They wanted an apology. As much as they needed the man who killed Christine Griffiths punished and put away, they needed his remorse, too. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. I wish I could take it back." They ached for this. But what they got was a man who refused to even look at them, who kept his head bowed and his eyes lowered as one by one they took the stand and talked about a young woman each of them had loved…
Read More"The Dairy Queen has, what do you call those things?" Ron asks his wife of 36 years.
"McFlurries?"
"No. No. It's a 'd' word."
"T? Tiramisu?"
"Not 't,' Maryann! 'D.' " Ron and Maryann are visiting from Alabama. They are in the family room sitting on the couch eating Healthy Choice Coffee Almond Fudge ice cream. The Healthy Choice apparently has triggered memories of a less healthy choice. The subject of the Dairy Queen has come out of nowhere.
Read MoreHer paws are more white than black these days, and her muzzle is white and the place on her belly where she loves to be scratched is all white, too. My dog is old.
She sleeps most of the day, waking only to bark at the mailman, to wag and woof at anyone who comes to the door, and to indulge in her favorite pastime, which is, of course, eating. Molly loves food - all food. When I open the refrigerator, no matter if she is half a house away and in a dead sleep, she comes running. At least she tries to run…
Read MoreSomewhere, on an old home movie, still on a reel, are seconds of Amy doing cartwheels in my garage. The film is dark, so her face is hidden. But you can see clearly her small, thin body, her short, straight hair and her dark-rimmed glasses, which, even when she wasn't doing cartwheels, were always slipping down her face. Amy did cartwheels the way she did everything, as if she had to do as many as she could, while she could. As if she knew she had to set records in record time…
Read MoreIf life is a train ride, with all of us on our own, each in individual cars, bumping and chugging and sometimes careening down the tracks, then my time with Wilmha was a series of quick but welcome visits that happened many miles and many years ago. We were in the middle of our ride when we met, the theoretical middle, miles of life already lived and, barring cataclysm, miles more to go.
Read MoreMy father was sick last week. The heat ambushed him. He has never been able to tolerate heat. He blames the malaria he had in the war for this. Before Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower marched him through Africa, he was fine, he says. After the war, he wasn't. The heat, since, has always slowed him down.
But it has never stopped him before.
Read MoreOf course he was telling me a better way to prune the rose bush. That's what he does. He's Mr. I Have a Better Way of Doing Everything, a man with vision, practical in his assessments and, as he likes to remind me, always on target with his recommendations. "Just get a saw and get rid of the whole bush," he said last Sunday afternoon as I belatedly attempted to tend to a wild mass of dead wood and thorns that I hadn't bothered to look at all year. I had killed my rose bush with inattention and was now determined to bring it back to life with a little pruning, a little Miracle Grow and a lot of love…
Read MoreAunt Mary wasn't my aunt. But that's what I called her. That's what most everyone who met her through her nephew, George, called her.
"This is my Aunt Mary," he'd say. And the name stuck, for it was a perfect fit for a woman who was like a favorite aunt - the one who always likes what you're wearing and praises your food and admires what you've done to your house and tells you you have nice children, even on days when they're not being so nice.
Read MoreChildren's cards are the best. The ones made of construction paper and glue, signed in crayon by a child's small hand. TO THE BEST MOTHER IN THE HOLE WIDE WORLD. HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY…
Read MoreHe's been grown and gone for so long that sometimes I think I dreamed him. Even his room is kind of gone - the striped gold wallpaper scraped off years ago, the trophies on his bureau, the signed baseballs, the football pennants, all stuffed in a box somewhere. Now the walls are painted yellow and the comforter is white and the curtains are lace…
Read MoreI didn't expect to see the tulips bloom this spring. Planting them was an act of faith. I dug 100 holes in a patch of dirt in my front yard, placed a bulb in each, shoveled dirt over them, watered them, then forgot about them. Maybe they would survive the winter. Maybe they wouldn't. After Sept. 11, everything was a maybe.
Read MoreWhile delegates from 57 Muslim nations sit around in Malaysia trying to come up with a definition of terrorism - using human beings as bombs to blow apart civilians is, most of them say, mere freedom fighting - the truth, as usual, gets buried under words. The truth is simple. Life is precious. Life is a gift. Life should be safeguarded, not sacrificed. So why isn't the preservation of human life the subject of the day instead of the ongoing rationalization for yet more murder?
Read MoreYou wonder what makes an ordinary day stand out in memory. Who takes the mental snapshots that we see when we look back through time? There are no real snapshots recording the day, because there was nothing special about it. Nothing special at all.
Read MoreThirty-four years ago my husband and I stood at the altar at St. Bernadette's Church in Randolph and before God and friends promised to love one another until death did us part.
Death was something straight out of the movies back then, drama relegated to the final scene. So were the words: "To have and to hold, from this day forth."
I was 20. The groom was 21. Our favorite song was the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice" ("if we were married").
Read MoreThe five of them were talking about a restaurant we had eaten in last year.
"It was across from Pat O'Brien's," one of them said.
"It had all that chrome going on."
"We ate breakfast there two mornings."
"And you got french toast and bacon both times," Maryanne told me.
They remembered but I didn't. It was gone, a restaurant and two mornings.
Read MoreI phoned her for another reason, but there is no other reason for Jill these days. All talk leads to Tara.
"In 40 days Tara will be married," she said, not in a forlorn, I'm-losing-her way. But with wonder. Forty days, can you believe it?
Jill has always talked with wonder about Tara.
Read MoreIt's all going back to the way it was before September 11th. But how can it?
Is this our fate? Court TV and celebrity news and issues we knew four short months ago were a waste of time are still a waste of time.
Thomas Junta has been charged with beating his son's hockey coach, Michael Costin, to death at the Burlington Ice Arena in Reading 18 months ago. This 275-pound man allegedly smashed the head of the 150-pound Costin against the ground until Costin lost consciousness. What more do we need to know?
So why the national coverage? Why the day-to-day dissection of anger gone awry? Why the news updates, the talk-show discussions, the media frenzy about what is indisputably a horrific crime, but not, as some would have it, a trend? Will we be better people for having watched this sideshow?
Read MoreHe can't talk about it. Not now. The pain is too new. Harry Hewitt saw his wife killed last Saturday night. "I was right there," he says.
Right behind her as she traveled home from a dinner the two had shared.
rRight behind her, driving his car because she had cashiered at Wal-Mart that day and he had met her after and taken her to eat and then dropped her back at her car.d
Read MoreI saw my neighbor, Al, sitting in his driveway, propped up against his wheelbarrow, still as stone. I thought he was dead. Who sits in a driveway? Who puts down his rake or climbs off a ladder or stops mowing his lawn to rest for 10 minutes, to close his eyes and drop his head and let his body go limp and do absolutely nothing? Al does. And he's taught his big black dog Dante to do the same.
Read MoreI was thinking Sunday, as I was reading the papers, giving most of my attention to the pile of flashy, color flyers packed with things to buy, things to give, things that promise to make an old-fashioned Christmas - so much more pleasant than the news - that this is what happened to the Jews in Germany. They didn't pay attention, either. They sat among their families, buffered by them, and pushed away the world, deluded into thinking that what was happening outside their doors could never happen to them.
They were preoccupied, as we are, with life, with celebrations, with birthdays, graduations, and holidays. Our personal lives brim with these small, good, wonderful things.
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