I am trying not to compare. Not stuffing. Not apple pie. Not last year with this year. Not table settings. Not houses. Not family rooms or family dynamics. Not anything. Comparison, I've come to believe, is the eighth deadly sin.
Read MoreThe grandfather is the hero in this story, a humble, hardworking man who dedicated his life to his family, who had no dreams except theirs. "We didn't know," his grandchildren said. They'd heard the tales of his hardships - didn't all grandparents walk to school uphill both ways? - but they hadn't listened. One week ago, at his funeral, they listened and wept. Vincenzo Tagliarini was 13 in 1926 and living in Sicily, the oldest of four when his father died. He became a man overnight. He quit school and took over the family farm. He grew vegetables and olives, not just to eat but to sell. When his sister fell off a horse and died, he helped bury her, then returned to the fields to work.
Read MoreWe remember it differently. Anne says that we went to Story Land on a summer day not more than five years ago. And that we walked around, just the two of us, enjoying the scene. Going there was my idea because I wanted to revisit a place I had come with my parents and my grandmother when I was a child. I don't dispute being with my parents and my grandmother. I wore an aqua-and-white dress, which I hated. I posed with the Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe. I smiled for the camera. This was nearly 50 years ago.
Read MoreA long time ago, when my daughter was 14, she had a homework assignment: Choose six people, dead or alive, real or fictional, with whom you would want to be stuck on a deserted island.I assumed I'd be one of them. Her brother was, and her godfather, and Mary Poppins and Matafu, a resourceful young boy in a book she was reading, and Doogie Howser, a TV doctor.
Read MoreIs this what happens as you age? Does everything new always bring back the memory of something old? Is the past both a minefield and an archeological dig only to those who have lived 40 or 60 or 80 years? Or does this happen to 20-year-olds, too? A puppy makes you think of your old dog young. A birthday brings back other birthdays. A perfect October day makes you think of other October days.
Read MoreIt is a perfect autumn day, late afternoon, and I am in the garage, cleaning. Although maybe "piling" is a better word for what I am doing. Rearranging. Moving things. It's a two-car garage, which means that in theory it can hold two cars. In fact, it never has. Clearing a path through the garage to the back door is my only goal.
Read MoreThere's a dogwood tree in her front yard in Randolph. "It's my Mama's tree," says Michaela, who is 6. "It has all the things my Mama loved. See?" Surrounding it are flowers and in it are Beanie Babies and under it is an engraved stone that reads, simply, Christine. Michaela doesn't remember her mother. She was a baby, just 16 months old, when Christine died. But she talks about her every day. And she prays to her every night. Last week she asked her grandparents who are raising her, "Do you think Mama would be happy with me?"
Read MoreYou try to teach them the eternals, that life is good, and people are kind, and nothing is so bad that you can't get through it. And most days you believe this. But then you replay history, or you watch the news, or you pick up a paper and see the face of yet another person maimed, killed, robbed, blown up, beaten, kidnapped, raped, sick and dying, and you think you're selling your kids a pack of lies.
Read MoreHis name was Barry, and he came to my house to install Comcast digital voice phone service, which I requested because my phone bill is huge, though not as huge as my cable bill, which is outrageous. It costs us a fortune to watch the TV that we used to watch for free.
Read MoreMy father was not overtly, nor even subtly, religious . He hardly ever went to church and I didn't have a sense that he prayed, though at the end of his life he told me that St. Jude was his good buddy. I imagine, though, that he talked to St. Jude in the way he talked to me, not often couching his requests with "please" and "if possible," but stating them directly and firmly as in, "I need you to do this for me." At the end of his life he handed me a crucifix, which he said he carried with him throughout the Second World War.
Read MoreWith the puppy, it was simply a matter of carrying her outside, plunking her on the grass, and letting her do her thing. She was 6 weeks old when we got her and was house-trained in a few weeks. No "how-to" books. No "Ten steps to housebreaking your pooch." And absolutely no guilt that she was too young to introduce to the backyard, or that our approach might cause her irreparable psychological harm.
Read MoreI will tell him tomorrow. I will pick up the phone and call his office and talk to his receptionist and say, "I have to cancel my appointment." And she will say, "When would you like to reschedule?" And I will say . . .
What will I say?
Read MoreI am on the phone with Rosemary, my best friend since second grade. I used to talk to her on the old black phone in the kitchen of the house I grew up in. And she used to talk to me on the old black phone that sat on a table to the left of her front door.
"Want to come over?"
"I'll ask my mother."
Fifty-two years. At least a million conversations. This one is hard. They've all been hard since her son, Mark, left for Iraq.
Read MoreI have it upstairs in a box somewhere, a piece of pink, lined paper filled with writing that's straight up and down. The penmanship struck me as exotic when I first saw it because it wasn't the Palmer Method. It was a combination of printing and art, the f's and g's and p's and q's big and bold and gaudy. The words the letters made were bold, too, because they held up a mirror to my life. This is who you are, the lady who penned them said.
Read Morewasn't wrong about their leaving. My husband kept telling me I was. That it wasn't the end of the world when first one child, then another, and then the last packed her bags and left for college. But it was the end of something. "Can you pick me up, Mom?" "What's for dinner?" "What do you think?”
I was the sun, and they were the planets. And there was life on those planets, whirling, nonstop plans and parties and friends coming and going, and ideas and dreams…
Read MoreEverything about the child is beautiful. She has beautiful hair, beautiful eyes (made even more beautiful by silver glitter she wears on the day we meet), a beautiful smile, and a beautiful soul. You can see a child's soul when they're new. "Where did you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere into the here." So says the poem. But as they age? Souls often hide.
Read MoreMy husband said I should put the bird out of its misery. "It will never fly again. Why are you doing this?" The sparrow, small and frail and biblical, got its neck stuck in the crook of a wrought-iron arm that holds a bird feeder, which I bought last week in a small store in New Hampshire. The feeder, the holder, the bag of special seed were purchased from an old New Englander who's been selling bird food and feeders his whole life. My other feeders are markdowns and seconds. But this was the real thing, "Droll Yankees The World's Best Bird Feeders," a Lexus in my world of Fords. Even the seed was a special blend.
Read MoreI used to have a pet rabbit. I had more than one, actually, though not at the same time. The first was named - no surprise here - Thumper, and lived in a hutch my brand new husband built in our backyard. I used to walk Thumper up and down the street on a short leash meant for a poodle. He was our first official now-we-are-a-couple pet (unless you count Irving, the bird) and when I discovered him dead in his cage one afternoon, I screamed so loud my mother-in-law, who lived next door, came running. A few months later, we got Ovaltine. We found him…
Read MoreThis is the first day of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Bigelow Sahlin Jr.'s officially blessed life together. Yesterday they were married. Today they are married. Already, one night is gone. Already the world has changed, and my friend's son and his new bride have changed, too, in obvious and in imperceptible ways.
Read MoreShe has a face like a torn scone. That's what my mother-in-law would have said. And then she would have let it go. She was not the type of woman who would have spent even a minute of her time trying to get a permanently dour someone to smile. So why can't I let it go? Why do I think that if I work hard enough, if I try just a little more, I'll find underneath this woman's scowl a hint, a glimmer, of a smile?
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