I am trying not to compare. Not stuffing. Not apple pie. Not last year with this year. Not table settings. Not houses. Not family rooms or family dynamics. Not anything. Comparison, I've come to believe, is the eighth deadly sin.
Read MoreThe e-mail's subject was "Nice thoughts for the start of Lent," so I opened it and read it, and because I thought it was worth rereading, I printed it and hung it on my bulletin board. It's a "give up" list, but it's not full of the usual give-ups: cookies, cake, ice cream, candy, wine. This list is about behavior, about giving up complaining, pessimism, worry, negativism, and gloom. Having given up all things delicious, including Dunkin' Donuts sugar-coated jelly sticks and Brigham's chocolate chip ice cream, many times before, I figured that "to give up gloom and enjoy the beauty that is all around" would be a piece of cake, so to speak.
Read MoreWhat I know now, what I've learned but what I have to remind myself every day, is that none of it matters. The snow. Sitting in traffic. Missing a flight. Forgetting to TiVo "Lost." A bad cup of $2 coffee. A woman sitting in her car, WHAT IS SHE DOING JUST SITTING??? while you are waiting with your blinker clicking for her to pull out of a space so you can pull in because the parking lot is that crowded and it's not even a Saturday.
Read MoreThe thank-you notes arrived less than a week after I brought over two small presents to the twins who live next door. They are 8 and in second grade. The notes, one from Albert and one from Melody. were written in little-kid print and addressed the same way, carefully, in neat straight letters. I read them and thought that with all their mother has to do - she works full time and takes care of a house, a husband, two kids, and a recently widowed father - she did this. She bought the kid-friendly stationery, sat down with her children, directed them ("Do we have to do this now, Mom?" at least one of them must have said), then made sure the letters got stamped and posted.
Read MoreI would have more in common with her now. I would sit at her kitchen table and drink my tea and eat the Pepperidge Farm oatmeal raisin cookies she always bought for me and not have one eye on the clock and one foot out the door. I would listen to her stories and take her advice and not be so quick to say, ``But things are different.'' ``But I'm not you.'' ``But you don't understand.''
She understood…
Read MoreBefore Ronald Reagan died we were talking about wakes and funerals. Before we heard the news on the radio, before the tributes and the retrospectives and the state funeral. Before his biggest event ever, my youngest daughter and I were sitting at the kitchen table discussing how sad it is that the ultimate celebration of a human life doesn't come until after a person is dead.
The dead can't smell the flowers people send. The dead can't enjoy the feel of a new suit. The dead can't smile at family stories or laugh at old jokes or look at someone he's known his whole life and put his hand on his shoulder and say, ``I never knew you felt that way.''
Read MoreThe piano sat in the living room for 33 years. A baby grand, it took up a lot of space. It was old, it didn't hold a tune, it needed to be refinished, but I loved it - not just for the notes that filled the house whenever it was played, but for its history. It was my in-laws' piano before it was mine. My sister-in-law played and my father-in-law sang and strummed a ukulele, and friends would come by to visit or to have dinner and inevitably end up around the piano. For years, it made music for parties that seemed to run one right into the next.
Read MoreI am prepared for moments of divine intimation, while on vacation, while driving through the Rockies or sitting on a rock in Maine or walking along some tropical beach. Epiphanies, those heady moments of sudden knowing and peace, occur in the midst of beauty and solitude, not on crowded Route 138 in Stoughton. But it happened there this week, on a road without charm and not a whole lot of trees, everything green and innately beautiful knocked down or paved over.
Read MoreThe child was 3, maybe 4, and walking hand in hand with his mother down Charles Street on a beautiful August day. Boston Common was to his left, the Public Garden to his right, The Four Seasons Hotel ahead and the State House behind. The sky was blue, the sun bright and every tree in the city was in bloom. The people were in bloom, too, little kids, big kids, tourists and natives, colorful in their shorts and baseball hats, suits and sundresses. The streets teemed with cars and trucks, bikes and bikers, busses and trolleys and in the distance, there were even more buildings and people and things. It was a page right out of "Where's Waldo."
