I was on the T headed to one of my favorite restaurants in Boston when I found myself thinking about the last time I ate there. I’d been with three of my closest friends, all of whom were visiting from the different cities where they live. As the happy memory of great food and even better company flitted through my mind, anxiety about my upcoming meal curled deep in my stomach. Yes, I was headed to dine on the same delicious food I loved. But this time, every single one of my fellow diners was a complete stranger.

Welcome to the brave new world of making friends in Boston.

A few months earlier, I had realized something startling: I hadn’t made a new friend since college who wasn’t a friend of a friend, a friend of my husband’s, or someone I met at work. I consider myself a social person. I like people. And yet making friends as an adult had somehow become impossible, especially in Boston, where friendliness isn’t known as our defining trait. Hence the question that had been nagging me for months: How do people actually meet people nowadays?

It turns out I’m not unique in this—it’s essentially a universal conundrum. Which is exactly why I ended up at Café Sauvage in the Back Bay sipping a limoncello spritz, having dinner with strangers.

I signed up for this dinner through Timeleft—an international platform that opened shop in Boston in 2024 with the goal of “turning strangers into friends.” The company organizes weekly dinners, bringing together six people, selected to dine together based on their answers to a short online survey.

Groups like these are having something of a moment in Boston. Just this past year, Base, a national platform that bills itself as “designed for people who value depth, curiosity, and authentic connection,” also opened here. Base organizes events and dinners where conversation is focused on a particular topic—and it involves an application, a phone interview, and a monthly membership fee of $100 or more on top of the costs of the individual events. (Friendship, it turns out, isn’t always free.)

These are just two of the many social groups that have cropped up in Boston in recent years, each with its own particular focus. Need people to take walks or work out with? There’s a group for that. Prefer crafting to exercise—or any one of dozens of other hobbies? There’s one for everything, from needlepoint and knitting to video games. There are supper clubs and cocktail meetups and even groups to find people to go clubbing with—yes, really. Think these gatherings sound superficial and can’t possibly facilitate deep connections? There are groups for that, too—those that promise to skip right over the small talk and rocket you headfirst into deeply personal conversations.

All these groups share a common goal: helping people find connection, something ever more elusive these days.

Whatever their focus, all these groups share a common goal: helping people find connection, something ever more elusive these days. In 2023, the surgeon general declared that our loneliness epidemic constituted a public health crisis.

Perhaps counterintuitively, rates of loneliness are even higher in cities, and Boston is no exception. A recent study based on 2024 Census data found that some 43 percent of adults in the Boston metro area reported feeling lonely, which is above the national average. Meanwhile, across the state, 25 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds and 13 percent of all adults reported that they “usually or always” feel isolated from others, according to the 2023 Community Health Equity Initiative survey.

“People want to be seen and valued and connected, but when the rubber meets the road, it can be hard,” says Kristen Lee, a clinical social worker and behavioral science professor at Northeastern University who studies social connection. “It’s challenging to find that community. People are trying to creatively find a way to make connections when it’s not necessarily readily available. That’s why we’ve seen [these groups] arise; they give more opportunity and inroads that aren’t organically happening.”

So are these social groups the antidote to the epidemic? The promises of community, connection, and friendship sure sound like it. But do they really work? And if they do, what does “work” even mean?

I am not the only person who found herself having trouble making friends in Boston—I’m just a little less motivated than some. Take Rebekah King. She moved here from California in 2022 and went online to find roommates. “I noticed there were a lot of people like me who were looking for connection and didn’t know where to find it,” she says. So she started a small Facebook chat that is now an 8,000-strong group of women and nonbinary people in their twenties and thirties, dubbed Boston Babes, that held 119 events last year alone. Eight thousand people. One hundred nineteen events. All because she needed a roommate.

Ana Baptista had a similar experience when she moved to Boston from Venezuela more than a decade ago and found it hard to find the time and space to connect with people—not to mention, we were a bit standoffish. She recalls an incident that many Bostonians have experienced some version of—the time she told someone she liked their jacket. “And they just stared back like, Why are you talking to me?” she said.

Like King, she decided to create the community she couldn’t find. She launched Girlfriends in 2018 as a group centered around activities that help facilitate friendships. Today, it has more than 400 members and hosted more than 60 events in 2025 alone, from dance and cooking classes to picnics and boat rides. “Making friends doesn’t need to be hard,” Baptista says. “You need to be in a space where it is fostered.”

These aren’t the only homegrown social groups. The Jar, founded in Boston in 2019, gathers guests to experience a piece of art—a painting, a comedy show, a poetry reading—then prompts them with thematic questions to discuss with everyone in the room. Participants are encouraged to bring one person they know well, two they see often, and two “unusuals,” people different from them in some significant way. “We don’t care where you work. Nobody gives a shit where you went to school,” says founder Guy Ben-Aharon. “We go from zero to intimacy really quickly.” One common kickoff question: What’s something you were known for as a child? Meanwhile, Skip the Small Talk, another Boston-born group now in 20 cities worldwide, takes a similar approach with speed-dating-style conversation prompts designed to bypass small talk entirely.

