A giving heart takes a worrisome pause

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A giving heart takes a worrisome pause

watch him all the time. He is my entertainment and my muse. For years, I'd come into my office, glance out my window and across the street and there would be Al, buffing his car, scrubbing his gutters, mowing his lawn, trimming, digging, raking, painting, hammering, hosing, chipping, shoveling, season after season, always doing something. Or he would be walking Dante, his wife Katherine's big black dog, smiling and talking to everyone he met along the way…

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A grandmother is born

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A grandmother is born

I can’t stop thinking about my friend Jill’s new grandson. I look at his photo and smile. I speak his name - Chase Henry – just to say it. And I tell people – neighbors, friends, people at the gym, strangers in line at the deli - about this little boy, whom no one has met yet, but who is already, totally loved. “It isn’t official, but here’s our baby BOY!” Jill’s daughter e-mailed. The phone call she’d been waiting for had finally come. After years that felt like decades, Tara and her husband Rob are at long last parents-in-waiting.

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Don't Leave Your Past Untold

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Don't Leave Your Past Untold

They told their stories and I listened. But I'd heard them before and I knew I'd hear them again, so there was no need to pay strict attention to details, to memorize names and dates, to note the people and the cities they mentioned.

For the stories were predictable, like songs on a radio. You could count on them the way you can count on hearing "Dancing Queen" when you're driving and switching stations. My mother-in-law, my father, my Aunt Lorraine - each of them regaled me with tales that I didn't write down because I didn't think I had to. Because all I had to do was nudge them and say, "Can you tell me that story again?"

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