When you think about riding your bike as a child, what memories come to mind?

For me, riding a bike meant freedom. Pedaling hard down the alley behind our house, streamers flying behind me, I felt untouchable.

Those feelings came rushing back recently when my older son told me how much he was enjoying his new bike and his ride to work every morning in Los Angeles and my younger son wondered how old his daughter had been when she learned to ride.

In an instant, I was back on my own bicycle, escaping the chaos of our family home on what I came to think of as my “freedom rides.”

The moment my feet hit the pedals, I was Annie Oakley mounting her horse, Target, or the Lone Ranger riding Silver. Down the driveway and into the city streets, I zoomed past the Martinos, who raised chickens in their backyard, and past the Caputos, with twelve children—including two sets of twins.

At the end of our alleyway, I crossed a one-way street, checking quickly to the right for cars. Then I barreled into another alley, glancing toward Vito’s corner store, where they sold penny candy and my favorite pink Dubble Bubble gum.

The last street was a straightaway, and I picked up speed. My bicycle streamers snapped in the breeze.

Nonna was my destination.

Back then, bicycles gave children something precious: freedom without supervision. We disappeared for hours, expected only to be home before dark. Our world was made up of corner stores, sidewalks, and secret shortcuts only kids seemed to know.

I wonder if children today feel that same sense of freedom. Or has childhood changed? Maybe phones and social media keep kids connected every second, but somehow less free to explore their own imaginations.

For us, was it the speed? The adventure? The feeling that the world suddenly became bigger the farther we pedaled from home?

Maybe that’s why bicycles stay with us long after childhood. Somewhere inside us, that kid with streamers flying is still racing toward a place that felt free, liberating, and completely our own.

A friend of mine, Laura Oliver, recently published an article in The Talbot Spy entitled Love is an Action Verb. That phrase stayed with me.

Yesterday I spoke with my granddaughter. She is sixteen years old, finishing her sophomore year, and squeezing every possible moment from her day. She had exactly five minutes to talk before leaving for her internship.

I, on the other hand, had nowhere to be.

The contrast made me smile.

At sixteen, life is a whirlwind of classes, deadlines, friends, family commitments, and the endless small urgencies that seem so important.

Then life moves on. College arrives. Careers begin. Families grow. Children become adults and have children of their own. The years fill with responsibilities and obligations, and before we know it, we find ourselves standing where our parents once stood – on the other side of young.

When I was in college, I called my parents every Sunday. It was simply what I did. Somewhere along the way, those regular calls became occasional ones. I called when I had time.

As I thought about Laura’s phrase, I found myself wondering how well I had practiced it during those busy years. I certainly said “I love you,” but did I always make the phone call, attend every event that mattered, or stop what I was doing long enough to listen with my full attention?

I would like to say yes, but I know the answer: no, not always.

Now I understand something I couldn’t fully appreciate then: making the call is part of loving. Showing up is part of loving. Listening is part of loving. Love is not only what we feel. It is what we do. Love is an action verb.

So yesterday, I was grateful for those five minutes with my granddaughter. Even though we were thousands of miles apart, through the miracle of a video screen, I watched her finish getting ready for her day.

Then she looked into the camera and asked, “How do I look, Nonna?”

I smiled. “You look beautiful, my babydoll. You look just beautiful.”

And as we said goodbye, I realized that those few hurried minutes were their own small act of love – hers in making time for me, and mine in being there when she did.

Recently I reread Seamus Heaney’s poem When All the Others Were Away at Mass. It begins simply: a grandson and grandmother peeling potatoes together while the rest of the family is at church. Years later, after her death, he realizes they were “never closer the whole rest of our lives.”

I understood that line immediately because I found myself returning to ordinary Sundays with Nonna Carmela.

She was not a woman who spoke about feelings. Love was food, routine, and feeding everyone before she fed herself. “Mangia, nonnared, mangia.”

For me, it was walking into her kitchen and seeing her at the stove, stirring rich red sugo. It was a heaping bowl of linguine with ricotta she made after Mass – just for me. It was a piece of Mancini bread dipped into sauce before dinner was ready, a meatball set beside it without a word. It was her saying, “I love-a you from t’e top of you head to t’e bottom of you feet.”

Back then, I was young and did not understand the holiness of those moments. Now I think some of the holiest moments in my life happened in her kitchen.

There are memories that seem small while we are living them. A glance. A gesture. A second helping of pasta. Only later do we understand how love quietly survives from one generation to the next.