Maria Colalancia, who started the supper club the Aperitivo Society in early 2023 with the mission of good food and good conversation, has a theory about why so many of these groups have started popping up all over town. “I think there’s a hunger to get away from being so chronically online,” she says. “It’s silly that an introduction has to be an online transaction. People just want to get out from behind their phones.”

The quest for a more analog way of meeting people is something researchers are noticing, too. “We are seeing a drastic change in society in terms of social ties. Especially after the COVID pandemic—we have Zoom, and everything is virtual, and we don’t know our neighbors anymore,” says Koichiro Shiba, an assistant professor of epidemiology at BU’s School of Public Health who studies the health effects of human relationships and communities. In a world where we’re arguably more connected—virtually, constantly—than ever before, he says, there’s a real missing piece. “That’s maybe partly why people are trying to go back to the old days and trying to make connections in person.”

It isn’t just how we interact that has changed, but where. “Third places”—the bars and coffee shops and neighborhood haunts that aren’t your home or your office, where you become a regular, where everybody knows your name (yes, like that bar)—have been disappearing. The neighborhood bars are shuttering. Coffee shops have become coworking spaces with espresso, everyone hunched over laptops, earbuds in, sealed off in their own little productivity bubble, nursing a $7 oat milk latte like it’s a desk rental fee.

I wouldn’t consider myself lonely, exactly. But I do want more friends who live in my city, not scattered across state lines. Making them, it occurred to me, takes a certain kind of muscle—and mine had been slowly atrophying for years. All these groups promising connection and community? I wanted to know if any of it was real—or if I’d just end up with awkward small talk and a $60 candlemaking class to show for it.

Over the course of this winter, I went to a handful of events to test how well these groups actually worked. They ranged from a watercolor painting class to crafting meetups, dinners, and a comedy show. I approached them all with mild apprehension, worried they would feel like networking—performative or contrived, with everyone wanting something from everyone else, except instead of a job, that elusive something was friendship.

And sometimes, that was exactly how it felt. The watercolor class was my first attempt. I sat down with four women, and we bonded, sort of, over how horribly our paintings were turning out. But most of the conversation centered around the basics: where we lived, how long our commutes were, and how high our electricity bills are in the winter. Thrilling stuff. In all the moments that were stilted, awkward, and semi-silent, I was painfully aware of how hard we were all trying and getting nowhere.

But the more groups I tried, the more natural it began to feel. At a meetup of the Boston Drunken Knitwits (a knitting group, though they welcome all handcrafters, including cross-stitchers like me), I felt like I had found my people. We traded stories about failed projects, admired each other’s work, and swapped advice, all while working on our own stuff.

Here’s what I learned: Putting yourself out there in a room of strangers, hoping some of them like you enough to talk to you again, is terrifying. But if nothing else, it was nice to be out of my house, talking to people in person rather than through my computer or phone screen—sharing my favorite hobby, which I usually do alone on my couch, with others. The approach to community was structured, sure. But the conversations themselves? They felt real enough.

Despite my skepticism about just how many real friendships can emerge from these groups, some have an impressive track record. Take Iliana Barrientos, 32, who joined Girlfriends after moving to the Boston area from Florida. She met a now-close friend during a Midnight Runners event, and the two clicked and spent the whole night talking. Recently, they took their respective boyfriends to an EDM festival. Luce Kelly, 28, joined the same group in 2024 after moving to the Boston area. She’s hosting an upcoming birthday dinner with eight women she met through the group—all of whom, she says, she never would have met organically otherwise. “They work in different sectors, or they live in different parts of the city or in other suburbs,” she says. “There would have been no overlap whatsoever with a single one of the people who are my friends now.”

Then there’s Alfredo Rojas, 37, who’s found that activities hosted by the Boston-area “Make Friends After College” Facebook group (20,000-plus members of all ages) facilitate more lasting friendships—ones that continue outside the events—than other groups he’s tried. Meanwhile, Dan Cross, 39, discovered that his once-wide friend group had started to dissipate as he got older—marriages and kids made meeting up more difficult. After trying one singles-focused meetup group, a few of the members spun off and created their own hiking group, hitting up New England’s mountains throughout the year. “I’m not the most social or outgoing person, so events like these help bridge the gap,” he says.

But not every event is a winner. Diane Darling, 60, went to a dinner where one woman was so combatively political that it left the entire table stunned into uncomfortable silence. Another woman told me about an event where she was one of just a few women in a room full of men. What was meant to be a platonic community gathering had the air of a singles mixer—and she was married. Someone else described attending events where it felt like everyone already knew each other. And worse: The connections she thought she had made ended as soon as the event did. She never saw any of them again.

