Anne used to live on my street, a quarter of a mile away. A million years ago when our children were small we hung out together, at her house in the winter and at my house in the summer. Lauren and Amy were best friends. They were 8 and 9 then, bright, fanciful little girls who were always doing cartwheels and singing and playing dress up and creating dramas that they insisted we watch…
Read MoreI thought THE LOOK had gone the way of penny candy and flavor straws. "What look?" I expected people to say when I asked about it. But instead there was all this nodding and smiling and instant recognition. "Oh, I know THE LOOK" and "No one could give THE LOOK like my mother." And "You know what? My mother still gives me THE LOOK."
Read MoreThis column was written a long time ago, when my dog, Molly, was alive and my cousin, Xena, was a child, not a mother of two. Before I had grandchildren. Before Katherine moved away. But the first week of August is now as it was then. The Top of the Ferris Wheel. And I still celebrate it every year on August1st. Here’s why:
The dog days of summer are the tops, the best life gets. So on August 1, every year I stop what…
Read MoreSitting in church, I remembered. But not until then. Not all morning as I read the papers, did laundry, cleaned the kitchen. Not even as I dressed for church, overdressed really. Who wears a hat anymore, especially for a noon Mass on a hot August day?
My mother wore hats. She sold them. That's what she did for a living, first at Wethern's in Quincy and then later at Sheridan's at the South Shore Plaza. She ordered them, unpacked them, fussed with them so that they would sit just right on mannequin heads, and she wore them home every day. The quiet, sedate ones, straws and whimsies, were for weekdays; the more riotous ones, flowered and feathered,…
Read MoreI walk down the cellar stairs and dig through boxes, unlabeled, packed in haste, the creche wrapped among Christmas glasses rimmed in green, and find the Santa Clauses, finally. The musical ones I wind up. Two play "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," but my favorite, a ceramic St. Nick with kind, blue eyes, plays "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," and I sing along to the thin, tinny notes. "Have yourself a merry little Christmas, make the yuletide bright. Next year all our troubles will be out of sight."
Read MoreMy friend Anne e-mails me an excerpt from "Listening to Your Life," a book of daily meditations by Frederick Buechner. I find it on my computer at 5 a.m.
It is dark. The house is quiet, and I feel a little like the shoemaker in the old children's tale. I tiptoe downstairs to find that someone has been working while I've been sleeping, a pair of shoes on the workbench already made. An idea on the computer, already hatched.
Read MoreThe sign is on the lawn "sale pending," so it's not a done deal yet. But I am pretending it is. I have my hopes high and my fingers crossed. I am thinking about cookies and cocoa with marshmallow and jars full of penny candy.
The priest who lived next door for 21 years moved last month and the house has been vacant since. It used to be my house before it was his. "Oh, you moved next door," people usually say when they learn this. "You were lucky. It must have been such an easy move."
Read MoreIt was a party game, that's all it was. New Year's Eve, 1994. Our hostess passed out sheets of paper with 10 questions on them. She separated husbands and wives and created new pairs. Let's see how much you remember from 1994, she said. Piece of cake, we all thought. We were a group who knew our news. Lawyers, bankers, teachers, librarians, we devoured newspapers. We watched news shows. We subscribed to Newsweek or Time. Hit us with your toughest question, we thought. We were ready…
Read MoreIt 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…
Read MoreThe 16-year-old says I stole her idea. She has been keeping what she calls a "common place book," for half a year now, since her English teacher, Mr. Schauble, introduced the concept to her class.
It's really a very UNcommon book, a journal augmented by other things, more like a scrapbook than a diary.
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 MoreIt happened again a few weeks ago.
I saw him in a crowd, at a graduation, a boy I used to date in high school. I recognized him right away: the dark blond hair, just a little too long to be a crew cut; the thin face; the high cheekbones; the wide-set eyes. Even his clothes looked familiar: blue sportscoat, white shirt, striped tie. I started to wave to him and almost shouted, "Tom? How are you? How've you been?"
But then I realized it couldn't be Tom because Tom would be 49 or maybe even 50 by now and this Tom was just a boy, not even 18.
Read MoreA friend, a newspaper reporter who'd retired to write books, set up the interview. It was a long time ago and a long drive away. I hadn't thought about that interview for years. I’d buried it in the place where hurts and humiliations get locked up.
I don't even remember the interviewer's name. But his words live in granite.
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 MoreI wanted her to put it in writing. I asked her, but she thought I was joking. I wasn't. She was remembering a me I no longer am. She was remembering a me my children have never even known.
"You made the best clothes in the class," she told me at the gym the other day. In my new incarnation, I work out. In my other life, I sewed.
"I was making a bathrobe and you were making a plaid jacket. I was impressed," she said.
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 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 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 More"Is he still handsome?" That's what people always ask. That and "How old is he?" and "Can he still sing?" and "Is he really as nice as he seems?"
Yes, he's handsome. He has thick gray hair, twinkley eyes, a great smile and a younger man's trim build.
How old is he? He's 30-50, my sister-in-law would say. Eighty is how the world translates it. But the number deceives.
Read More
ABOUT COLUMNS ARCHIVES WHAT’S ON MY MIND GALLERY IT’S NEVER TOO LATE BOOKS CONTACT
Copyright © 2020 Beverly Beckham
Web Design by: SKILLARA | Marketing + Media
