The last day of school - summer has begun. No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks.
I wish this were my last day of school. I wish I were 9 or 10 or 11 and had the whole summer off. I want to be bored and hot and suck on ice cubes and read comic books and complain that I have nothing to do.
Read MoreThe facts exclude the faces - old, lined, frightened, weary, faces; gums smooth where teeth used to be; thin hair; knotted hands; parched skin; frail, fragile bodies.
The facts ignore the feelings - feelings of people at the end of their lives, dependent upon others, too poor and too ill to take care of themselves.
The facts are terse and cold.
Read MoreThey wanted me to write about them.
I said no because I generally don't. Really, where's the story, I thought?
I go into schools now and then and talk about how I got started as a writer. I tell a couple dozen kids that if you do something long enough, if you try hard enough, you eventually get better at it.
Read Moret must be a byproduct of age. It must develop like a taste for lobster or pate, or like gray hair, slowly, but inevitably. How else to explain it? When I was young I used to hate working in a garden; now I'm old and I love it. Why?
When I was a child, you couldn't lure me outdoors. My mother tried. She bought me a package of bachelor button seeds and a planter at the five-and-ten and brought in from outdoors a pail full of loam and said, "Here, now you can grow your own garden." She must have believed that once I saw life spring forth from seeds I had personally buried in dirt I would be awed and treasure all life that emerged from the ground. But it didn't work that way. I didn't have any interest in the seeds…
Read More"All we do is argue," the woman tells me over a cup of coffee. Her 16-year-old daughter has just stormed out the front door ("I'm going for a walk.") because her mother suggested in front of "company" that she might want to shut off the TV and go upstairs and clean her room.
"I didn't yell at her," the mother says. "I was simply making a suggestion.
"My daughter and I are like oil and water these days. I tell myself to be calm and patient and understanding. I try to remember how I felt when I was her age. I know I was a slob, too. But it isn't just her room we fight about. It's everything. She looks at me like I'm a fly on her dinner plate. She sighs every time I try to talk to her. She shuts herself in her room and talks on the phone for hours, and I can hear her up there laughing and giggling and having a great time. Then she hangs up and comes downstairs and thumps around here like she's in prison and I'm the guard.
Read MoreThere's this little girl, just 13 months old. Her birthday was Valentine's Day, her father tells the woman next to him. She is toddling around the doctor's waiting room totally unconcerned that everyone else is sitting. She races to the TV, stares at it for a minute, then turns away. She picks up a book she finds on a chair, looks at it, then puts it down. She approaches a stranger, meets the stranger's eyes, grins, then runs back to her father who hasn't for a second taken his eyes off her.
She is a tiny thing, a baby, still bald, the blond fuzz on her head barely visible. She wears pink pants and a teal green sweater and a grin that shows off her teeth. Her mother is in the doctor's office because within weeks she will be having another baby. But it's clear the father is totally enthralled with this one.
Read MoreI embarrassed her the other evening. I didn't mean to. The problem with me is that I look at her and see a child, a little girl, although she is 15 now and hardly a little girl at all.
I walk into a restaurant and there she is, somewhere I don't expect her to be and I give her the third-degree. I say she should have phoned and told me where she was going. I say I don't want her in a car with a driver I don't know. I overreact. I behave like my mother.
Read MoreElaine Maganello, who lived behind the house in which I grew up, and who was a whole year older than I and, therefore, infinitely more mature, told me her Betsy-Wetsy doll, which she took for a walk every day, was real.
And I, of course, believed her.
Read MoreI thought I had gotten past the body thing. I thought I had my priorities straight. Better to work on the mind than the thighs. Better to read a book than work out. Age is a natural part of life, after all. What sense is there in fighting the inevitable?
What's a little cellulite? What are a few sags? What's a dimple or two among friends?
Read MoreMy mother-in-law makes her bed the minute she gets out of it. So does my friend, Anne. Pat keeps Windex and paper towels in the bathroom and wipes down the sink in the morning before she leaves for work. Caryn folds clothes when the dryer buzzes. A different Ann vacuums her garage once a week. Each insists that what she does is easy. "If you make your bed right away, it's done for the day," my mother-in-law likes to say. "Plus it tidies up the room." "If you empty the dryer when it buzzes, then you don't have to iron the clothes," Caryn continually tells me. "It only takes a second. And it saves so much time."
Read MoreMy husband found the "contract" while searching for something else. "Remember this?" he said, handing it to me. I looked at the lined yellow paper and remembered instantly. It was the note my daughter signed last January, the afternoon she got her dog.
"If we get a dog" the note says in my husband's neat handwriting. "Lauren is responsible for:
Walking, feeding and grooming the dog…
Read More“I want my old life back.”
That’s what the woman whispered between sobs.
I heard her, though I was just walking by, walking past, trying not to hear, trying not to look, not to see.
“I want my old life back,” she said again, louder this time, and I stopped walking and looked directly at her, a broken, old woman bent and weeping in a wheelchair.It was a Sunday in February ten years ago and I was at Hollywell Nursing Home in Randolph on a mission looking for help for my own mother, who was not so old but just as broken. I had spent the day visiting nursing homes and even then knew with absolute certainty that this was one of the worst days of my life.
Read MoreFor a month, I drove everyone crazy.
I'd be at a restaurant with my 15-year-old daughter listening to her talk about school and boys, TV and boys, cheering and boys - the usual discourse of 15-year-olds. And in the middle of a story I'd suddenly find that I wasn't listening to her anymore.
Read MoreEvery afternoon she races in from school, raids the refrigerator, then heads for the piano. "So how was your day?" I shout over Jimmy crack corn and I don't care. "Fine," she answers, distracted, immediately lost in the notes of a song she has been drumming on her desk and rehearsing in her head throughout the day. "How'd you do on your vocabulary test?" "We didn't have it. Wanna' hear me play Remington Steele?
Read MoreChange the names and the date; the story is always the same. A boy who is upset is followed to his car by a girl. She tries to calm him down, gets in the front seat and winds up dead. Two teen-agers with fast cars drag to see whose souped-up engine is more powerful and never find out because they die trying. A young, inexperienced driver gets behind the wheel of a car built for speed, takes a corner too fast and…
Read MoreThe Patriot Ledger
Beverly Beckham
1985
What I will always remember about Maureen is that she was a good mother. I didn't know her well. I saw her only at racquetball so she was more acquaintance than friend. Yet, during the five years we played in a women’s league, there developed among a group of us a bond…
Read MoreThe Patriot Ledger
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
