The holiday season has begun. I know this not because of the Christmas carols that are being played relentlessly or because I flipped over the calendar recently.  I know this because my heart is heavy as I struggle with how to strike that balance between gratitude and disappointment, come Christmas morning. My kids are not greedy.  As Sally explains to her brother Charlie Brown:  “All I want is what I have coming to me.  All I want is my fair share.”  What they’ve asked for is what many of their friends already possess. The eldest requested a laptop: “It would be really helpful for homework…

Over Thanksgiving weekend, my husband Kevin and I saw the movie Anna Karenina. For the record, Lincoln was my first choice, but it was sold out. This particular version of Tolstoy’s story was mostly beautifully rendered and decently performed, although I thought the casting of Count Vronsky was way off. Regardless, as I left the theater I felt disheartened. This story, like so many others, is basically a celebration of adultery. Well, perhaps “celebration” is not quite the right word, but certainly our sentiments – and our prurient interests – are focused on the unfolding of the illicit …

With just two days to go until Thanksgiving, it will come as a surprise to absolutely no one that I found myself standing in a very long line at the grocery store this morning. In fact, the line was long enough for me to overhear the details of another family’s Thanksgiving dinner. “OK,” the woman in front of me said, checking her list for a final time, “we’ve got the Brussels sprouts, the creamed spinach, the stuffed mushrooms ...” “Wait!” her companioned interrupted, “do we have the tossed salad makings?  And enough carrots for the carrot cake?” Brussels sprouts? Creamed spinach? Salad? …

Like many of you, I found myself outdoors yesterday relishing the mild temperatures and basking in the warm sunny rays that shone through the almost leafless trees. For a while I raked and marveled that just days ago these same leaves lay hidden under a thin blanket of snow. And to think, on this day, the mercury will likely hit 70 degrees! I was happy the leaves (if not the children) provided an opportunity to be outside. Before the sun began its inevitable dip downward, I put the rake aside, and turned to the last bag of bulbs that needed planting. I am always late with the bulbs. My goal …

In case you had forgotten – or have just landed here from outer space – this is Election Day in Belmont and across the nation. Inspired by Nate Silver’s polling prowess, I decided to try my hand at surveying a “representative sample” of Belmont’s youngest “age demographic” – in this case, the under-twelve set. I had the following question put to them: If you could vote for either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney for President, whom would you vote for and why? Below are their responses; the names have been changed to protect these innocents. Enjoy! Nate (age 9): “I’d vote for Obama. I mean, he’s …

At a certain point in my youth, my siblings and I grew bored with the tropical fish and assorted caged rodents that constituted our family pets. Led by my sister, we three kids began to lobby hard for a pet dog of our very own. When I was seven, my parents finally relented – under the usual conditions that it would be our responsibility to walk and feed the dog. Puppy Max arrived over February vacation. By mid-April he was, of course, strictly relegated to my father’s care. Even so, we all loved Max deeply.  And for a little more than 16 years, he lived a great dog-life. But when the end came…

October never used to be a complicated month for me. In fact, until recently, I would have rated it my favorite month of all the twelve. What’s not to love about October? The celebrated colors are, in a word, glorious. And when it’s not raining, the days are perfect: cool crisp mornings unfold into soft golden afternoons. And once the sun dips low in the sky, it’s delightfully cool yet again. There are pumpkins and mums in autumnal shades adorning doorsteps, freshly picked apples in fruit bowls, and gorgeous harvest moons gracing the night sky with a luminous glow. With all this resplendent …

Listening to Anne Silverman play piano is a transformative experience. I recently visited with Anne at her home on Waverley Street where she teaches piano to children and adults.  Before we began to talk, I requested that she play a piece of music, anything at all. The piece she selected sounded both familiar and new; I immediately began to relax. I watched and listened in amazement as her hands glided across the keys and it was all I could do not to stretch out on her couch while the notes she so effortlessly created caressed and soothed something deep inside. I’ve known Annie for several …

Early last week, the Belmont School Department issued a “Stranger Danger Alert” in response to a Chenery Middle School staff person’s report of having seen a “suspicious, unknown adult [male]” hanging around a street corner in close proximity to the school.  According to the report: “When approached by a staff member, the adult left the property and proceeded to drive away.” I have no issue with how this event was handled. Adults who linger around a middle school, peering at the playground area, should certainly be requested to move along. Kudos to the unidentified staff person who took …

It’s surprising how often I think about Carol Brady.  Never mind that she is a piece of fiction, a relic from the early 1970s sit-com world.  The truth is I do think of her and how fortunate she was in that celluloid world of make-believe. She is indelibly etched in my mind, not because, as a single mom (was she widowed? divorced? it was never really stated) of three daughters, she met and married Mike Brady, a successful architect.  And not because her blended family worked so seamlessly well almost all of the time (how else would it work on television in the early 1970s?). No, I think about…