Heaney’s poem reminds me that intimacy sometimes lives in peeling potatoes, in stirring sauce, in simply being beside someone long enough to remember the rhythm of her breathing.

And years later, after they are gone, we realize we were never closer.

‘When all the others were away at Mass’

When all the others were away at Mass I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying And some were responding and some were crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head, Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives – Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

by Seamus Heaney

When my mother was 91 years old and six weeks before she died, she told me she was sorry for all the rocky years between us. Then she added, “I have many regrets, but…I’m still learning, don’t you see? It takes a lifetime to learn how to live.” Millennia earlier, the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote much the same thing.

There is wisdom hidden in everyday moments, but why is it so hard to stop long enough to notice them? Why does it take a lifetime?

I try to live in the present moment. I meditate every day, yet outside those quiet ten minutes, my mind races with worries that ricochet through my thoughts, especially in the dark hours of the night, when the devil seems to dance on my chest.

Over these past few days, I was blessed to spend time with my family in Pittsburgh. When my older brother glanced up from his reading and smiled, when my niece stopped to hug me on her way to prom, when my sister-in-law enjoyed a second helping of the chicken pastina soup I made — these were everyday lessons, answers to everyday prayers.

When I slow down and truly pay attention to a conversation, a fleeting kindness, a painful truth, or a small unexpected blessing, something shifts inside me. I breathe more deeply. I listen more carefully. I begin to understand what each moment is trying to teach me.

My prayer today is that you and I do not wait until we are 91 to learn this lesson. Each day quietly offers us another chance to become more patient, more compassionate, more awake to others and to ourselves.

I am still learning. Perhaps we always are.

Maybe it really does take a lifetime to learn how to live.

Ten years ago:
my granddaughter Iysa, brother JF, and Darlene, my sister-in-law

In the last days of my mom’s life, I spent six months with her in hospice. Those months, especially the final weeks, were precious. We had been at odds for much of our lives, but as she faced the end, we found our way back to each other. We made peace. For that, I will always be grateful.

The summer between my junior and senior years in college, my parents gave me a trip to Europe. It was the era of Arthur Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day, when the idea of backpacking across a continent still felt both romantic and possible.

When my two girlfriends and I arrived in Florence, we made our way to the Piazzale Michelangelo, high above the city. I remember standing there, looking out over the terracotta rooftops, the bell towers, the golden ribbon of the Arno River.

I was completely captivated, and in that moment I knew I was home. I turned to my friends and said with surprising sincerity, “One day I’m going to live here.”

I didn’t question it. I simply recognized it.

Over the years, I’ve heard other versions of that same quiet certainty from different people in different places.

A friend deplaned in Ireland and said that she felt like she had returned to something she already knew.

Another arrived in Alaska and told me the air smelled like Christmas, like a memory she had always cherished.

Someone else traveled to Germany in search of ancestral roots and never left. “I arrived and stayed. I knew I belonged there,” she said simply, as if it were the most natural conclusion in the world.

These are not stories about tourism. They are stories about recognition.

Travel has a way of doing this. It places us in landscapes we have never lived in, yet we respond as if we are remembering them rather than discovering them. As if certain places are not new at all, but strangely familiar, like a word we had on the tip of our tongue and finally remembered.

Is home a place we come from, or can it also be something that, for reasons we cannot fully explain, comes alive in us?

A friend wrote to me after last week’s blog:

“Wow, this really hit home. My husband has been dealing with a difficult family situation for years, and he finally made the decision to get up off those nails. He realized that the pain of staying had become greater than the fear of getting up. I know he is going to be in a better place with himself and his son.”

Her message stayed with me because it reminded me of my son, who suffered a 14-year heroin addiction. In an effort to understand addiction better, several years ago I interviewed 42 recovering addicts and alcoholics from around the world and asked, “What brought you to recovery?”

The majority answered without hesitation: “When the consequences of my actions became too painful to live with.” Only then – when the pain point of using became so intense – did the people I interviewed decide it was time to get off the nail.

Today, my son is 19 years sober, and our family lives in deep gratitude. But my son had to reach that decision himself, in his own time, when the pain of staying the same outweighed the fear of change.

As parents and spouses, we want to protect those we love from making mistakes, but sometimes we can’t. We can support, love, and guide – we can stay close, but each person has to decide when he or she is ready.

My hardest lesson.

