They weren't fishbowls, though that's how I remember them; two, clear glass tubs full of white paper strips that held my youngest daughter's dreams. She was 16 and we were in New York City for six weeks, subletting an apartment because she'd been admitted to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts for a summer program, and I wouldn't let her go alone…
Read MoreAll I want is to be outside. I want to cut the grass and prune the bushes and dig up the ugly ground cover I planted last year that is brown and straggly and taking over the world. I want to rake up the dead leaves and chop down dead bushes and cut back the hydrangeas and plant coreopses and turn on the hose and revel in this most welcome late-blooming, finally burgeoning, amazingly gorgeous spring. A half-hour. One hour at the most. Then I'll come in and do all I have to do. I'll rake just one flower bed. I'll pull just a few weeds. I'll be finished by nine. It won't even make a dent in my day.
Read MoreMy husband says I would know if I swallowed an ant. I'm not so sure. Right up until the ant, it had been a perfect day. Sunshine. Warmth. I got to play in my garden for the first time in so long that I had forgotten how the earth smells in spring: new like the top of an infant's head; fresh, like my dog Molly's breath when we first met her, when she was just 6 weeks old…
Read MoreAmazing things have happened in the 2,000 years since Jesus Christ lived. But none compares with what Christianity celebrates today.
Eternal life. That's what Easter is about. Not fancy hats or frilly dresses or Cadbury eggs or lilies or bunnies or patent leather shoes or Easter egg hunts or even family get-togethers.
Easter is about all that cannot be seen.
Read MoreA few days ago, six of us were eating and talking about Rob Portman, the US senator from Ohio who had just announced that after a lifetime of opposing gay marriage, he had changed his mind.
His son had come out, and he had given gay marriage more thought, and I was dissing him for this, not for his change of opinion but for seeing the light only because his son, not someone else's, was gay.
And that's when my friend and teacher John O'Neil made me see the light. "It takes a face to change a heart," he said quietly.
Read MoreI had a moment last week. It was my youngest child's 36th birthday not a benchmark, I know. Not 16 or 21 or 30 or 40. But startling nonetheless. All the numbers are: Friends' ages. Years married. Years out of high school. The year 2013.
If the devil himself had appeared at my door in those few minutes when I was trying to figure out exactly how my baby got to be 36, I would have…
Read MoreThe pictures are ordinary. There's Lucy in front of Cinderella's castle. There's Lucy on the Dumbo ride. There's Lucy standing next to Prince Charming.
These are shots that everyone takes. "Stop. Look at me. Say 'cheese!' "
Read MoreEvery Wednesday night, at 11 o'clock, sometimes a little after, in a little room in a little club on Columbus Avenue in Boston, pianist Michael Kreutz plays his closing number, "What I Did for Love," a song from the hit musical "A Chorus Line."
Wednesday is show-tune night at the Napoleon Room at Club Cafe, and for three hours Kreutz sings and plays and other people get up and sing, so many faces and voices familiar, but always some new ones, too, every week different.
Read MoreEvery Wednesday night, at 11 o'clock, sometimes a little after, in a little room in a little club on Columbus Avenue in Boston, pianist Michael Kreutz plays his closing number, "What I Did for Love," a song from the hit musical "A Chorus Line." Wednesday is show-tune night at the Napoleon Room at Club Cafe, and for three hours…
Read MoreThere are no words. Yet there are only words. Tragic. Inexplicable. Carnage. Babies. Heroes.
We use words to make sense of the senseless. Charlotte Helen Bacon, 6, wanted to be a veterinarian. Daniel Gerard Barden, 7, was always smiling…
Read MoreMy husband jokes, "The cows know the songs by now." He's referring to a scene in the movie "City Slickers" in which Billy Crystal is trying to explain the basics of VCR recording to a friend who isn't catching on. The two of them are on horseback, driving cattle, trotting along, and a rider behind them, who has been listening, shouts: "He doesn't get it! He'll never get it. It's been four hours! The cows can tape something by now." And so it is with me and singing…
Read MoreThe manger was my mother's. But I hadn't thought about its history for a long, long time, because the figurines Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus and the wise men and the sheep and the cow and the horse and the angels are mine, bought over decades, all porcelain, all white, the small, wooden manger the sole thing that was hers. It's in the background of a picture I keep on my desk all year long…
Read Moren the beginning, the trees were rag-tag things, missing more limbs than they had. Even Charlie Brown wouldn't have bothered with them.
But my father always did. He'd come home on a December night, a man with a mission, dragging in a long, skinny sapling, branches awry, half its needles frozen, the other half gone. "It's ugly," my mother and I would say. "It's a work in progress," he'd announce, then go get…
Read MoreI don't know Kyle Gendron, except socially. We say hello at functions, make small talk, and now and then, I post on his Facebook page "Wow!" and "Amazing!" because he is such a superb photographer.
When I e-mail him sometimes for advice about photography, he always e-mails back.
Read MoreHere's what we've all been taught. To be polite. To be quiet. To not make a scene. To go with the flow. To be aware of other people's feelings.
Here's what we teach our children: To acknowledge a person's presence. To look someone in the eye. To say "please" and "thank you." To not interrupt. To say "excuse me." To be respectful.
And it's all good advice. Until it isn't.
Read MoreBack-to-school shopping has always been my favorite ritual. As a kid, I loved taking the train into Boston with my mother on a hot August day, trying on plaid dresses and cordovan shoes, eating lunch — always macaroni and cheese at Colestone’s — heading home, then arranging all the loot on my bed and waiting for my father to come in from work, to show him all we had bought…
Read MoreAll I did was pull open a kitchen drawer to get a butter knife.
I'd been reading the newspaper, drinking coffee, enjoying the early morning quiet. The crumbs in the divider must have been there for weeks. But I hadn't noticed them before. Now they were all I could see.
So I abandoned the paper, dumped all the silverware in the sink, got out the Comet, and began scrubbing.
Read MoreIt's all about juxtaposition.
I had been to visit Chris McLean at Norwood Hospital. Chris has fluid around his heart. He's 52. I've known him since he was 5. He isn't any more or less extraordinary than anyone else. He's just one more person who was born and shared his childhood…
Read MoreShe was born nine years ago on June 20, and it was the best of times and the worst of times.
Lucy's being here was what we had prayed for, what we had begged for. But not exactly. Because she was not the child we had imagined.
Read MoreI don’t know when the late Erma Bombeck, whose column appeared in hundreds of newspapers for 30 years, wrote “The things a dad does.” All I know is that I read it a long time ago, loved it, and saved it. And every Father’s Day, I reread it because it captures a way of life that existed for most of the 20th century but doesn’t anymore. Bombeck’s piece is short, just 300 words.“When I was a little kid, a father was like the light in the refrigerator,” it begins…
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