Penny for Your Memories? Treasure Your Coins for Now

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Penny for Your Memories? Treasure Your Coins for Now

When I was in seventh grade, I memorized “If” by Rudyard Kipling because the Sisters of Notre Dame required us to memorize poems. Kipling wrote “If” to his son, Sister said, to teach him about the importance of picking yourself up and dusting yourself off whenever life throws you a curve. If you can “. . . watch the things you gave your life to, broken. And stoop and build ‘em up with worn out tools,” is a line I didn’t pay much attention to when I was young, but…

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Memory of a Christmas Gift Is a Grand Gift Itself

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Memory of a Christmas Gift Is a Grand Gift Itself

It’s something I think of every Christmas and I don’t know why. I am sitting on the couch in my in-laws’ living room. I don’t remember the couch, though I should. I sat on it dozens of times. I am sitting on the end, in the corner, close to the dining room. My sister-in-law, Janet, is sitting on a chair to the left of me.

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A Childhood Bond That Recalls a Sweet Boy’s Smile

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A Childhood Bond That Recalls a Sweet Boy’s Smile

I don’t know if, when you’re in second grade, you can actually want to be someone else, erase who you are and become that other. Maybe what’s truer is that you want to stay who you are, but embellish yourself somehow, like store-wrapped chicken pounded and garnished, chicken still, but fancy now, dressed up as chicken piccata. Rosemary Jablonski was my chicken piccata…

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On first school day, a flood of memories

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'It's one of those days you talk about when they are babies. . . . "She will be in 1st grade when he is in 4th.' "

This is what my daughter Julie wrote on her Facebook page last week under the pictures of her children, Adam and Charlotte, posing in their front yard on the first day of school.

Facebook was full of pictures of big and little kids shyly grinning and of moms and dads writing "Look who's excited to start her first day of school!" and "Yes, that is a tie!" and "Where does it go? Feeling old!"

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Christmases That Live Dimly in Memory

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The manger was my mother's. But I hadn't thought about its history for a long, long time, because the figurines Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus and the wise men and the sheep and the cow and the horse and the angels are mine, bought over decades, all porcelain, all white, the small, wooden manger the sole thing that was hers. It's in the background of a picture I keep on my desk all year long…

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Once Again, The Best Tree Ever

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n the beginning, the trees were rag-tag things, missing more limbs than they had. Even Charlie Brown wouldn't have bothered with them.

But my father always did. He'd come home on a December night, a man with a mission, dragging in a long, skinny sapling, branches awry, half its needles frozen, the other half gone. "It's ugly," my mother and I would say. "It's a work in progress," he'd announce, then go get…

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Memo to the kids: Call home

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Memo to the kids: Call home

It was magical, the old telephone. It rang and you raced to it and picked it up and said ``hello?'' and someone - a friend, a neighbor, sometimes someone far away in another state - said ``hello'' back. And you got excited, hearing a certain voice, thrilled and surprised when it was your best friend calling, or a boy you just met, because the phone ringing was like a knock on a door or a gift-wrapped present. Always a mystery.

It was practical, too. ``I lost my homework page. Can you read me the questions?'' ``Want to go to the movies on Saturday?'' ``My mother said she'd pick us up after play practice tomorrow.'' And bingo, just like that, schedules were confirmed and problems solved.

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In a forgotten photo, a mother's happy face

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In a forgotten photo, a mother's happy face

I had two mothers. That's what I've long thought.

The first was young and spry and pretty and hip. She sang and she danced and she loved old movies and show tunes and big hats and Johnny Carson.

The other mother was head-injured and infirm. A fall made her old. A fall took away all her prettiness. Before she fell, my mother was one person. After she fell, she was another. I knew both, I loved both, so I thought I knew her.

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Out of the blue, a memory she never knew she had

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Out of the blue, a memory she never knew she had

She 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.

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On the brother she never knew

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On the brother she never knew

In the end, after a few hours, a few months, I dismiss these things. Chalk them up, as Ebenezer Scrooge did, to ``an undigested piece of beef.'' The butterfly that shadowed me the day after my father died. The bird that found a crack in a window and flew into my house after my mother died. Messengers, at first. But in time, simply a butterfly, simply a bird.

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Conjuring up images of the past

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Conjuring up images of the past

It 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…

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A land of fairy tales and memories

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We wore dresses - my grandmother, my mother, and I. My grandmother's was frilly and swirled when she walked. My mother's was light brown, a color she seldom wore but wore well. And mine was turquoise with puff sleeves, a cinched waist, and a white mock-apron top, which I thought was very Heidi-like.

I was into Heidi back then.

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I'm sure she knows I loved her

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I'm sure she knows I loved her

She died on a Monday in September between a weekend when my son was home and a Tuesday night pizza party. The sun didn't blink; the world didn't pause. Nothing happened - there was no presentiment of change, not even a flicker of feelings to make me think of her, my long ago friend, a woman I loved, a woman who was good to me, passing through and by and on. Flo Grossman died on Sept. 25 and I didn't know until Dec. 19. How can this be? The world should have felt different that Monday - slighter, duller, because the space filled by a vibrant life was suddenly left vacant.

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When memories are merely jogging in place

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When memories are merely jogging in place

We 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.

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Something new is reminder of something old

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Something new is reminder of something old

Is 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.

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FIND YOURSELF BY LOOKING INSIDE

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I 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.

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ALONE WITH MOTHER'S MEMORY

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ALONE WITH MOTHER'S MEMORY

I thought it was the rain, long days of it. No sunshine. No color. I thought, I'll be fine when the rain stops. But when it stopped, finally, last Monday and the sky brightened for a while, I wasn't fine. It was June 5, my mother's birthday, and though she has been absent from this life for many years, the lack of her felt new, my loss startling, like walking into a familiar room and banging into a glass door.

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