It’s late on a Sunday night, almost Monday morning, and I am on my iPad googling Glennon Doyle Melton. My daughter Julie told me to read Melton’s book, “Love Warrior, A Memoir” two years ago. Sunday, I finally got around to it. I read it in a day. And at the end of the day, I wanted more…
Read MoreI was Beverly Theresa Curtin back then. Twenty years old. A senior at Bridgewater State, the college my father chose for me. I commuted. He bought me…
Read MoreThey have been my surprise silver lining in 2017, Facebook posts from a guy I barely know about a baby I've never met. Words and photos that gripped me from the start, that made me hope and gave me hope, and that continue, every day, to make me smile.
Read MoreI was there when it arrived — Kismet? Coincidence? — visiting my old best friend, whom I hadn't seen in years. She had ordered it before she knew I was coming, a "Dorothy" tree she called it, homage to my mother, whose name was Dorothy.
My visit was all impulse. I met Rosemary in second grade. Throughout grade school we were inseparable. Then, little by little, we grew apart…
Read MoreFor a long time after my granddaughter Lucy, who has Down syndrome, was born, I looked at healthy, typical babies with envy. They were everywhere — at the mall, at the playground, cooing, smiling, sitting up, playing patty-cake, walking, talking, meeting every developmental milestone right on time, their perfection a constant…
Read MoreSometimes we lie to spare ourselves. Sometimes we lie to spare others. I like the sparing others lie.
Decades ago, when my husband was in Arizona with his work buddies, on a reward trip, a building-partnership trip, a "get out of Dodge it's winter here and perpetual summer there" trip, he called home the first night and announced, "It's raining."
"It's raining?" I said back. It hardly ever rains in Phoenix. Nearly 300 days of sun and only 20 days of any kind of precipitation, boasts the Chamber of Commerce.
"It's just a fluke. I'm sure the sun will be shining by tomorrow," my husband said confidently.
Read MoreI took it out on him, the person I love most. We do this sometimes. It was over the silliest thing: wreath hangers that went missing.
"Did you move those wreath hangers that were in Julie's room?" he asked, poking his head into my office. "I thought I left them there." I should have stopped what I was doing right then. Got up from my chair and helped him. If a friend had lost something, if a stranger had knocked on my door and said, "I had wreath hangers tied to the Christmas tree I have on my roof and they must have come undone because they're not there now," I would have put on my shoes, grabbed my coat, and joined him in his search…
Read MoreMy Uncle Frank died last week. He was 82, but he looked 70. He had thick gray hair and not a wrinkle on his face and he stood straight and he smelled good and he was solid and sturdy, inside and out, and I felt that strength every time I hugged him. I believed, I hoped, he would live forever. Decades ago, when he was in his 40s, doctors gave him six months to live. They told my Aunt Lorraine and she told her children and me. But she never told him.
Read MoreIt is a perfect little tree, the kind a first-grader would draw and be proud of, with a skinny trunk leading up to skinnier branches raised like a music director's skinny arms when she is beckoning an audience to sing. It's a minimalist tree. Not a stunner like the dogwood in front of the Canton Public Library or the magnolias that line Boston's Marlborough Street. Or the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., or California's redwoods. Nobody would ever stop and gape at it. Or take its picture. But I do.
Read More"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'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 MoreIt was the middle of the heat wave and we were inside sitting on the floor, Lucy using my iPad, looking at Disney characters on YouTube. "Not that. Not that. Not that. This one, Mimi!"
Then she clicked and Mulan sang.
"Who is that girl I see
Staring straight back at me?
When will my reflection show
Who I am inside?"
Read MoreA few days ago, six of us were eating and talking about Rob Portman, the US senator from Ohio who had just announced that after a lifetime of opposing gay marriage, he had changed his mind.
His son had come out, and he had given gay marriage more thought, and I was dissing him for this, not for his change of opinion but for seeing the light only because his son, not someone else's, was gay.
And that's when my friend and teacher John O'Neil made me see the light. "It takes a face to change a heart," he said quietly.
Read MoreEvery Wednesday night, at 11 o'clock, sometimes a little after, in a little room in a little club on Columbus Avenue in Boston, pianist Michael Kreutz plays his closing number, "What I Did for Love," a song from the hit musical "A Chorus Line." Wednesday is show-tune night at the Napoleon Room at Club Cafe, and for three hours…
Read MoreThe manger was my mother's. But I hadn't thought about its history for a long, long time, because the figurines Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus and the wise men and the sheep and the cow and the horse and the angels are mine, bought over decades, all porcelain, all white, the small, wooden manger the sole thing that was hers. It's in the background of a picture I keep on my desk all year long…
Read Moret's young love that songwriters go on about and that filmmakers explore, young love that propels poetry and novels and myths and fairy tales. Romeo and Juliet. Antony and Cleopatra. Lancelot and Guinevere. Jack and Rose (Remember ``Titanic''?). And, of course, today's most popular young couple, “Twilight’s” Edward and Bella.
Young love, just out of the gate with its longings…
Read MoreIt wasn’t supposed to end like this. Not after all they have been through. Not after all the hope and prayers and therapies and people storming the heavens. If you have faith the size of a mustard seed nothing will be impossible to you. That’s what we’re told. They had faith. And they didn’t want to move anything as big as a mountain. All they wanted was to save a child, their child, to make their child well…
Read MoreCharlotte’s Run, which begins on April 10 at 10 AM at the Granite Grill in Braintree,(cq) is all because of Charlotte Rose Kelly. But it is not for her. It’s to raise money to annihilate a disease that this brave but tired four-year-old has been battling for nearly two years. Charlotte was two-and-a half, when five doctors walked into a room at Children’s Hospital Boston and gave her parents, Patrice and Greg Kelly (cq) the incomprehensible news that their beautiful little girl had Stage IV Neuroblastoma, (cq) a rare and deadly form of childhood cancer...
Read MoreSometimes it catches up with you. That's what my husband said.
And I said that's nuts. It's been 39 years. No one cries over something that happened 39 years ago.
The stars have aligned, that's all. It's 1971. The autumn light is dazzling. It's cool in the morning, but warm late in the day. There's a hum in the air of cars and trucks and school buses. I swear, if I turned on TV and saw Peggy Lipton in ``The Mod Squad,'' I would not be surprised.
Read MoreI had two mothers. That's what I've long thought.
The first was young and spry and pretty and hip. She sang and she danced and she loved old movies and show tunes and big hats and Johnny Carson.
The other mother was head-injured and infirm. A fall made her old. A fall took away all her prettiness. Before she fell, my mother was one person. After she fell, she was another. I knew both, I loved both, so I thought I knew her.
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