Her name was Miss Dibbs. She was a large, 130-pound yellow lab, the kind of dog whose presence filled a room joyfully, without effort.

She didn’t just live alongside me; she structured my days.

When she died on January 15, 2025, the day still went on, but the one who gave the day its rhythm was suddenly gone. This post is a rumination on loss, grief, and the enduring love of a furry family member.

Some memories don’t arrive as scenes. They arrive as sound. A voice in another room. A song you don’t yet understand. A radio left on when no one is really listening.

This piece takes place on New Year’s Day, 1969, when I was almost eleven, and the radio was already doing more work on me than I knew.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Christmas lately. Not the tidy, Hallmark version, but the noisy, imperfect, chaotic kind I grew up with. This is one of those stories.

Every December, I find myself thinking less about the Christmases I want and more about the ones I actually had. Not the polished versions — the loud, improvised, slightly dangerous ones. The kind that happened in a crowded little house on the corner of Liberty and South Loring, where money was tight, time moved slowly, and somehow everything worked out anyway. This is one of those stories.

Step into a Friday night in 1978, when boxing was on free TV, bars came with gallon jars of pickled mystery snacks, and my dad found a creative way to manage his lunch tab—by putting it on mine.

This story, pulled from my latest book‍ ‍A River Still Runs, is part comedy, part memory, and all Lowell.

Big day — I’ve just launched my new author website and published my first blog post!

My memoir, A River Still Runs, looks back on growing up in a big Irish Catholic family in Lowell, Massachusetts during the 1960s and ’70s.

To kick things off, I’ve shared a favorite chapter from the soon-to-be-published book, A River Still Runs called “That Christmas Look.”

If you’ve ever had a Christmas that went a little sideways (or a rug that never quite recovered), I think you’ll enjoy this one.