He is wise, respected, serious and well-known. People around the world depend upon him to tell them what they think. Few would dispute his intelligence.
I see him when he is on vacation. He is on a cruise ship for seven days with two children. They are his children, I learn. Perhaps he has shared custody. Perhaps he has them every other weekend and for vacations each year. I don't know.
Read MoreThere is no room for sarcasm or double entendres or psychoanalytical babble with this one. Woody Allen is slime. End of story.
If Allen, who is proof positive that long-term analysis is lethal to mental health, had fallen in love with some youngster he met on a playground, it would be one thing. An aberration, perhaps. Distasteful. Definitely irresponsible. But young girls are exploited by old men every day. The world would have yawned at the news.
Read MoreHe isn't allowed to talk to the press. The rules forbid it and if he breaks the rules he will lose his job and then where will he be?
But where will he be if he holds his tongue and keeps his job and nothing changes? Will he end updead one night, murdered by one of the punks who murder him now in small ways, who hurl insults at him, who threaten him, spit at him, drop garbage in his lap and sucker-punch him for the thrill of it?
Read MoreEveryone recognized him but no one knew who he was.
"Well-known Quincy man dies unknown," the headline said in Saturday's Patriot Ledger.
The story that followed told of a man who frequented Wollaston's businesses, who, every weekday bought the $1 breakfast special at Newcomb Farms; who, every weekend sat at O'Brien's bakery and drank coffee and ate pastry; who talked with clerks and nodded at passersby and bought scratch tickets at the Hancock Street Pharmacy and even shared, when he won, part of his $400 with the girl who'd sold him his lucky ticket.
Read MoreThe mood was different Thursday. The defense was contrite instead of confrontational. The game was over. No more winning through intimidation. No more delays and distortions. No more referring to the Oct. 16, 1990, death of 22-month-old Todd Slocum as "an incident which is said to have occurred."
Last month, Robert Donahue pleaded guilty in Middlesex Superior Court to manslaughter, motor vehicle homicide, operating under the influence of alcohol and operating to endanger. One would like to believe that Donahue admitted his guilt, however belatedly, to ease his conscience.
Read MoreAlready it's old news, last week's headlines, one more tragedy in a line of never-ending ones.
It wasn't even a lead story. So many people die every day; the death of a small child 3,000 miles away is a huge and horrible personal tragedy for his parents and family and friends.
But it barely affects the people who didn't know him. It may stun us. We may feel for the parents, identify with them, weep for them, but only for a moment. Our grief is temporary.
For that's the way life is. We turn the page. We read another story. We are immersed in our own families, children, worries, responsibilities. Our lives go on.
Read MoreAh, yes, the good old days. Dad worked 10, 12, 14 hours, came home, sat down, read the paper, ate dinner, took out the rubbish, shoveled snow in the winter, cut the grass in the summer, and gave the final word in all important decisions.
Your father will be home in 10 minutes. I want you to put your books away, now.
You better watch your step, young man. Don't let your father catch you talking like that.
How different things are now. The monarchy is dead. Democracy rules. Father is no longer a figurehead. Fathers father.
Read MoreAnger is self-destructive. You have to let go of it. You have to get past it. That's what psychiatrists say.
Priests say it, too. And ministers and rabbis. Turn the other cheek. Hate the sin but love the sinner. Forgive.
Ten years ago, I read "Victim" by Gary Kinder. It told the story of Cortney Naisbitt, 16, the youngest son of Carol and Byron Naisbitt, a sophomore at Utah's Ogden High School. On the afternoon of April 22, 1974, Cortney flew solo for the first time. Flying was his passion. Soloing had been the culmination of a dream.
Read More"19-year-old survives car crash" the headlines should have read, because his not dying miraculous. But it wasn't news. Surviving never is. People walk away from car crashes every day.
But Erickson shouldn't have. He fell asleep at the wheel while driving home from Boston on the VFW Parkway. His Toyota pickup truck careened over an embankment, ploughed into trees, spun around and landed back on the park-way facing the wrong direction. The truck is history. Erickson survived without a scratch.
People say he was lucky. But he was more than lucky. He was smart. He was wearing a seat belt. The seat belt saved his life.
Read MoreThere is not even an attempt to keep them quiet. They swarm into Concord's Alcott School auditorium, at 10 o'clock on a Friday morning, all of them happy because they're missing something - arithmetic or social studies or science; most of them chatting, a few of them shouting. The din is festive, chirpy, happy, full of kids' sounds.
