He had a loud voice, something that normally would have made me cringe. A loud talker on an airplane is always annoying. And when the loud talker is in the row opposite you? And the flight is nearly full and there is nowhere to run? This is a prescription for a long flight.

But this loud talker wasn't a business person on a cellphone, making sure you hear every word. Or some teenager bragging to a friend "So she was, like, amazing, you know?" wanting attention, wanting to be overheard. This loud talker was a boy of 8 or 9 who wanted the attention not of all the people around him but of the one person who mattered most to him: his father…

A woman is tormented by footsteps in the apartment above hers. She pounds on her ceiling with a broom. She screams "Shut up!" out the window. Finally, she runs up the stairs, broom in hand, to confront whatever monster is above her, infringing on her quiet. What she sees makes her stop in her tracks. "He's the one making my ceiling shake?" she asks, incredulous, her anger melting like snow on a coat…

My husband was always the keeper of the lights. For 30 years, he strung them wherever I saw fit in the front yard on everything green, in the backyard on a skinny dogwood, on a small Christmas tree that we put on the deck, inside on a big tree, over the mantle, and above the sliding glass door…

We are older now than we ever dreamed we'd be, Rosemary and I. When we were children, best friends forever, Rose pricking her finger to seal the vow, me chickening out, we imagined a lot of things. But never this. Grandparents were what we had, not what we would grow up to be. It wasn't conceivable that we could be so old…

The words are ugly in the 1952 Funk & Wagnalls Standard Encyclopedia. Trisomy 21, called Down syndrome now, was called mongolism then, and the description of the condition was graphic and cruel and wrong….

It was the Sunday before Halloween and the children came to church dressed not as ninjas or vixens but as saints. They'd been asked to do this and dozens did, young kids and older ones, arriving in flowing robes and sandals; and the priest invited them all up to the altar. "Can you tell us a little about your saint?" he asked. And the children…

They sit in their homes and tell their stories and show you photographs and sometimes they show you their child's room. Books. Trophies. Posters. Clothes in the closet. Shoes on the floor. Things are all they have left. And their stories run in the papers. And on the news. And into each…

It wasn't intentional, the juxtaposition of an old man dying underneath a picture of an old man young. A grainy black-and-white, the picture was part of a collage that hung on a wall with other photos and plaques. It was hardly noticed when the room was my father's den, before it became the place where he would die…

He was 19 and his name was Shayne Cabino and he lived in my town and he was killed on Oct. 6 in Iraq, one of at least 1,965 members of the US military now dead since the war began.

Cabino's family, too distraught to talk, held a news conference at the Canton police station, where a friend read a statement saying that…

It's the silliest, most superfluous thing: a big, stuffed, standing-up, udders-hanging, tan-and-white toy cow that does nothing. It doesn't moo. It doesn't give milk. It doesn't even twitch its tail. 

Who needs a thing like this?

The cow lived for a long time in a hospital gift shop…

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…

It was called the "The 200 Club" and to be a member was simple: All you had to do was graduate at the bottom of your class. There were about 40 of us in this self-appointed, self-denigrating group in May 1964. I remember worrying that we would be called up to graduate in order of class rank…