A RWANDAN SURVIVOR'S TALE OF FORGIVENESS

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A RWANDAN SURVIVOR'S TALE OF FORGIVENESS

It is not a beach book. It is not funny like "Marley & Me" or intriguing like "Beach Road" or trendy like all the Whitey Bulger books now suddenly in print. It is, no doubt about it, totally incompatible with summer and sand and sea air laced with Coppertone and flimsy bathing suits and cups full of lemonade. "Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust" is exactly what you don't want to read on a summer day. Which is why it's not on any summer reading list that I've come across. But here is why it should be.

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`Baby Talk' contest takes down a barrier

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No hurt was intended. In fact, the young woman from the modeling agency was apologetic. In New York, it's different, she said. In New York, babies with special needs model for lots of companies. Boston just isn't there yet.

I didn't expect that Lucy would be chosen. I just didn't expect that she wouldn't be given a chance solely because she has Down syndrome.

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The world's explosive enough

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It was a birthday celebration, a country club throwing itself a fun little party. Nothing unusual about this.

Only a lot of people in Canton, which is 15 miles south of Boston, didn't have a clue about Wampatuck's 100-year birthday bash. It was to most a surprise party.

People were aware of other things, though. They knew that the Democratic National Convention was in town, that the terror-threat level was high, that commuters were being searched, that there was more air traffic than usual and that these were perilous times.

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Snake oil can't rejuvenate a soul

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It was tucked into the news Wednesday. Something about a treatment called "Gentle Waves" that can make old skin look young. You sit in front of a flashing light for 40 seconds and you can reverse the aging process. Except that it takes at least eight treatments at $ 100 each to begin to see a difference and the difference is, even then, subtle…

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ST. ORDINARY: MOTHER TERESA'S HUMBLE LESSON

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ST. ORDINARY: MOTHER TERESA'S HUMBLE LESSON

Last Sunday, in Roman Catholic churches around the world, the Gospel told the familiar tale of a rich man's quest for Paradise.

"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God," Jesus said.

This is a bold statement. But what does it mean? That the rich are doomed? That in the afterlife the poor finally get what they never had on Earth?

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Spring replaces a winter rife with discontent

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Spring replaces a winter rife with discontent

The national threat level: from orange to yellow and back again. Twenty degrees one day, zero the next. Snow everywhere. And bad news. Month after month of it. Except for the miracle of Elizabeth Smart, it was all bad news. The winter was miserable. It was long and dark and hard and scary. And it refused to leave. But here we are on the other side of it. Most of us anyway. Those of us who didn't lose anyone to the winter or the war. For us, finally, the bad time is over. It's May and if it's a little cloudy and rainy, who cares?

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We were all kinder, gentler

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We were all kinder, gentler

It's all going back to the way it was before September 11th. But how can it?

Is this our fate? Court TV and celebrity news and issues we knew four short months ago were a waste of time are still a waste of time.

Thomas Junta has been charged with beating his son's hockey coach, Michael Costin, to death at the Burlington Ice Arena in Reading 18 months ago. This 275-pound man allegedly smashed the head of the 150-pound Costin against the ground until Costin lost consciousness. What more do we need to know?

So why the national coverage? Why the day-to-day dissection of anger gone awry? Why the news updates, the talk-show discussions, the media frenzy about what is indisputably a horrific crime, but not, as some would have it, a trend? Will we be better people for having watched this sideshow?

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Everyday life must triumph over terror

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Everyday life must triumph over terror

Before, on a September Sunday, I would be looking at the world in all its beauty and thinking that it's going too fast - the month, the fall, the leaves turning, every day getting shorter than the one before. I would ache to slow it down and be sad when I couldn't. September is always a bittersweet time. Before, on a September Sunday, I would drive to church and see pumpkins for sale at Cassie's and I would think, I have to stop on the way home and get some. And I would pass a nursery full of mums, and think, I need to get mums, too, and cornstalks and hay for the wheelbarrow. And I need to repaint the wheelbarrow.

