Tuesday, June 8: I am at my computer moving words around a screen, but not seeing them. My mind is fixed on three people I know, at three different hospitals, all seeing doctors, all undergoing tests and procedures, all doing battle with cancer.
Caryn is having a check-up. She's examined every six months now. Three and a half years ago she found a lump, was diagnosed, had surgery and months of radiation and chemotherapy.
Read MoreCeleste House is quiet these days. The old convent, converted four years ago into a home for recovering homeless substance-abusing women and their children, is closing shop.
Most of the beds on the second floor have been stripped clean. Photographs that once covered the walls are gone. In the playroom there is just one child, for only one mother remains here. All the others have been transferred to other homes for substance-abusing women throughout the state.
Read MoreIt is an idea born of frustration, holding parents criminally accountable for their children's violent actions. But Mayor Ray Flynn, fed up with violence, as are we all, is advocating just that: punishing parents who fail to keep guns out of their children's hands.
Last week he ordered Boston Police Commissioner Mickey Roache to convene a task force to draft legislation that would penalize parents whose children carry guns. Should the plan win final approval, it would affect only those living within city limits.
Read MoreLet me see if I've got this straight: I live in a country in which it's perfectly OK for college professors speaking in classrooms or graduations or anywhere else they choose, to promote hate and racism; but where clergy are warned, when they take the podium at school events, that if they say the G word they're breaking the law.
No wonder this country is so messed up.
Read MoreIt isn't news anymore, because it isn't new. It's a fact of life. Bad service is standard. Good service is rare. And it's getting rarer every day.
You walk into a store in search of a particular item and you see salespeople, but they're talking to one another. They ignore you. You wander from rack to rack - it's obvious you're looking for something - but no one comes near you. The salespeople continue to talk.
eopSo you leave. You go to another store. But it's the same there. Salespeople standing around neglecting customers.p
Read MoreI read a few weeks ago that the hottest home videos these days are the X-rated kind. Absolutely normal Americans are setting up cameras and performing all kinds of sex acts for the not-so-private eye, then selling these feats of fancy so that others can observe and maybe get in the act, too.
There was no hint, of course, that this behavior might be slightly abhorrent. There was not a single syllable of moral wrestling in the piece. It was straight news. This is what people are doing.
Read MoreSo, how long have we been listening to our politicians pontificate about "family values?"
The phrase has been on everyone's lips for the past year, but the concept has existed forever. The family - it's sacrosanct. It's the bedrock of the nation. If we could get the family back together, make it strong, then the country would follow.
Read MoreThey come and they go - the murdered and the murderers. They fill the front page for a day or two. They lead the nightly news. And then they disappear.
The next day brings different faces, but the same story, the same tragedies.
You think, at the time, I will remember this one. I will remember Kimberly Ray Harbor and Charles Serjeant and Melissa Benoit and Robyn Dabrowski for the rest of my life.
Read MorePeople lie. This is fact. You lie. I lie. We all lie.
"Thank you very much," we might say to a rude young woman who begrudgingly slices us a half-pound of white American cheese, wraps it in waxed paper and thrusts it at us, all the while huffing and puffing as if we had asked her to change a flat tire in the middle of a highway in the middle of a storm.
Read MorePeople seldom mean these things. They don't see the harm in them. They are just words, expressions; in some cases, traditions.
For example: Once upon a time on the Massachusetts Turnpike, the little Pilgrim, which is embossed on Turnpike signs, had an arrow going through its hat. It wasn't until American Indians objected - as well they should have - that thepeople who approved the sign actually saw how demeaning and how stereotypical this image was.
Read MoreCat made it sound quite aboveboard. Purely educational. AIDS Awareness Trading Cards, featuring people with AIDS, hotline numbers, plus a condom instead of bubble gum in each package, she explained long distance from Eclipse Comics in Forestville, Calif., were designed to educate people and to help stop AIDS.
Cat edited these cards, and she's proud of them. There are 110 in all and they sell for just 99 cents for a pack of 12. They don't just feature people who've died of AIDS. There are AIDS Facts cards, and AIDS Myths cards, and cards showing the Demographics of AIDS, the effect of AIDS on the world, descriptions of other sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis and herpes, as well as the AIDS hotline numbers for 25 major U.S. cities.