The night of my Timeleft dinner, I walked in my front door to find my husband with a smirk on his face, ready to hear what he assumed would be a horror story about my evening with strangers. Instead, I launched into no fewer than 15 minutes of breathless recap: how I’d waited outside in the cold for an extra 10 minutes because I was so nervous; how I genuinely liked every woman I spent dinner with; how I had developed a newfound desire to add Yellowstone National Park to our travel bucket list and go hiking in the White Mountains this summer. I was nearly bouncing off the walls with excitement, thinking that maybe, just maybe, this time I had made some new friends.

One woman and I discovered early on that we went to the same heated Pilates studio in Harvard Square, and we promised we’d see each other in a class. (It struck me then: Someone I could be great friends with might be right under my nose, if I ever bothered to look up and talk to them.) But in the more than two dozen workout classes I took in the two months following that dinner, I never saw her again—or maybe I did, and in the haze of the 100-degree room, I’d forgotten that I promised to look for her. Either way: We didn’t connect again.

For weeks, I counted it as a failure in the friendship department. Which, if I’m being honest, it was. But here’s the thing about adult friendship—the issue I kept bumping up against all winter: The groups can put you in the room. They can hand you the conversation starters and seat you next to someone who also loves heated Pilates and has strong opinions about Yellowstone. But they can’t do the rest. You have to put in the work. You have to fight the inertia, the voice in your head that says, She probably doesn’t remember you anyway, the exhaustion that makes it so much easier to just go home and watch TV. Real friendships aren’t built in a single dinner. They’re built in the follow-up—the text, the coffee, the showing up again.

So I took a leap. I messaged the woman from Pilates and asked if she wanted to go to a class together. She said yes. We’re going next week, and maybe we’ll grab coffee or a drink after. We might not become best friends. But then again, you never know. And that’s the whole point.

We were in the bland hinterlands of Greater Boston, skiing along the ho-hum Leo J. Martin Golf Course—otherwise known as the worst golf course in America. The traffic of I-95 hummed nearby; a passenger train clanged in the darkness. But my mind knew nothing of the setting, for I was at war.We clambered toward a narrow hairpin turn, four Lycra-clad cross-country ski racers so close I could see the dried white spittle on my competitor’s whiskery face. The pack constricted like water through a pinched hose. Then suddenly we were on a wider expanse of groomed trail, snow glimmering under the floodlights at the Weston Ski Track’s winterlong Tuesday Night Race Series (TNR), which has been around since the facility’s inception in the early 1980s, and I knew it was my moment to pass. I squeezed past the guy flagging before me, our ski poles clacking. Then I kept digging, hoping, a mile into this 3-mile Nordic race, to hang onto 12th place in a field of about 100 competitors spread between two waves.

The TNR Series is essentially a beer league, offering amateur skiers the same thrills and bare-knuckled rivalry that basketballers might find playing pickup at Peters Park. The series’ nine annual races, staged between January and March, are cumulatively scored, with everyone scrapping for age-group bragging rights. And they typically play out, thanks to climate change, on tight stripes of manmade snow—on snaking, polycone-lined courses that deliver what may be Nordic skiing’s closest approximation of stock-car racing. Still, a sporting bonhomie prevails. Passing people at Weston, I often get a kindly wheeze of solidarity: “Go for it, dude!”

Often, but not always. Now, in Race 9 of the 2025 season, the guy I’d passed shouted, “I’m going to fucking deck you after the race!”

I skied on, gratified that he was receding behind me, and I reflected on the absurdity of my quest: I am 60 years old, and even three decades ago, I never had the zip and power you’ll see on TV this month when the world’s best cross-country skiers—among them, Johannes Høsflot Klaebo of Norway and Julia Kern of Waltham—take to the snow at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy. Still, for me, Weston is the Olympics, for my AARP years have come with a swarm of anxieties. My career as a writer has not gone gangbusters. In my family life, there’s an estrangement so painful I cannot divulge the details. My late middle-aged campaign to find wholeness hinges in large part on skiing. Living in the sticks of New Hampshire, I ski daily in winter. I own 10 pairs of skis. I study technique videos on YouTube. I endeavor, with each race, to eke all I can out of my diminishing sinew.

I finished Race 9 in 10th place, and when my impassioned friend crossed the line 30 or so seconds later, he was yelling and jabbing his finger at me. I considered the possible headlines: “Man, 60, Mauled at Cross-Country Ski Race,” and then I drifted away to find safety in a crowd of recent finishers doubled over in the snow, catching their breath.

