He says not to come and I don't. I respect his wishes because he is my father. He is old and he is sick and he is leaving me. The cancer is killing him and the chemotherapy is its unwitting accomplice. He has been in a hospital for more than a month now. He's a good patient, everyone says. He was a good soldier, too. He doesn't complain and he does what's he told…

Thirteen weeks without writing a column. Without cutting and pasting pieces of life, a thing I did three times a week for much of my life. My grandson, Adam, is asleep upstairs in my house. His mother, my daughter, is in Foxborough waiting to try out for "American Idol." He dreams and so does she…

I took the coaster home and stuck it in my journal, but I didn't tape it in. I like holding it. I like looking at it.

The image on the coaster could be my father. It's circa 1950, a sepia sketch of a police officer, standing alone, straight, serious, hard-brimmed hat, young face, clean shaven, long wool coat, badge over the heart, polished leather shoes…

I've always had trouble with endings. My friend, Anne, gave me a card full of them one Christmas years ago, which she'd cut from newspapers and magazine articles.

“I need an ending,'' I'd said to her at least a hundred times. And so she sent me some: ``And that, folks, is not funny.'' ``Oh, yes, and have a nice day.'' ``Yup. Just like your…

I never would have described Rona Jaffe's 1958 best seller  “The Best of Everything, ''which I read in 1958, as “vintage heavy breathing.''

I don't remember heavy breathing at all or “sweaty, illicit and brain-fogging sex; furtive hotel room trysts; tussles in boardrooms and darkened apartments; and searing emotions…

He loved them instantly, more than all the other wind-up things in the room. He looked at them in wonder, the way his mother did when she was his age. It was the first time I saw the baby she used to be in him…

The pool was full of people when Loretta went under - her mother, her sisters, my husband, our friends. She slipped into the deep end from the shallow end, the drop abrupt. Only my husband saw.

He fished her out and she came up sputtering. She was 9 or 10 at the time. She hadn't screamed or thrashed. If he hadn't been watching…

We never take our eyes off them. Well, sometimes. When we blink. When we sleep.

But all the other times we're watching.

We watched them when they were infants, first in their bassinets, then in their cribs. We watched them in their swings, opening their eyes, looking around…

They are kids. Take away the wheelchairs and ventilators, the crutches, the aides, the letter boards, the speech machines, all the adaptive equipment and what you have is a group of kids hanging out on a spring day waiting for the speeches to end and the fun to begin…

The video tells the story, some of it, anyway. Proms are always magical. Function halls are transformed by balloons and soft lights into ballrooms and kids are transformed, too, by hopes and by dreams. Every girl is a princess on prom night. And every boy is Brad Pitt…

Every Saturday of my youth, from third grade up, winter or summer, rain or shine, my best friend Rosemary and I walked to the Turner Free Library in Randolph where we were allowed to borrow two books, no more. And where, until we were 12, we were confined to the young adult section…

She never had any children, not because she didn't want them but because she couldn't have them. She tried for years, during her 20s and 30s, without success. In the beginning, people would ask her, ``So when are you going to start a family?'' And she would smile and say, ``We're trying…

They are fixtures in your life, people you expect to see when you open a door, round a corner, turn on TV. It seems they have always been there - down the hall, down the street, just a phone call away.  “Hi Dad,'' I've been saying for 58 years, which is not actually always, but is always to me…

They don't watch TV. Their parents won't let them. The babies listen to music, show tunes and kids tunes instead. Except once in a while both children have been seen perched on their fathers' laps mesmerized by the Red Sox. But that's been it. A few innings of baseball. A few hours of Baby Einstein. And the rest of the time the TV…

For a secular world with a short attention span, we've been surprisingly consumed for a solid month with God and, for believers anyway, his representative here on Earth.

First there was Pope John Paul II's illness, which absorbed us. Then his death, which saddened us. Then his funeral, which was the most attended in…

By late Monday afternoon, you see them sprawled all over downtown Boston, wrapped in their Mylar blankets - proud, exhausted, happy, many of them in enormous pain, attempting to navigate subway steps backward.

I don't get it. I've tried. I've talked to friends. Friends of friends. My son. My boss. ``It was amazing,'' they all say. ``It was the best…

The pictures are so old that they're square and fringed in white, blurry silhouettes of my mother and me taken with a Brownie camera in the gloom of a rainy spring day. There we are in front of the Washington Monument. And there we are at the Changing of the Guard…

He used to have his coffee with cream. He drinks it black now - and without the doughnut. He doesn't eat bread, either. Or sweets. And he joined a gym, a place where the owner weighs you in, then watches and critiques your workout.

And he's quitting smoking, down from…

She doesn't look like a victim of sexual abuse. She doesn't look like a woman whose father beat and molested her for five years, from the time she was 3 until she was 8, until the state came and removed her from his home. 

A model, an actress and a screenwriter, Angela Shelton spoke last Wednesday at a dinner to benefit the women at Pine Street…

The news that Peter Jennings has cancer shouldn't come as a shock. Cancer is our number two killer, second only to heart disease. It's everywhere. Babies get it. Old people get it. It doesn't discriminate…