If only there were a way to bottle a child's pure glee

If only there were a way to bottle a child's pure glee

I am looking at my grandson Adam's picture as I write this. His mother snapped it with her iPhone, an old iPhone so the picture is pixelated and a little out of focus. Still, you can see the joy in his face, a child's joy; unmasked is the word, I think. But it's the wrong word because Adam is only 11 and has nothing yet to hide…

Read More

Making Paragon Park memories for the future

Making Paragon Park memories for the future

My father took pictures of everything. I have dozens of black-and-white prints labeled "European Campaign — General Eisenhower 1942-1945," and hundreds of slides he took later, after the war, after I was born, which he showed for years in our parlor on a big white sheet, until one day when he bought a real screen. He gave me his photos long before he died. I scanned them into my computer and it's where they live now, at my fingertips, pictures of people and places long, long gone. But just a few clicks, and they fill up my screen.

Read More

In music and lyrics, a link from her childhood to theirs

"Tammy" was the favorite song of my best friend, Rosemary, and me. But after singing it at the Policeman's Ball in 1957, I set it aside for over 40 years. Then one night, it reappeared out of the blue when I couldn't get my granddaughter to sleep.

They fall asleep to "Tammy." It's their lullaby of choice.

"Want me to sing you a song?" I ask whenever they are mine for a night and every one of them, every time, says, "Yes, Mimi. Will you sing 'Tammy?' "

Read More

On first school day, a flood of memories

'It's one of those days you talk about when they are babies. . . . "She will be in 1st grade when he is in 4th.' "

This is what my daughter Julie wrote on her Facebook page last week under the pictures of her children, Adam and Charlotte, posing in their front yard on the first day of school.

Facebook was full of pictures of big and little kids shyly grinning and of moms and dads writing "Look who's excited to start her first day of school!" and "Yes, that is a tie!" and "Where does it go? Feeling old!"

Read More

She met the Cookie Monster, and found it was she

I ate the kids' cookies.

My neighbor, Katherine, who lives across the street and bakes all the time, yummy things like cakes layered with raspberries and cakes dripping with chocolate, put two freshly baked chocolate chip cookies in two baggies last Tuesday, then handed them to me because it was nearly 5 p.m. and too close to dinner time for cookies. That's what the children's mothers repeated three times before they left their daughters with me: ``Don't feed them anything, Mimi. Not even if they beg. It will spoil their dinner.''

Read More

Seeing the young person in the old

Seeing the young person in the old

“Once upon a time, I was a little girl just like you,'' I tell my 3-year-old granddaughter.

And she squinches up her nose and shakes her head and says, ``No, you weren't.''

I show her pictures of me when I was 2 and 5 and 8. I say, ``See. I had hair just like yours.'' I show her my fourth-grade school picture. ``Look. Here I am.'' I call my childhood friend Rosemary and say, ``Rose? Talk to Charlotte. Tell her how old we were when we met.'' And Rose tells her that we were 7 and in second grade.

But Charlotte remains unconvinced.

Read More

Her `Tammy' still sings true

I 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 More

School shopping never grows old

Chicago 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 More

Happiness is finding magic in the everyday

We 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 More

Children's happiness is mine, too

Children 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 More

Childhood is a riveting, but fleeting, show

This 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 More

Finding that the garden is a rabbits' salad bar

Finding that the garden is a rabbits' salad bar

They 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 More

A land of fairy tales and memories

We 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 More

A grandmother is born

A grandmother is born

I can’t stop thinking about my friend Jill’s new grandson. I look at his photo and smile. I speak his name - Chase Henry – just to say it. And I tell people – neighbors, friends, people at the gym, strangers in line at the deli - about this little boy, whom no one has met yet, but who is already, totally loved. “It isn’t official, but here’s our baby BOY!” Jill’s daughter e-mailed. The phone call she’d been waiting for had finally come. After years that felt like decades, Tara and her husband Rob are at long last parents-in-waiting.

Read More

A new baby brings a song to her heart

Lucy is my first grandbaby, and her song just came. I didn't expect it, so I didn't go looking for it. It found me.

I was singing all the time back then, when my first daughter was pregnant. "You Are The Sunshine of My Life" and "My Special Angel." "You'll Never Know Just How Much I Love You" and, of course, "Baby Love."

The baby wasn't even close to being born, but I was already head over heels in love. And people in love are known to do some strange things, like walk on clouds and burst into song.

Read More