For most of the years I knew him, Al Delcupolo never sat still. He was polishing his car, or sweeping the driveway, or shoveling snow, or hosing down his lawnmower, or cleaning the gutters, or digging, or climbing, or hacking at some shrub, or up on his roof - a thing that drove his wife, Katherine, and me crazy.
He wasn't a spring chicken. He was in his 60s and then in his 70s and still climbing ladders.
Read MoreHe loved her and she loved him. It is that simple. It was love at first sight and love at every sight for nearly nine years. A fairy tale. A legend. Too good to be true, but it was true.
Al wasn’t her grandfather, but you don’t have to be a grandfather to love and be loved like one. Al wasn’t even Lucy’s uncle, or a long distance cousin. He was simply Al – neighbor, friend,…
Read MoreWhen a doctor at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia told New Jersey mother Chrissy Rivera last month that her 3-year-old daughter was ineligible for a kidney transplant, she was incredulous and furious.
``Did you just say that Amelia shouldn't have the transplant done because she is mentally retarded. I am confused. Did you really just say that?'' she wrote in her blog on wolfhirschhorn.org describing the meeting.
Read More"You have hair like an old lady," my four-year-old granddaughter said to me one day last month. It was a simple observation, not a judgment. No negativity implied. Charlotte and I were at my kitchen table sitting side-by-side making a birthday card for her mother, when she looked at me and made this totally innocent, out-of-the-mouths-of-babes…
Read Moret's young love that songwriters go on about and that filmmakers explore, young love that propels poetry and novels and myths and fairy tales. Romeo and Juliet. Antony and Cleopatra. Lancelot and Guinevere. Jack and Rose (Remember ``Titanic''?). And, of course, today's most popular young couple, “Twilight’s” Edward and Bella.
Young love, just out of the gate with its longings…
Read MoreI said it didn't matter. And I'd convinced myself that it didn't. So had my daughter, Lauren. We both insisted it was no big deal.
My granddaughter, Lucy, would be going to the Dean S. Luce School for first grade. Not John F. Kennedy, the closer neighborhood school where her mother and aunt and uncle had all gone, which she could walk to by herself when she got a little older, where the whole family had sat through dozens of plays and concerts and "bring your parents to lunch" days…
Read MoreIt wasn’t supposed to end like this. Not after all they have been through. Not after all the hope and prayers and therapies and people storming the heavens. If you have faith the size of a mustard seed nothing will be impossible to you. That’s what we’re told. They had faith. And they didn’t want to move anything as big as a mountain. All they wanted was to save a child, their child, to make their child well…
Read MorePlanting bulbs is an act of faith. You dig holes, take some dry, scaly ugly things out of a paper bag, place them right side up in the holes, cover them with dirt, watch rain and snow and ice entomb them. And you wait and wait and wait, believing they will transform themselves into things of beauty. When I was a kid, one of my favorite ``Superman'' episodes - the old black-and-white half-hour show starring George Reeves - showed the Man of Steel holding a piece of coal in his hand and squeezing it, turning the coal, in seconds, into a diamond. That's what the Earth does, Superman explained, only it takes the Earth a million years. This was magic to me…
Read MoreMy father called at the crack of dawn the day I turned 40. "Good morning, daughter,' he said, the way he always did, preferring "daughter' to "Beverly' because, as he liked to remind me, I was Beverly to a lot of people, but nobody's daughter but his…
Read MoreThey came from short and long distances to meet him. They came before work and after work, and in between commitments and appointments and all the things that everyone has to do every day. They stopped doing these things, took a break, and showed up at my door smiling, walked in, sat down, held out their arms and oohed and aahed…
Read MoreMy role models, “long ago in the last century,” as my grandson loves to say, were saints and movie stars. Joan of Arc and Debbie Reynolds topped on my list because they both suffered pain and hardship, one for the love of God, (Joan of Arc was burned at the stake) the other for the love of a great singer. (“Any Time” is a really fantastic song but Debbie Reynolds was burned by…
Read MoreI have a picture of Adam taken in April seconds before he blew out the candles on his birthday cake. It's a photo I keep going back to because he is pure child in it, bright-eyed and full of wonder and innocence.
Sometimes it hurts to look at it.
And yet I keep on looking.
Read MoreHow is it a woman can live for 98 years, be a war hero decorated by five countries (England, France, the United States, Australia and New Zealand), write a book about her experiences (``The White Mouse''), have many books written about her ( ``Nancy Wake: A Biography of Our Greatest War Heroine,'' Peter Fitzsimons; ``Nancy Wake: SOE's Greatest Heroine,'' Russell Braddon), inspire a movie (''Charlotte Gray,'' starring Cate Blanchett), yet die unrecognized by a nation full of people who know the most trivial things about the most trivial people? (Think ``Jersey Shore's'' Snooki.)…
Read MoreOn July 15, the magazine GQ proclaimed on its website that the people of Boston are the worst dressed in the country.
This should have been a lighthearted summer story, raising ire and eyebrows, but with a wink, too. We're just teasing, Boston. We just want you and everyone else to read our magazine!
But what was silly turned serious when writer John B. Thompson, in a poor attempt at humor, penned these words: ``Due to so much local inbreeding, Boston suffers from a kind of Style Down Syndrome, where a little extra ends up ruining everything.''
Read MoreAdam is seven and Charlotte just turned four. Last week, for the first time, the three of us played War.
Adam's an old hand at the game. He knows that a Queen beats a Jack and a King beats a Queen and that triple war is so much fun. War, for him, is a piece of cake…
Read MoreI haven't tended my garden this year. Spring came and went and because it was always raining, I didn't prune or weed or mulch. Summer followed spring, and the rain stopped, but still I didn't go in search of my gardening gloves.
A few weeks ago, only because we were having house guests, I grabbed my favorite spade, my trusty hoe, and some well-worn clippers and went to work hacking away at overgrown bushes and at a weed/vine tenacious thing that every year tries to strangle whatever else is in bloom. I yanked and pulled and…
Read MoreI used to see my grandson Adam every day. When he was less than a month old, he and his parents moved from their tiny New York City apartment back to the suburbs, and while they were house hunting, they lived with my husband and me…
Read MoreBack in the early 1990s, before the priest scandal and the shutting down of Catholic churches and Catholic minds, the Roman Catholic Church paid for newspaper and radio ads inviting lapsed Catholics to come back to a kinder and gentler church. ``Rediscover the Catholic Church'' was a revolutionary reaching out to Catholics who - because they were divorced…
Read MoreI can see it from her point of view. Literally. I walk into the bathroom, kneel down, look up, and the cow on the wall does appear to be glaring at me.
"I no like. I 'fraid," Charlotte says, beeline-ing it past this bathroom and actually detouring — walking through the dining room and living room — to get to the steps that lead upstairs…
Read MoreSometimes I think it’s as simple as this: Lucy was born on the wrong planet. There was a mix-up in Paradise and she got on the wrong shuttle and ended up here on Earth instead of in some galaxy a trillion miles away where everyone is like her….
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