Read MoreThe phrase has taken a beating in the last few weeks.
Say the words, "family values" and your commercial value plummets. It's safer to be snide, easier to drag out Ozzie and Harriet and sneer, "Yah, but look what happened to them!" It's far more fashionable to denigrate the notion of family than to think about what family really is.
Family is not Ozzie and Harriet.
Read MoreIt isn't a cloud over her head. Nothing so buoyant, so graceful, so small. It's a weight that she carries. But not like stone. Stone doesn't wrap itself around you; stone doesn't bleed. She carries the weight of a child, her child, 25 pounds, 36 inches, 22 months old.
He had blond hair and a tinkly laugh, and he grew in her womb and even when she was nine months pregnant and heavy, her stomach huge, she felt light compared to how she feels now. Now even her fingernails feel heavy on her hands.
Read More"Life in the Ghetto" is a non-fiction children's book, written and illustrated by 13-year-old Anika D. Thomas. You read it and you think it's horror fiction. It can't be true. You don't want it to be true.
On the front cover against a background of coloring-book red bricks, is a child's drawing of a girl's face. The girl in the drawing is crying.
On the back cover is a photograph of the author standing in front of her red-brick home. The windows behind her are boarded up. Trash litters the ground. But the steps to her apartment are clean.
Anika is smiling in the picture, but it is fake, a smile-for-the-camera pose. Her arms are folded and her eyes avoid the camera's lens.
Read MoreNewsweek's cover story this week is about the riots in Los Angeles. There's a two-page picture-spread of the city's destroyed buildings. A couple of pages are dedicated to political analysis. There's a section on race and crime, a page about the ethnic diversity of L.A., a page about welfare, a page highlighting George Bush, another homing in on Peter Ueberroth and three pages which, in Newsweek's own words, offer a "close-up look at life and death on one city block."
Ending the piece, on the final page, is a list of the names and the races of the 54 men, women and children killed in the riots. At the top right corner there's a color photo of DeAndre Harrison, 17, dressed in a white suit, his hands folded in front of him, lying in his coffin.
Read MoreWilliam Safire, the New York Times' resident expert in the use of the English language, made a mistake last week. He wrote: "The last time a dying man ran for president of the U.S. was in 1944." This is not true. Franklin Roosevelt WAS dying when he ran in 1944, but so is every man who is running for president now. We are all dying from the moment we are born. We don't like to think about this, but death is our destiny. None of us knows when or how or where we'll die. We don't come with guarantees or promises. We simply are until we are not. To quote an Elton John’s song, we are all "candles in the wind."
Read MoreIt was just another breakfast. I didn't want to go.
Eight a.m. is too early for small talk and smiles. I enjoy sitting at my kitchen table, reading the paper in silence, then facing the day.
But Karen Schwartzman from the Bank of Boston called and lured me. She said I'd get a chance to meet Margot Stern Strom, who is not only the executive director of Facing History and Ourselves but one of its two founders.
Read MoreI have accepted his words and his love, the way an infant accepts food. I've never wondered at them before. His letters have arrived sometimes in clusters, sometimes separated by weeks. I've relished them all. They are breezy, newsy, funny, warm, full of joy and wonder and life. I've shared them with my husband and children and answered some, but not all.
Read MoreYour column in Wednesday's Globe was impassioned and well-written. You know how to squeeze the most emotion from every word. You're good at what you do. But you don't do much good.
You hate too much. Your words divide. They make the chasm between whites and blacks grow just a little wider. They deviate and they deceive.
Read More"Some of you are saying to yourselves that there is not much that one person can do. But I tell you that together, we can prevail." - Jerry Brown, Oct. 21, 1991, announcement speech.
Politicians dismissed him. The press disparaged him. The pundits - the self-acclaimed experts who make their living telling us what we've just heard and what we should think - totally disregarded him.
Read MoreThere is no warning. The earth doesn't tremble. The sky doesn't darken. A siren doesn't sound so that you can run for cover, so that you can steel yourself for pain.
It's a direct hit every time and the pain is like nothing you've ever felt before. It burns, rips, chokes, suffocates and inundates every limb,every muscle, every cell, every thought, every breath.
It strikes the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives, children, family and friends of 23,000 Americans every year.
The pain doesn't pause. It doesn't sleep. It doesn't abate.
And it never goes away.
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
