t’s difficult every year. Saying goodbye to one year while welcoming another. Looking back AND looking ahead. Summing things up, filing away, while making plans…

Dear World, I understand you don't believe in me anymore. I am a figment of the imagination, you say, a charade inflicted upon children. I corrupt youth and inspire greed. You think I am a farce. Ah, but you're wrong. I am neither a figment nor a farce. I am as real as you. In fact, I am you. I am the the best of you.

Fred Bruce, who will be 88 on Jan. 2, doesn’t remember when he started the tradition of bringing poinsettias to the graves of all the people who have meant something to him in his life. Not just family and close friends, but long-ago friends, school friends, work friends, men and women who shared, maybe, for just a short while, some part of his life. “I’ve been doing this since,” he pauses and shakes his head. “God, I can’t remember.” And yet, he remembers names, dates, chronologies, and family histories of people he hasn’t seen in half a century. “Eleanor was the best waitress. We worked together at Howard Johnson’s when I was 21. Her only son, Carl, was murdered in 1969. I watched him grow up. He was a fine, young man. He had small children. He was driving a cab for extra money.”

Every year, he…

The day I turned 50, my father called and said, “I can’t believe I have a daughter who is 50.” It was as if 50 had, just that morning, fallen unexpectedly into his world, like a giant slab of space shuttle debris plummeting out of a clear blue sky. As if my turning 50 hadn’t been preceded by my turning 30 and 40 and 48 and 49. My 50th birthday stunned him. He tried to explain, but couldn’t. There were no words, he said. Speechlessness, for this man, was unusual. He always had something to say. On my 50th birthday he went mute. I held the phone waiting. But all he did was sigh…

Until a few weeks ago, I was a point and shoot purist, standing tall on my moral high ground refusing to even consider doctoring my photos to make anyone look better. I edited my shots, of course, cropped and lightened and maybe softened a few facial lines. But no whitening of teeth, no smoothing of foreheads. No out, out damn spotting of freckles or blemishes. What was the point of making people look not like themselves, but what they might look like if they were nipped, tucked, and catapulted back in time? My goal, I said haughtily, was to take pictures that didn’t lie…

The gloves are my rabbit hole. Black cotton with perfect double seams stitched along each finger, triple stitched along the thumb, and scalloped at the wrist. Daytime gloves. Joe Berry gave them to me along with a mid-length pair, white cotton, still held together by a piece of thick thread, formal gloves, the kind you’d wear to a prom. No reason for this gift. No birthday. No occasion. “I knew you would like them,” he said simply…

I met him 40 years ago at Lauriat’s, a bookstore that used to be at the South Shore Plaza in Braintree. I know this because he signed my copy of “The Dead Zone” For Beverly — With good wishes; it was a pleasure to meet you — be well. Steve King” and then added the date: August 24, 1979. I was a big fan back then. I’m still a big Stephen King fan…

Back in 1982, when my husband and I were in our 30s and our kids were actually children, not the adults they are now, for Christmas we bought them ColecoVision, a video game player that was a big deal back then but would never pass muster by today’s standards. It was a large, clunky thing (there was no streaming in 1982); it had to be connected to a TV. It used a separate cartridge for each of its games. And it took time to warm up. But once it was working? It was a thing of beauty.

For all the years before there was texting, I was the one who said it first, phoning her at the crack of dawn every Aug. 1, blurting out, “HappyTopOfTheFerrisWheel!” before she could even say hello. Now my friend Beth beats me. “HAPPY TOP OF THE FERRIS WHEEL” she texts in all capital letters the second her iPhone clicks to Aug. 1. The two of us have been celebrating this non-holiday since our adult children were in middle school…

I flew to California the day before her birthday. It was a big birthday, her 16th. And I was sad leaving her.

“I already miss you,” I moaned when I kissed her goodbye. Lucy looked at me and smiled, cocked one eyebrow and said, “Save it for Farley,” which is Lucy teasing, Lucy pretending to like Farley (a favorite teacher) more than she likes me. It’s a game she invented, something she says when she wants to get a rise out of me, her words a joke. Lucy makes jokes. She sees the humor in things. The doctor who told us she had Down syndrome didn’t tell us that she might be funny. She might not walk, talk, see, hear, read, write, he said. Funny never came up…

‘What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence,” is a book propped up on a table under “New Releases” at Barnes & Noble. I pick it up. And can’t put it down. So I buy it. I’ve read only four of the essays so far. I want to absorb each. Maybe even more than absorb, I want to reflect, to think about these writers and their mothers, and to think about my mother, too, and all the things we never got a chance to talk about. Except that we did have a chance…