"Why," my 14-year-old son asked me recently, “does society lie to kids?” Hmmm, I thought, he’s going to have to be more specific, what with this being an election year and all.  I asked him to explain. “Ever since we were little kids,” he continued in a familiar tone of righteous umbrage, “we’re given the message that ‘you can do and be anything you want.’  But it’s a lie.  For most of us, our dreams will never really come true, despite what movies, pop songs, and popular culture tell kids.  “Did you get that message at home?” I asked, wondering if his father and I were complicit in this ‘lie…

Last week in this column, I let you know about an upcoming theater event entitled “The Goddess Diaries.” As you may recall, "The Goddess Diaries" is a series of disparate theatrical monologues about passages in the lives of women.  The show is coming to the Regent Theatre in Arlington for two performances on Sept. 22-23. I mentioned in the column that proceeds from the show will benefit Our Space, Inc, a non-profit organization co-founded by two Belmontians, Gail Erdos and Peggy Tryon. Our Space’s mission, as delineated on its web page, is “to embrace children and teens who have faced or are …

Thanks in part to the efforts of several Belmont women, “The Goddess Diaries,” a series of theatrical monologues about the passages of women’s lives, is coming to the Regent Theatre in Arlington for two performances on Sept. 22 and 23.The play’s author, Carol Campbell of Fairfax County, Va., had co-produced and acted in a production of The Vagina Monologues, and was inspired to create a theatrical experience that covered a broader spectrum of women’s life experiences. The result, “The Goddess Diaries,” consists of a series of monologues, each reflecting a time of change, growth, or loss in a …

With the exception of the winter-into-spring transition, I am always a little melancholy when one season is about to end and another to begin. This is especially true of this time of year. I know I am not alone in my desire to slow time down and hang on a little longer to the last, sweet vestiges of summer.  This, of course, is never possible.  Oh sure, I had enough quiet afternoons at the town pool and, more recently, some lovely, languorous days at the beach. I read books, ate sweet corn, and made lemonade from lemons. Sometimes the kids were at various camps and sometimes they bickered …

Being the further utterances of the women of Belmont. Yeah, there’s a lot of talking going on.  Husband and Wife  Q: “Why do always undermine my authority as a parent?” A: “Why do you make such dumb-ass parenting decisions?” Short Event Horizon “I refuse to think about funding my kids’ college educations. Orthodontia alone is keeping me up at night.” NIMBY Pamby “It was for a Hospice Center – you know, providing end-of-life care for the terminally ill. You’d think the neighbors thought a half-way house for rapists, pedophiles and axe murders had been proposed.” For Everything There Is A …

It’s time for another Patch installment of Belmont Women Speak, where I share with you quotes I’ve overheard around town – and have frantically scribbled down on scraps of paper, backs of receipts, the odd napkin, etc. – over the past year. The topics are as varied and disparate and the women who spoke them. I hope you enjoy them. Look for Part 2 in this space next week. On the Perfect Drug “There really should be such a thing as an over-the-counter, anti-anxiety, sleep aid, with the added benefit of appetite suppressant, as a safe and approved drug. Millions could be made.”  On the Perfect …

Compared to many of my compatriots, I was a relative latecomer to Facebook.  This was absolutely by design. I’d heard enough about the banal status postings (“Should I go the gym or have a second cup of coffee?”) and the proud parental postings (“Junior made honor roll again!”) such that I felt, while maybe I had the time, I didn’t want to invest it in this particular form of social interaction. The years ticked by and I began to feel excluded from something that everyone else seemed to be enjoying, banality notwithstanding. Eventually I succumbed to the temptation, enlisted the help of my …

I first encountered the writings of Mary Roach several years back when a friend handed me Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.  “This is the only kind of non-fiction I’ll read,” my friend said, “informative and humorous at the same time.”  She was absolutely right. Roach has a gift for taking scientific topics – in that case, exploring bodies postmortem – and pulling out the most interesting information and presenting that information in an accessible and amusing way.  Stiff was a hoot to read. Roach begins the book: “The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a…

Summer is more than half over and, it’s true, much of my “to do” list remains irritatingly unaccomplished. I have not managed to paint the front porch. I didn’t create time to paint the girls’ room (hydrangea blue, in case you were wondering). The attic remains unorganized. And worse, I’m nowhere near ready to run a 5K, as I’d hoped to be by summers’ end. I have, however, indulged in the archetypal summer pastime: reading. With the kids ensconced in one thing or another, I have successfully carved out time to get utterly lost in some titles that have been on my “to read” list for a while now…

The ocean was wild that August afternoon. There is something both foreboding and inviting about the ocean at the end of the summer: it’s aggressive and unpredictable, a harbinger of far-away hurricanes that are growing, gaining strength, and toying with the possibility of ripping through the New England coastline. We weren’t thinking about hurricanes, though. My brother Peter, my husband, Kevin, and I stood on the Point Judith beach in Narragansett, Rhode Island, mesmerized by the sight of huge waves crashing into the breakwater rocks.  The spray was beautiful: wet white fireworks, exploding …