A birthday not celebrated

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A birthday not celebrated

Today is her birthday. She would have been 10. At school they would have sung to her. At home there would have been presents and cake and a party. But she died in June so there is no celebration. In the house not far from Wollaston Beach where Leanne lived with her mother and grandparents, though there are photos of her smiling on the walls and shelves, there are few real smiles anymore. Her absence fills the place. There are no feet pounding up the stairs. No books flung on a chair. No "Mama! Nana! I'm home!" Two women who loved and raised a child are empty without her. They try to put into words their loss, their love and their pain. But words can't hold these things and so as they speak, tears fall…

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Hand-in-hand, brothers all

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Hand-in-hand, brothers all

A few days before Christmas I saw them walking along the street near the viaduct. It was sunset. The sky was red. The trees were black. There was no sidewalk and no other pedestrians except these two young boys. They were brothers, you could tell. They had the same straight, sandy hair. They wore the same knit stocking caps and the same loose-fitting jackets, only in different sizes, and they walked in the same loping way. One was about 12 and the other 5…

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Taking time to remember a good man for all seasons

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It was sudden. A small heart attack had been a warning, doctors said. Slow down. Take it easy. His wife was to pick him up and drive him home from the hospital late on a Saturday morning. He died before she arrived.

I knew him only a short time, for a few years as my boyfriend's father, for a few years as my father-in-law. I never called him by his first name. I was too young and he was too old for that informality…

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`Life' asks us to make peace with past before it's too late

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`Life' asks us to make peace with past before it's too late

It isn't a flawless movie, but it's powerful. "My Life" is about a man, diagnosed with terminal cancer, who decides to make a video for his unborn child so the child will know his father.

The man, who has about four months to live, sets a camera on a tripod, sits in front of it and talks, hesitantly at first, uncomfortable before the mechanical eye.

After a while, the process gets easier and he begins to record everything. He reads a Dr. Seuss book to his unborn son. He teaches him to shave. He demonstrates the correct way to walk into a room, not self-consciously but with confidence.

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Neatness doesn't count when your room is full of memories

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She is upstairs cleaning her room, the 21-year-old. The new college graduate is out, out, damn spotting childhood and adolescence to make way for the working woman she has become.

Necessity has forced her to do this. She can't fit what she brought home, what she has collected in the past four years, in a room that is a storehouse for her first 17.

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The Essence of Life Lies in the Ordinary Miracle of Motherhood

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Three of the children are out in the field with their father when I arrive.

It's a Kodak moment: The girls run with their arms outstretched through spring grass under a cloudless sky, their dog loping along beside them. Tabitha's hair flies behind her like a kite's tail. Xena runs double-speed to keep up. Shiloh, 2 1/2, walks and runs, stopping every few steps to hike up her long, cotton dress…

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`Family values' vs. Blue Laws

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`Family values' vs. Blue Laws

So, how long have we been listening to our politicians pontificate about "family values?"

The phrase has been on everyone's lips for the past year, but the concept has existed forever. The family - it's sacrosanct. It's the bedrock of the nation. If we could get the family back together, make it strong, then the country would follow.

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A miracle that came too late

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A miracle that came too late

My friend Anne's daughter died of cystic fibrosis eight-and-a-half years ago. Amy was 11, in the sixth grade, and my daughter Lauren's best friend. We knew Amy was going to die, everyone knew, but we knew it intellectually the way we know that someday we'll grow old, and someday babies not even born yet will have gray hair. We didn't believe it, couldn't imagine it. Someday was theory. Amy's death was an eternity away…

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Well-behaved kids give back what they take in - respect

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I met them the first time when they walked into my mother-in-law's house with their parents on New Year's Day four years ago.

"My brother's daughter, Jeannie, is coming with her family to visit all the way from New York. Won't you stop by and visit, too?" my mother-in-law phoned to ask.

I bet I groaned about having to visit someone I hardly knew. I bet I complained about all the things I had to do: take down the tree, vacuum up the pine needles, get my life in order, ready the slate for the new year.

I know I went to my mother-in-law's intending to stay just a little while. But that was before I met Jessica, Tabitha and Xena.

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`CARETAKERS' ALWAYS ON CALL

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A social worker would call her the "primary caretaker." You probably know someone like her.

She's the one daughter in a family of five, six, ten who, when her mother gets sick, packs up her pre-school kids - even if they have colds, even if they're in the middle of a birthday party - to drive her mother to a doctor, pick up a prescription, stop at a market, then go back to her mother's house and whip up something for dinner.

