't grow from magic beans overnight and disappear above the clouds into a land of giants. It wasn't even a tree, just a leggy, flowering plant. But it was taller than I am by at least a foot, and to the 3- and 4-year-olds who called it their Jack and the Beanstalk tree, it seemed to reach the sky…
Read MoreWe wore dresses - my grandmother, my mother, and I. My grandmother's was frilly and swirled when she walked. My mother's was light brown, a color she seldom wore but wore well. And mine was turquoise with puff sleeves, a cinched waist, and a white mock-apron top, which I thought was very Heidi-like.
I was into Heidi back then.
Read MoreI am my father's daughter. I have his hands, old hands, worker's hands, calloused and sun damaged. And I have his ways. His ways I accept. The hands stun me. I look at them and they are his, only smaller; the fingers short, the knuckles creased, the veins like tree roots too close to the surface. How and when did this happen? My father's hands fixed things. They were exact, like tweezers, plucking tubes from the back of our TV, testing them, until the one that was making the picture arc was found…
Read MoreOld memories, like flotsam and jetsam, bob to the surface at odd times. I am sitting in church with my granddaughter, Lucy, loving the feel of her arms around my neck. She is all mine in church, no distractions, no one to whisk her away. And I am thinking about Father Coen, and how he used to say that it didn't matter if children understood the Mass. Their presence was enough. That taking kids to church was like taking them to baseball games. Eventually they would come to know and love both.
Read MoreWe remember it differently. Anne says that we went to Story Land on a summer day not more than five years ago. And that we walked around, just the two of us, enjoying the scene. Going there was my idea because I wanted to revisit a place I had come with my parents and my grandmother when I was a child. I don't dispute being with my parents and my grandmother. I wore an aqua-and-white dress, which I hated. I posed with the Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe. I smiled for the camera. This was nearly 50 years ago.
Read MoreIs this what happens as you age? Does everything new always bring back the memory of something old? Is the past both a minefield and an archeological dig only to those who have lived 40 or 60 or 80 years? Or does this happen to 20-year-olds, too? A puppy makes you think of your old dog young. A birthday brings back other birthdays. A perfect October day makes you think of other October days.
Read MoreWith the puppy, it was simply a matter of carrying her outside, plunking her on the grass, and letting her do her thing. She was 6 weeks old when we got her and was house-trained in a few weeks. No "how-to" books. No "Ten steps to housebreaking your pooch." And absolutely no guilt that she was too young to introduce to the backyard, or that our approach might cause her irreparable psychological harm.
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