Virginia Buckingham - Marblehead Current

26Jun

By Virginia BuckinghamNo Comments

Columns, Virginia Buckingham

EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY: Move slow

Raise your hand if you are glad the season's first heat wave is over. I know some people thrive in oppressive heat, I'm married to one, but most of us reasonable types prefer to spend summer days outside, and that was nearly impossible for many last week. There was a benefit, though, to the high temperatures and humidity. It forced us to slow down, physically, and perhaps mentally, too. I remember several years ago walking by my family room window and noticing four or five huge black birds crowded onto one of my bushes. They weren't crows, they weren't anything I've seen before. If I could compare them, I'd say they were similar to white egrets, except black. The funny thing is I didn't stop and study them for even a few minutes. I registered they were there, and then rushed on ...

5Jun

By Virginia BuckinghamNo Comments

Columns, Opinion, Virginia Buckingham

EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY: There’s more to a tree

I was walking near my neighborhood on a recent sunny morning and saw three people standing stock still in the middle of the street, looking up. I followed their gaze. Was it a cool bird? That would get my immediate attention. Nope. So wide it was hanging over the street, nearly touching the branches reaching up on the other side of the road, was a tree. Its cone-shaped canopy was dotted with cone-shaped pink flowers. "Do you know what it is?" one of the gazers asked me as I came closer. I wanted to answer "a tree" but I am not my most sarcastic sibling so I refrained and instead said, "No." "I Googled it," she said, using the function Google has to take a picture and seek an identity. The answer came back in Latin and thus was not much help to her. I smiled sympathetically and wa...

29May

By Virginia BuckinghamNo Comments

Columns, Opinion, Virginia Buckingham

EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY: Making Time

My dad bought me my first watch for a long-ago birthday. He picked it out of a plastic case which sat on the front counter at the local drug store, aptly named Drug City. The case spun around so you could look at all the choices, and he picked a Timex on a silver link chain that looked like a bracelet. I treasured it, mostly because my dad wasn't one to buy us presents; that was my mom's purview. I kept it for years after it stopped working in a little wooden jewelry box on my dresser. I don't know where it is now. I bought a second watch for myself on my first business trip. I was 22, fresh out of college and was working for a regional trade association. I was about to shepherd a group of businessmen on a round of meetings with their members of Congress at the Capitol. I panicked ...

22May

By Virginia BuckinghamNo Comments

Columns, Virginia Buckingham

EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY: I’ll swear on this bible

When it comes to vegetable gardening, I thought I was a committed bachelorette. A dabbler. Playing the (planted) field so to speak. Not serious. Forgive me if you are a deeply knowledgeable and passionate gardener but my approach has been more casual affection than passion, like a fun date I knew would never turn into a long-term relationship. I enjoy gardening. I'd even go on a second date with it since it brought me flowers (beware, bad garden humor ahead). I thought this "friends with benefits" approach would be enough. Until I got religion. Gardening religion that is. How did I get here? First, I'm a COVID-era gardening novice. I stopped commuting to New York in 2020 and started kneeling in the dirt in a small backyard raised bed between Zoom calls in 2021. My garden is approxim...

8May

By Virginia BuckinghamNo Comments

Columns, Opinion, Virginia Buckingham

EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY: Meet me in the field

Readers of this column know I spend a lot of time thinking about how to bridge the political divide and bring people together. This past week I was presented with two sharply different approaches to that work. Or were they? First, Daniel Lubetsky, CEO of Kind Snacks, who has put action behind the work of fostering respectful disagreement and positive connection for years, gave a TED talk last week, a summary of which landed in my inbox. It echoed many themes I had heard him speak of at a conference I attended in Dallas last year. I didn't know of Lubetsky before that appearance but wow, what a hopeful model of leadership he presented. I was hooked. In Dallas, Lubetsky told the origin stories spurring his work, both involving his father, Roman, whose life – and human spirit – were sa...