Read MoreEvery afternoon she races in from school, raids the refrigerator, then heads for the piano.
"So how was your day?" I shout over Jimmy crack corn and I don't care.
"Fine," she answers, distracted, immediately lost in the notes of a song she has been drumming on her desk and rehearsing in her head throughout the day.
Read MoreA pretty little blonde walks down the street, a young teen, ponytail bopping, legs pumping, arms keeping rhythm, a happy, purposeful walk. And I who have looked up from my desk and out the window have "Hey, Em!" in my throat and it's on my lips when I remember: Emily's away at school. She's in college. She isn't 14 anymore. It's like stepping out of movie theater at noon - going from black to bright, from story to reality…
Read MoreIt's 10 days after the operation and everything is getting back to normal. The hole that opened in the earth has closed, and falling into it is almost - though not quite - a memory. All's well that ends well is what we say, what we repeat, what we believe. My husband is home. He is healing. Life, as we've known it, returns a little more each day to the way it was, to the way we want it to be. That's the goal, getting back to normal, putting the operation behind…
Read MoreIn the morning, the gully between the trees into which the car had plunged, seems smaller than it did at midnight. I drive past and am amazed that an automobile fit in that spot, never mind landed there. A few inches either way, and the driver would have been hurt, might have been killed. The car windshield was smashed, the front end shattered; but the driver emerged unscathed. She'd been wearing a seat belt, and an angel no doubt was sitting beside her.
Read MoreHe was my mother's uncle, not mine. I hardly knew him. But I knew about him. He was part of the family lore. "Stop slouching. You'll look like Uncle Pete." "What are you doing staring at the ground when you walk. You don't want to be like Uncle Pete."
Read MoreIt was one those moments. The kind you want to store under glass, the kind you wish could go on and on.
Such an ordinary moment, just a group of friends sitting around at the end of a day talking. Nothing special, nothing that would make a stranger walking past even pause.
And yet you do…
Read MoreShe was just a baby, maybe a year old, sitting in the back seat of a car traveling along Route 128 a week ago. I never saw her before and I'll probably never see her again. I know nothing about her - not her name or where she lives, or where she was going, or whom she was with, though I assume the woman driving was her mother.
I only glanced at her as I was speeding past. But the glimpse made me smile and pause and reflect. It makes me smile still, days later, because she was so full of naked wonder that it was like walking along a street in the cold past a store whose door opens briefly and blankets you with warmth.
Read MoreI used to play this game all the time. I used to excel at it: I can't do this because I don’t have that. For example I used to tell myself, I can’t write because I don't have a typewriter. That was my reasoning when I was 14.
Read MoreI was driving to Beverly a few weeks ago and listening to a tape I'd borrowed from the library, a book tape. The tape "Joshua" was a religious parable, which I hadn't realized when I'd checked it out. It was preachy and overly dramatic and tacky.
But I was on a long drive in a car with a broken antenna, and it was this tape or nothing, so I listened.
Read MoreThey talk about these things in whispers if they talk about them at all. The act of describing diminishes, trivializes, what they hold dear. "It sounds strange, I know, but it happened. When I was at my lowest, she came to me. I wasn't thinking of her. I wasn't thinking of anything except that I couldn't take it anymore." And then someone who this woman had loved, who had cared for her as a child, and who'd died a decade before, came and sat beside her. "I didn't see her. Not with my eyes. I felt her with my heart. She was in the room with me."
Read MoreIt's my daughter Lauren's analogy, not mine. "I don't know what to write for New Year's," I told her. "Write about being the last bird," she said. I knew instantly what she meant. The last bird. The one struggling to keep up with all the rest, who fly so effortlessly in formation, and zig-zag from left to right as smoothly as a singer climbs and descends a scale.
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