Or she's the one with the full-time job who visits her father every day on her way home.

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The Waltons may be fictional, but loyal fans don't think so

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The Waltons may be fictional, but loyal fans don't think so

Fact and fiction. They blend. A person steps into the sun at high noon and he and his shadow are one. Both exist. Both are seperate entities, but for a moment they merge.

Schuyler, population 400, is fact. It's a tiny town nestled among the mountains in Nelson County, Virginia. Walton's Mountain is but a shadow of Schuyler, a creation of its most famous son, novelist and screen writer Earl Hamner.

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Vacation memories become real again

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I thought I remembered it exactly: my father taking the ceramic dog-bank down from the chest where it sat every day of the year; my mother shaking quarters and dimes and nickels onto the chenille bedspread in their room; the three of us dividing and piling and counting.

Get a knife, they would tell me when the dog had expelled its final coin. I would run into the kitchen and return with a dull blade and poke it through the slit on the top of the dog's head and dig out dollars that were stuck inside, that could be felt more than heard. When the bank was empty, we held our breath and let our eyes savor the piles that stood like silver volcanos on the spread.

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Bush was right: We must revive `family values'

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The phrase has taken a beating in the last few weeks.

Say the words, "family values" and your commercial value plummets. It's safer to be snide, easier to drag out Ozzie and Harriet and sneer, "Yah, but look what happened to them!" It's far more fashionable to denigrate the notion of family than to think about what family really is.

Family is not Ozzie and Harriet.

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Adoption meant life

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Adoption meant life

She is 17 and beautiful, not just on the outside, with her dark hair and Snow White complexion and her perfect teeth, which never needed braces; but on the inside where it counts.

She has always been beautiful: interested in other people, careful about their feelings, warm, considerate, a smiling, sweet, loving, gentle, wonderful girl.

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Senseless hate is the saddest irony of all

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She used to live with them. They took her in when no one else would. She'd been staying with her mother, but the mother, one morning, looked across the kitchen table at this pregnant daughter and her young husband and said, "Go. I don't want you here anymore. Find someplace else to live." And so the couple packed their belongings, left the house, bought a newspaper, sat in the library and pored over the apartment-for-rent ads. They phoned a few, but got no results. They didn't have money for a down-payment; they had no collateral except themselves.

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Child is the real victim of divorce

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Sometimes you don't want to hear it. You want to drive past the house, away from problems that shouldn't exist at all.

He said this. She said that. He has a lawyer. She has a lawyer. Two adults who vowed to love each other now spend their time tearing each other apart. And in the middle there is always a child, a bewildered child, who loves them both. This time the child is not even 3 when Mommy leaves.

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Are you a slob? Just blame poor grandmom

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My mother-in-law makes her bed the minute she gets out of it. So does my friend, Anne. Pat keeps Windex and paper towels in the bathroom and wipes down the sink in the morning before she leaves for work. Caryn folds clothes when the dryer buzzes. A different Ann vacuums her garage once a week. Each insists that what she does is easy. "If you make your bed right away, it's done for the day," my mother-in-law likes to say. "Plus it tidies up the room." "If you empty the dryer when it buzzes, then you don't have to iron the clothes," Caryn continually tells me. "It only takes a second. And it saves so much time."

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Cooking up a new tradition for the Thanksgiving feast

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It used to be cute that I couldn't cook. When I was young and newly married, everyone forgave me my failures. People gushed that my fried bologna and beans were "different," my fried hamburger and french fries an "important staple," my fried eggs and bacon an "interesting choice for dinner." I didn't realize that these personal favorites were not actually adored by crowds, not even when practically everyone I knew, including my husband, would insist that we send out for pizza.

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The case of the missing clicker

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The TV clicker is missing. It vanished 10 days ago somewhere between 7 p.m. and 8:15 p.m.. The 14-year-old had it last. This is fact. It was in my hand and she stole it from me. "Give me that," she said, grabbing the remote control before I could. I had mistakenly changed the station instead of turning up the volume during a riveting scene of "Life Goes On." The entire family yelped. "I can't believe you still don't know how to use this thing," my daughter said.

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So if you were on an island...

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When she was little she clung to me and said, "You're my best friend in the whole wide world." She used to cry when I went away, for a night, for a weekend. "Why can't you take me?" she would ask. And I would explain, "Because this party is for grown-ups. Because this is a business trip. Because you'd be bored." "No I wouldn't, Mommy. I'd never be bored around you."

Such absolute, unconditional love.

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