I don't know why it felt so important to find the exact spot. She isn't there. I recognize this. And yet it didn't seem enough just to ride around and lump her together with DICKSON and HARRISON and WHITTENBERGER and all the other people I never met. I knew Amy - knew her for too short a time, too long ago. But I knew her well. She was my daughter's best friend; because of her, her mother and I became friends…
Read MoreToday 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…
Read MoreI have come to know Julia slowly, a young woman whose husband died of cystic fibrosis a few months before their son Jeffrey was born. After his death, the priest at our parish spoke of Julia's faith and courage. But she was a stranger then. I had no idea she was my mother-in-law’s next door neighbor. It was after that day in church that my mother-in-law began mentioning Julia, but I didn’t connect the dots. I didn’t realize that the priest’s Julia and my mother-in-law’s Julia were one and the same. Because Julia, then, was just a name…
Read MoreI think of it as myth, now, as a fairy tale I once believed. Truth has been downsized to fit a package I can carry around with me. The whole truth grew too heavy and cumbersome with age. The whole truth demanded a responsibility I continue to shun.
But I remember the child who accepted the whole truth, the child I was, who knew that life on Earth was only a test, that Heaven was the reward, not anything we might win here on Earth, and that the sole purpose of existence was to love God in this world and be happy with Him in the next.
Read More"Don't waste your tears," my mother used to say when I was young and moping around the house because John W. didn't talk to me at CYO, because John W. didn't notice me at school, because John W. didn't like me though I liked him more than I liked any other boy in the world.
"Save your tears for real sorrow," my mother said the afternoon I came racing into the house, sobbing because John had finally asked me out and I couldn't go. I thought she was heartless. I'd already accepted a date to the Victory Dance and I had to turn John down.
Read MoreIf I had my old high school diary, which I read and tore into a million pieces when I was in my early 20's (Why did I write only when I was miserable? And why did I write so much about boys?), I would see pages and pages of musings about Richard.
There'd be a lot of nasty stuff, I'm sure. Not because I didn't like him. I did. I do. But I was jealous of him. I didn't like that he was so important to my best friend Rosemary. I wondered whether he would be good for her and good to her, and what would happen to me if they became a permanent pair.
Read MoreLove thy neighbor. This is what we're called to do. Every day of our lives. But most especially this week, Holy Week.
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. This is what we pray. But how do you forgive? How do you let go of hurt and anger and hate?
Petty things cause such wide rifts. A neighbor invites a dozen kids to a birthday party, but excludes your son. How could she be so insensitive?
"Why doesn't anybody like me, Mommy?" the child asks. And anger hardens and becomes cement around the heart.
Read MoreHe was my first real love, a flesh-and-blood boy, not a creation, not someone Rosemary and I invented on a Saturday afternoon as we walked downtown, or on a Saturday night as we babysat.
Those heartthrobs - Val Poche and Jimmy Weber - were actual people, but people we didn't know. They were older boys Rosemary saw at church or at school, around whom we invented a life.
Read MoreShe was a shadow figure for years, made up of parts, never a whole. Her hands washed dishes, scrubbed pots, filled pans with oils and meats and spices. Her feet walked from the table to the countertop to the stove. Her voice was soft, and always friendly. "Do you two want something to drink?" Even when it was firm, it was never harsh. She suggested; she didn't demand.
Read MoreI always get the story wrong. No matter how many times I hear it I confuse the details. Was he wearing the sweater with the reindeer the night they met? Or was she? Was it September or October 1947 or 1948?
It was Sept. 5, 1947. He was wearing the reindeer sweater. She was wearing a red Sheltie Mist sweater, white bucks and a camel-hair skirt that swirled every time she swayed. I know because I can see her legs, long and shapely. Incredible, unforgettable legs. That's what Joe said the first time he told me the story and that's what he always says, every time he relates it.
"She had great legs" and "she was absolutely beautiful."
Read MoreWhen it arrived in the mail, I dismissed it as another of those self-help books that promises more than it delivers. Nice cover, eye-grabbing title - "1001 Ways To Be Romantic" - but inevitably just a rehash of those tacky, smarmy suggestions that appear in Cosmo once a year.
My 21-year-old daughter set me straight.
Read MoreI probably looked at the book five years ago. That was the last real "occasion." Twenty years married then; a time for reflection.
Tomorrow it will be 25 years.
I unearth it now from among a pile of baby books and children's drawings and saved holiday cards and report cards and diplomas. It is, surprisingly, in good shape, discolored only around the edges. The square photographs, rimmed in white, the rust-colored pieces of scotch tape, the prices on the back of the congratulations cards - 15 and 25 cents - these are the things that date it. I carry it into the kitchen, thinking how strange it is that this book is a quarter of a century old.
Read MoreA friend stopped by with a book she suggested I read during Advent.
"It will open doors for you," she said and it has, although I've only just begun it.
"Two From Galilee" by Marjorie Holmes is not a new book. It was published 20 years ago. But it's new to me. So is the idea behind it.
Read MoreMy 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…
Read MoreI phoned her the other day to ask how her pregnancy is coming along. "I'll be glad when it's over," she said in a weary voice. "I'm a nervous wreck…
Read MoreThere's this little girl, just 13 months old. Her birthday was Valentine's Day, her father tells the woman next to him. She is toddling around the doctor's waiting room totally unconcerned that everyone else is sitting. She races to the TV, stares at it for a minute, then turns away. She picks up a book she finds on a chair, looks at it, then puts it down. She approaches a stranger, meets the stranger's eyes, grins, then runs back to her father who hasn't for a second taken his eyes off her.
She is a tiny thing, a baby, still bald, the blond fuzz on her head barely visible. She wears pink pants and a teal green sweater and a grin that shows off her teeth. Her mother is in the doctor's office because within weeks she will be having another baby. But it's clear the father is totally enthralled with this one.
Read MoreOK, so I'm a sucker for sentiment. Plunk me down in front of a carousel on a hot summer day, give me some cotton candy, let me hear the calliope and the yelps of excited children and I get all filled up inside, although I may know no one, although I may be among strangers.
Give me a seat at a recital. Let me hear children sing. Put me behind a school bus and let me watch as the bus stops and the kids spill out, and I get a lump in my throat.
Read MoreI embarrassed her the other evening. I didn't mean to. The problem with me is that I look at her and see a child, a little girl, although she is 15 now and hardly a little girl at all.
I walk into a restaurant and there she is, somewhere I don't expect her to be and I give her the third-degree. I say she should have phoned and told me where she was going. I say I don't want her in a car with a driver I don't know. I overreact. I behave like my mother.
Read MoreShe 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.
Read MoreThey told me I wouldn't like the movie. Too corny, the 21-year-old said. Too predictable, the 15-year-old added.
They had been disappointed so I assumed I would be, too. But I wasn't. I loved "Forever Young." It was a trip into yesterday, a love story, not a sex story, corny and predictable, yes, but who cares? It was tender instead of lewd. Imagine that in the 1990s!
Prior to the movie, I'd overheard a conversation. A girl, no more than 20, home from college for Christmas, was telling some friends about a guy she'd picked up at a New Year's Eve party. They were strangers who met around 11 p.m. and were bed partners a few hours later.
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