The heat finally broke at our house this afternoon. About three-thirty, the wind started coming in off the water, the blinds on the east side of the house began to sway slightly letting in the cool air, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. According to the forecasters, the week ahead won’t see too…
It could top 100 degrees in the Boston area today. The heat wave that has been systematically baking the nation has reached us. As Matthew Broderick said in Biloxi Blues, “It’s hot. It’s hot. It’s Africa hot.” Well, I lived in Africa and I lived in Texas. Texas is hotter. Over the years we have…
Last night Ginger and I spent the evening at Fenway Park watching our Boston Red Sox play the Cleveland Indians. Fenway is one of my favorite places. The nearly century-old park in one of the few not named after a corporation. It’s also one where you have to lean a bit to see around the…
Years ago, when I was teaching at Charlestown High, we got in to a class discussion about fighting. It had nothing to do with the book we were reading. There had been a fight in the school that day and I asked the kids what happened. As we talked and I continued to ask questions,…
Ginger and I went into Boston today for doctor’s appointments. Mine was in Copley Square and hers in Kenmore, so she dropped me off and took the car with her. The point of my trip was to talk to my doctor about my antidepressant and whether or not it was doing what it could or…
I’ve had a simple goal since I wrote last Wednesday: read a novel. There are times when a small act of defiance reverberates in larger ways; reading a novel from beginning to end for the first time in a couple of years felt like a profound gesture for me. As we headed into Boston yesterday,…
In a different chapter of my life I was a high school English teacher. I started as a building sub at Charlestown High School in Boston and worked my way into a job, staying there for seven years. I loved being with the kids, but the bureaucratic tag team of the School System and the…
When the room gets too dark to see, the best thing I can do is stack up the words of others so I can climb up to look out the window for little flickers of light. In these days when I’m daunted by books, I’m even more grateful for poems. Small as they are, they…
I learned something new about the impact of my depression yesterday: I’m not reading. I’ve collected books around me like CDs for as long as I can remember. I wanted to be a writer because I was, first, a reader. I learned about the power of language from writers who knew how to focus that…
Soon after Ginger and I moved to Boston, we were walking in the Cambridgeside Galleria one evening when we were stopped by a local news reporter who said he was doing a story on married couples and money. He asked us who handled the finances in our relationship and Ginger said, “I do” at the…