1May

By Will DowdNo Comments

Columns, Opinion, Virginia Buckingham

EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY: An education worth fighting for

Congratulations to all the high school seniors who have just committed to the college they will attend this fall. Maybe it was your first choice, maybe it was your safety, or somewhere in between. Whichever it was, this is the opportunity to buy mom that coffee mug she so desires for Mother's Day and dad his higher-education-branded belt come his day in June. Oh, and set your path for a lifetime. Or, end up on a path you can hardly conceive of now. It's that latter possibility I urge you to keep an open mind to. I remember the precise calculation and deep thinking that went in to choosing the college of my dreams. Yes, the cover of the Boston College admission booklet with iconic Gasson Hall framed by a pink flowering tree was all I needed to know — this was the place for me! So BC was...

17Apr

By Virginia BuckinghamNo Comments

Columns, Opinion, Virginia Buckingham

EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY: Civil war nonsense

Very few things make my blood boil these days, I'm trying to incorporate a zen-like outlook in life as much as possible. But any intentional effort to increase political antagonism and paranoia, like a movie released last Friday, takes me from zen to 10 on the inner-rage meter, with 10 being the highest. Leave it to Hollywood to try to capitalize on the country's polarized zeitgeist. Don't take your history-interested teenager to the movies this weekend to learn about the events leading to the attack on Fort Sumter in 1861. Nope, "Civil War" is about an armed conflict in this country in the "not-too-distant" future according to write-ups. Like after November 2024, oh movie-pushing public relations mavens? Subtle. And those willing to fan the flames of the outlandish fear that we...

10Apr

By Virginia BuckinghamNo Comments

Columns, Opinion, Virginia Buckingham

EVERYTHING WILL BE OK: A great and good man

This is the story of an 8-year-old boy and a 62-year-old man. One very successful and well-known. One, well, 8. Picture the scene: A crisp, sunny day on the South Lawn of the White House. Rows of chairs set up theater style for a show like no other. The 2007 World Champion Red Sox team arrayed on a riser behind a podium with the presidential seal. Big Papi commanding attention like he’s at bat. The president at the microphone. A little boy, just over 4 feet tall, in a Red Sox hat and jacket, a baseball in one hand, a Sharpie in the other, creeping up the center aisle, getting closer and closer to the riser, like a hunter cornering its quarry. Then, without warning, the show ends, and the players file off the stage and head up the white marble stairs while a phalanx of ushers ste...

3Apr

By Will DowdNo Comments

Columns, Virginia Buckingham

EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY: Experiments in wonderful

I want to remember to be like her, this stranger with a wonderful attitude, our neighbor for the week in a vacation condo. At first, I felt a little sorry for her. She seemed in her late seventies or early eighties. Alone. White hair fashionably cut, wearing a bright red and black flowing dress. Sitting with her eyes closed on her deck, face tilted toward the sun. A book on the table beside her. Was she widowed, I wondered. Lonely? Idle thoughts as we sat yards from each other and just yards from the crashing Atlantic Ocean. The condos themselves are only yards away from the water, too — which is delightful, but at the highest of tides, when the waves crash within inches of the sliding glass doors, and sometimes shake the sides of the building itself, it can also be a little unn...

13Mar

By Virginia BuckinghamNo Comments

Columns, Opinion, Virginia Buckingham

EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY: Signs

Every year around this time I take a walk to Flint Street on the Neck. There's a spot there by an old stone wall where purple crocuses come up, and I look for my first annual sign of spring. None was in sight when I checked in February, but by last week they had emerged. My Merlin bird identification app indicated a yellow goldfinch was in or near my yard on a recent morning. They don't all migrate, but I haven't seen any since the fall, so I'm calling their return another welcome sign of spring, along with exhibition baseball on TV and the reopening of Sullivan's at Castle Island. I've never gone to the famed hot dog stand for opening day, but reading about it in the paper is a reassuring sign that the calendar's rhythms continue to move on undeterred. I've read and shared ...