They are not, as you can see, kid's play.
Read MoreIt's all about money. That's what it has been about from day one - money saved, money earned, money pocketed by corporate executives, money reaped to make shareholders smile.
Dollar signs filled the headlines last week.
Read MoreYou would think it was this great, magnanimous thing. "Family leave" - it has the ring of a papal dispensation. It has the sound of charity.
But it is neither. The much-debated bill finally working its way through Congress is crumbs from the table. It's much ado about nothing. Workers, primarily women, if the great and glorious Senate approves and the president signs, will be entitled to take off 12 whole weeks from work without pay to stay home and care for their infants.
Read MoreOK, all you professional communicators out there - television anchors and personalities, reporters, columnists, entertainers, satirists, humorists, big shots and little shots alike - raise your right hand and repeat after me:
"I will lay off Chelsea Clinton for the next four years. I will not say or write or even intimate anything negative about her. I will not undermine her, ridicule her or go for a laugh at her expense, either in print or on film.
"I will treat her as if she were my 12-year-old daughter, tenderly, aware that 12 is a tough age to be and that 13 isn't much better, and 14 and 15 are no prizes either, and even an unintentional comment, even a pair of seemingly harmless words such as `frizzy hair' can make a young girl sob and inflict a wound that hurts for a lifetime."
Read MoreIt's the first capitulation. Totally understandable. Maybe even warranted. But it's a surrender, nonetheless, of ideals and perhaps even goals.
President-elect Bill Clinton has decided to send his only child, Chelsea, to private school. Who can blame him? Who, in his position, wouldn't do the same? He is the president. She is his daughter. Why shouldn't she have the best?
Read MoreThe positioning of the trivial with the tragic distorts both, takes what is important and what is fluff, puts them into a blender and mixes them up. Makes it impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Newsweek is a perfect example. On the cover of the Jan. 4 issue there is a photo of two young girls crying, and this headline: "A Pattern of Rape - War Crimes in Bosnia." Open the magazine, though, and what do you see? A two-page spread for asprin-free Bayer Select. People in pain, now pain-free because of Bayer. A page later there is the table of contents, which is itself a mishmash of serious and frivolous:
Read MoreA little house-cleaning before the new year begins. Way back in September, I wrote a what-do-you-think column. Who, I asked, has made the greatest contribution to the 20th century?
People I had already spoken with had mentioned Gandhi, Pope John XXIII, John Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, Jonas Salk, Henry Ford, Mother Teresa, and Albert Schweitzer. I gave my vote to Walt Disney. But I wanted to know what you thought, and I asked you to write. And you did.
Read MoreUsually I read these things and take them for what they are: a warning that once I would have memorized, but that now I just peruse. I don't have little kids anymore. I don't need to worry about toy safety.
But the story was about Fisher Price's Little People and though it has been years since I picked up the cow and put him back in his barn, and arranged the plastic children in their swings, I finished the article because of all the toys my children had, Fisher Price Little People were my favorite. Even the words on a printed page evoke nostalgia.
Read MoreYou have to see this through three sets of eyes.
There's Frankie Rodriguez, 19, hot stuff, a right-handed pitcher last season for the Red Sox' Single-A Carolina League affiliate in Lynchburg, Va. Scouts look at him and see the majors. His career prospects are soaring. He can taste success.
Of course, he attracts fans. Young, pretty girls cheer him on the field and wait for him after the game. He has his choice. On the night of Aug. 24, he gives a pair of girls who've followed him from game to game all summer long, a ride home. One of the girls says she doesn't want to go home, that she'd rather go to Rodriguez's apartment instead. When she gets there, she asks her friend to leave Rodriguez's bedroom so that they can have sex. Afterward, he drives both girls home.
Read MoreRosemary calls for directions Sunday afternoon as I'm sitting at the kitchen table clipping a story about "smart cars."
Smart cars - as opposed to dumb cars - are automobiles which have built-in computerized road maps on their dashboards. Little sensors in the car's wheels actually measure distance traveled and a built-in magnetic compass instructs the driver of a car, in an R2D2 voice, how to get from point A to point B.
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