I don't know when Christmas became all about buying. Black Friday. Hot deals. Doorbusters. Stores opening at 4 a.m. Coupons and discounts, and every day from now until Dec. 25, more ``last chances'' than a 3-year-old gets.
This is the stuff that sucks the cheer out of the holiday season.
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 MoreWay back in the day, fresh out of college, I was a teacher for a year. Room 218. Fourth grade. Devine School. Randolph, Massachusetts.
It was so long ago that I had an old typewriter and the school had a mimeograph machine.
Read MoreShe was silent as I was putting on makeup, standing on a stool, all 2 1/2 feet of her stretching and straining to see my every move.
My granddaughter Charlotte is newly three and is never silent, not even when she sleeps. But last Friday morning she stood in my bedroom miraculously mute and mesmerized. Moisturizer, foundation, blush, mascara, and lipstick. They had cast a spell.
Read MoreI am sitting at my computer eating reduced-fat potato chips, using them to scoop up tuna fish once packed in water but now swimming in low-fat mayonnaise. And I am feeling smug and Spartan because there is no bread in my lunch, no yummy roll grilled in butter, no slice of white American cheese melted on top. There's 1 percent milk in my coffee and just a single cookie on my plate: my neighbor Katherine's homemade - without butter - almond biscotti. Ah, healthful eating.
Read MoreIt used to be easy. More than easy. It was like breathing. It happened without thought. I'd be driving - past my old school, Tower Hill, where my best friend, Rosemary, and I used to play; past the halfway point, where Rosemary and I used to meet; past St. Bernadette's Church, where my husband and I were married. And I'd see these places exactly as they had been, 10, 20, 30 years before - Tower Hill School hidden behind a hedge of lilacs so thick you could smell them from the next block; the halfway point all woods and swamp and orange lilies; St. Bernadette's so new it looked placed, not built, on the black macadam…
Read MoreIt was easier when Father Coen was alive. His faith was strong and certain, and as long as he was here, my faith was strong and certain, too. I called him my window through whom I saw God. And he said, "God is everywhere. You know that." I know it sometimes, but not all the time. Not enough of the time. Not the way I knew it when he was here to remind me…
Read MoreOld memories, like flotsam and jetsam, bob to the surface at odd times. I am sitting in church with my granddaughter, Lucy, loving the feel of her arms around my neck. She is all mine in church, no distractions, no one to whisk her away. And I am thinking about Father Coen, and how he used to say that it didn't matter if children understood the Mass. Their presence was enough. That taking kids to church was like taking them to baseball games. Eventually they would come to know and love both.
Read More`It's Janet’s birthday," I tell the person who answers the phone, expecting her to say, "It is? I'm so glad you mentioned this." Or "I know. We're having a little party this afternoon." But she says, "Oh." She says it flat, without inflection, in a way that means "I don't care. What difference does it make? Why are you telling me?"
Read MoreWe remember it differently. Anne says that we went to Story Land on a summer day not more than five years ago. And that we walked around, just the two of us, enjoying the scene. Going there was my idea because I wanted to revisit a place I had come with my parents and my grandmother when I was a child. I don't dispute being with my parents and my grandmother. I wore an aqua-and-white dress, which I hated. I posed with the Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe. I smiled for the camera. This was nearly 50 years ago.
Read MoreIs this what happens as you age? Does everything new always bring back the memory of something old? Is the past both a minefield and an archeological dig only to those who have lived 40 or 60 or 80 years? Or does this happen to 20-year-olds, too? A puppy makes you think of your old dog young. A birthday brings back other birthdays. A perfect October day makes you think of other October days.
Read MoreI have it upstairs in a box somewhere, a piece of pink, lined paper filled with writing that's straight up and down. The penmanship struck me as exotic when I first saw it because it wasn't the Palmer Method. It was a combination of printing and art, the f's and g's and p's and q's big and bold and gaudy. The words the letters made were bold, too, because they held up a mirror to my life. This is who you are, the lady who penned them said.
Read MoreI had been thinking about her. That's the way these things happen. Coincidence? A random pairing of events? Or something more? Sound just out of earshot? Sunlight, bright and steady, but in another room? I had been remembering who knows why? being a child sitting on a kitchen chair, my face pressed against a window, waiting for my aunt to come and play with me. I could hardly say her name. "Rain coming?" I would ask my mother, "Lorraine" too big a word, "Aunt Lorraine" impossible.
Read MoreThe e-mail's subject was "Nice thoughts for the start of Lent," so I opened it and read it, and because I thought it was worth rereading, I printed it and hung it on my bulletin board. It's a "give up" list, but it's not full of the usual give-ups: cookies, cake, ice cream, candy, wine. This list is about behavior, about giving up complaining, pessimism, worry, negativism, and gloom. Having given up all things delicious, including Dunkin' Donuts sugar-coated jelly sticks and Brigham's chocolate chip ice cream, many times before, I figured that "to give up gloom and enjoy the beauty that is all around" would be a piece of cake, so to speak.
Read MoreThe thank-you notes arrived less than a week after I brought over two small presents to the twins who live next door. They are 8 and in second grade. The notes, one from Albert and one from Melody. were written in little-kid print and addressed the same way, carefully, in neat straight letters. I read them and thought that with all their mother has to do - she works full time and takes care of a house, a husband, two kids, and a recently widowed father - she did this. She bought the kid-friendly stationery, sat down with her children, directed them ("Do we have to do this now, Mom?" at least one of them must have said), then made sure the letters got stamped and posted.
Read MoreThey are just things and things shouldn't mean so much. But they do.
Most are old and many are broken. A musical clock, a plastic reindeer, a dime store manger, Santa at his desk, a faded ornament they all tug at me.
Read MoreIn the movies, music announces the big moments. An orchestra swells, there's a shift in keys, a violin wails and you know you'd better pay attention.
Real life doesn't give you a warning. The big moments come and go along with the small ones. We don't edit our lives. And yet somehow they get edited…
Read MoreIt's strange what your brain decides to remember, what it puts in first place and shuffles to the head of the class. It's not rule-bound like a teacher. The brain doesn't select the smartest or the best looking or even the cleverest memory to take out of mothballs. It's almost as if it reaches into a grab bag of life and pulls out whatever it finds. A snippet of conversation here. A splice of an afternoon there.
Read MoreIf life is a train ride, with all of us on our own, each in individual cars, bumping and chugging and sometimes careening down the tracks, then my time with Wilmha was a series of quick but welcome visits that happened many miles and many years ago. We were in the middle of our ride when we met, the theoretical middle, miles of life already lived and, barring cataclysm, miles more to go.
Read MoreYou wonder what makes an ordinary day stand out in memory. Who takes the mental snapshots that we see when we look back through time? There are no real snapshots recording the day, because there was nothing special about it. Nothing special at all.
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