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Sox should remember Sherm

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Sox should remember Sherm

It's a personal thing with Gary Titus. He'll tell you this. Sherm Feller was his friend. How good a friend? Titus and his wife, Sarah, named their son Louis "Sherman" Titus "to keep Sherm in our memory always." Last spring when Titus logged on to the Boston Red Sox Web site and was greeted by his friend's familiar voice, "Ladies and gentlemen - boys and girls," he was thrilled. The voice belonged on the site. Sherm Feller was and always will be the voice of Fenway Park.

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Dear Abby misses a beat with answer to 'Trying'

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Dear Abby misses a beat with answer to 'Trying'

I think you've been kidnapped. I think someone from the school of It's All About Me has commandeered your computer. It must be. I've been reading you since I could read, which makes me certain that you could never have written the response to "Trying to Do the Right Thing" in last Friday's paper. Can we talk about this? What's happening in Los Angeles? Are you at the controls or have you been replaced? Or is it that you've been in L.A. so long that the Me, Myself and I culture has finally worn off on you, too?

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Women pay hidden cost for beauty

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Women pay hidden cost for beauty

The pretty young woman hobbling out of her apartment, struggling with her crutches and the heavy glass door, put it all in perspective. She was tall, thin and fair with curly brown hair, long legs and her two feet in blue cushioned toeless things that people wear after surgery. She was having a hard time walking, the crutches and the feet things new, the sidewalk slick, the morning cold. I assumed she was a dancer and that tight toe shoes and high-heeled tap shoes were the reason behind whatever had happened to her feet.

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Codman center can celebrate its work, plans

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Codman center can celebrate its work, plans

I never lived in Codman Square yet in every sense of the phrase, I grew up there. I was 11 and in the seventh grade, a commuter student at St. Mark's in Dorchester and as lonely as I would ever be. That's when I discovered the square and the library that overlooked it. Every day when the neighborhood kids went home to lunch and the other commuters ate their waxed paper-wrapped sandwiches in the gloomy auditorium, I walked up the hill past Girl's Latin to the Codman Square library.

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It's just a moment in the snow

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It's just a moment in the snow

Mid-winter. Halfway between here and there. Waiting for the snow to fall. Waiting for the snow to disappear. These are strange days. You find things in your refrigerator, cranberry sauce, a few pieces of ham, left over from Christmas. The poinsettias remain in bloom. Christmas wreaths still bedeck more than a few doors. In corners, and under the carpet, stray pine needles hide.

They're props from a play that closed weeks ago. It was a good play, but that was then and this is now. Now it's time to get serious, time for resolutions, for getting focused. Last year is over. A new year has begun.

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Admire yes, but also follow Mother Teresa's example

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Admire yes, but also follow Mother Teresa's example

'Smile at each other - it doesn't matter who it is - and that will help you to grow up in greater love for each other.' - Mother Teresa

She is the antithesis of everything we worship in this country. She is old and we revere young. She is wrinkled and stooped, and we admire smooth and tall. She is humble and we're used to boastful. She is poor and we idolize wealth.

She is a bent, old woman who drapes cloth on her body only to cover herself, who doesn't dye her hair or work out or wear makeup or jewelry or spend even an ounce of energy worrying about what she looks like.

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Ease up - tourists are people, too

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Ease up - tourists are people, too

It's late July and time, it seems, for tourist-bashing. Last week in this paper, Joe Sciacca got all a-flutter over the Old Town Trolley and Beantown Trolley and the new Duck Tours, which he says are the reason you can't get from point A to point B anywhere in this city. Congestion and gridlock are the fault of trolleys and "lard butts from Nebraska," don't you know?

This week, in Boston's other major daily, columnist Patricia Smith wrote that tourists "clog the Artery, babble over maps in restaurants, snap endless pictures of sunbleached gravestones" (why this would bother anyone puzzles me), and continues on to bemoan their "maddening practice of standing directly in the middle of a downtown sidewalk at 5 p.m., their heads upturned and mouths open, gazing reverently at 'Look, another old building!' while juggling camcorder, bottles of Evian, and several hot squiggling children." Huh?

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