I heard this story from a Buddhist practitioner:

“A man notices a dog sitting on a porch, whining in pain.
He asks, ‘What’s wrong with you? Why are you whining?’
The dog answers, ‘I’m sitting on a nail … and if I get up, it will hurt too much.’” 

So the dog continues to sit because he feels safer choosing the pain he knows over the pain he fears might come with change.

I remember this story well because I was like that dog. I was in pain, but I was afraid to move. I was afraid to get up.

We all have nails – some big, some small. Nails that hurt us, poke at us, and keep us in a state of quiet unrest. Some are career nails: work that drains us. Some are relationship nails – we don’t leave for fear of being alone. Others are health nails, friendship nails, family nails.

For me, at age fifty-four, four major “nails” collided in my life: I was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a bilateral mastectomy; my father died; my firstborn son was addicted to heroin; and I left the school community where I had served as Head of School for seventeen years.

With all of these nails, I felt adrift – aching, beaten down, and lost.
But it was because of this pain – not in spite of it – that I finally found the courage to change my life.

That moment became the beginning of It Takes a Lifetime to Learn How to Live.

The truth is simple, and not always easy to accept: At some point, the pain of staying becomes greater than the fear of getting up.

…and we all have the possibility of getting up. The question is when.

In Italy, Easter is known as “the feast of feasts” and is more important than Christmas. Easter marks the resurrection of Christ – the heart of the Christian story. Christmas celebrates Christ’s birth, but Easter is the reason that birth matters.

You can feel it in the days of Holy Week that lead up to it. Churches fill, bells echo through the streets, and towns come alive with processions and reenactments of the crucifixion. From Holy Thursday through Easter Sunday, there’s a sense of anticipation. Everything softens on Pasquetta, the Monday after Easter, when people picnic in the fresh air and enjoy the warmth of a burgeoning spring.

But more than anything, Easter is about gathering. Families and friends arrive, and the day unfolds slowly around the table. There’s time for conversation, laughter, and the quiet comfort of being together.

And then there’s food. Lamb roasting, spring vegetables, slices of Colomba di Pasqua – a soft, dove-shaped cake symbolizing peace and renewal – are passed around at the end of the meal. Children delight in breaking open large chocolate eggs to discover the surprises hidden inside.

In Florence, the celebration returns to a tradition dating back to the late 1400s: the Scoppio del Carro, or Explosion of the Cart. A team of white oxen pulls a towering, 30-foot cart through the streets, stopping in front of the Duomo. During Mass, the priest lights a mechanical dove that shoots from the church’s high altar to ignite the cart in a burst of fireworks. It’s loud, sudden, and dazzling—a symbol of faith, renewal, and hope for the year ahead.

Buona Pasqua! I hope your Easter was filled with joy and a sense of renewal. And if it wasn’t, I wish you peace with the onset and beauty of spring.

Now that our parents have passed, my older brother, JF, is the official holder of memories. Not only that, but he’s the first-born son and grandson. In the Italian tradition, it doesn’t get much more important than that.

He recently wrote, “I’ll be seeing Nana soon…I am 78 and in poor health…and that will be a treat for me. Loved that woman!”

I adore my brother, so I wanted to share something he wrote last week in response to my blog entry:

“When I feel blocked or boxed in, in the grand tradition of Italians everywhere, I complain. Just let it out. And figure tomorrow will be better. And if it isn’t, then the next day. Take your wins when you can, because the losses will find you.

But getting back to Italians…my people…I would never want to be of any other nationality of origin…my sainted Nana (that’s what I called her…my sister uses the more proper Nonna in her book) never had a good day. When I would see her I would always ask, ‘How you feelin’ today, Nana?’ And the answer would always be (read it with a nice Italian accent), ‘Oh, no good, no good. Me no feel good.’ Meanwhile this old Italian lady, who grew up HARD, and never felt good, could outwork me 15 days a week and 55 days a month.

I suppose if you say you feel great you’re inviting the Evil Eye, and Nana was the designated neighborhood remover of the Evil Eye. But what a woman! She was the best.

I remember the first time I ever cried out of sadness—not pain, but sadness. I was maybe five years old, lying in bed, ready to fall asleep, when for some reason I pictured Nana dying. It made me cry like hell.”

Reading that, I realized something: Sometimes, if you’re lucky, someone loves you so much it hurts. The kind of love that fills you up and keeps you safe, even years later.

He loved that woman.

She was Nonna