For years, I’d heard about the Weston Ski Track. Its habitués would show up at the races I do in northern New England, telling improbable tales of a ski venue whose only sizable hill—a 30-foot-high, skateboard-ramp-steep massif referred to as Mount Weston—was shaped by a bulldozer. I knew that the place had some claims to glory. Kern learned to ski there, taking to the snow as soon as she could walk and then improving so quickly that, by around age 12, she was mixing with grown men in the A Wave every Tuesday. Kern placed fifth in the sprint at last year’s World Ski Championships. “I credit a lot of my drafting tactics to those Tuesday Night Races,” she told me.

Still, I’ve always harbored a northerner’s snobbery toward podunk Weston, with its man-made snow and its rinky-dink hills. That changed only when I decided, early last January, to enter Weston’s Race 1. I found myself hooked by the urban vibe—the rush-hour jostling, and the way 100 skiers would crowd post-race into Weston’s barracks-like, concrete-walled golf shop to scarf down pizza and beer. Their voices formed a happy din; their sweat steamed the windows. I liked how there were skiers who’d recently relocated to Boston bearing the accents of the world’s chicest ski locales—Norway, Sweden, and Japan—and I liked how everyone found joy amid the industrial inflections of Weston’s orange polycones.

Soon, I developed a ritual. Traveling south to visit my partner, V, in Worcester each Tuesday, I’d detour to Weston to race. Each week, I’d arrive to find but a few stray novices poking around like lonely ants on the snow. But then, gradually, the TNR faithful would show up to glide along through their warm-ups. We’d strip off our jackets, and then we’d stand on the starting line, shivering in tights, to share an almost spiritual moment.

Since the early 1990s, the jefe of TNR has been Andy Milne, a retired high school teacher who says he’s witnessed, over his decades in the classroom, a sad decay of the American social fabric. “I used to see kids walking home from school in big groups,” Milne says. “Now they’re almost always alone.”

At the TNR starting line, Milne forces skiers to shake the hands of their competitors. He endeavors to salt the races’ cutthroat energy by telling a groan-worthy dad joke each week. (“What did the snowman say? I don’t know about you, but I smell carrots.”) In a booming, rasping, and slightly menacing exam proctor’s voice, he enunciates a distinct social code. “You are expected to talk to people when you are warming up,” he tells the assembled starters, “to congratulate the person in front of you and in back of you.”

There’s a bit of the tyrant about Milne, but his approach draws the multitudes. He says TNR attendance has increased fivefold under his long watch. Which, of course, makes the racecourse more crowded and the dogfight more intense. Moments after Milne’s weekly disquisition, almost inevitably, some chucklehead will eat it trying to make a dicey pass on the 180-degree turn 200 yards into the race.

The critical question at Weston, I learned, is: How and where to pass? On the turns? Hazardous. On the course’s short, gentle downhills? Not easy, because descent speed is dictated in large part by the type of wax under one’s skis, and my peers and I were equally waxed. On uphills? Yes, that does work, but being old—and thereby lacking in fast-twitch muscle fiber—I didn’t have a ton of game there.

I fared poorly in the first two races, finishing 15th, then 21st. Meanwhile, there was a frustrating inevitability at work: Seconds into each race, a clump of five or six twentysomething chums who’d connected while racing in college bolted out in front. Leading them, always, was James Kitch, recently an All-American at Harvard. Kitch is tall and ripped. In his resplendent white Harvard race suit, he seemed to occupy a caste of his own. Not far behind, always, was the Crimson’s assistant coach, 2022 Olympian Hannah Halvorsen. Her poles punched the snow with smooth, machine-like power and precision.

But every race was a new ball game. When the days were warm and the evenings cool, the slush froze, and the track was a skating rink, wicked fast, so that the leaders averaged more than 15 miles an hour. On cold days, Weston Ski Track made lots of snow, and we skied amid a slow, sticky powder reminiscent of confectionery sugar. As the snow guns opened up new terrain, more polycones appeared. The races grew to 4.02 miles and, eventually, 5.75 miles long.

Race 3 came after a blizzard. Weston was, for a few days, a paradise of soft, fluffy snow, so the Tuesday series time-traveled back to skiing’s roots. Almost invariably, Weston races see skiers invoking a fast, newfangled technique: Ski skating, invented in the 1980s, involves skiers pushing their legs to the side, as ice- and roller-skaters do. But skating through deep powder is laborious, so Race 3 was a “classic” race, with participants scissor-stepping their way along, just as Norwegian émigrés like Herman “Jackrabbit” Smith-Johannsen did when they brought skiing stateside in the late 19th century. I so wanted to be there, racing classic, but the snowy route south from my home was impassible, and I missed the season’s most magical night.

During Race 5, I embraced a new tactic: start as fast as you can and hang on.

During Race 5, I embraced a new tactic: Start as fast as you can and hang on. This actually worked. I’m an ornery old bastard, and midway, I found myself eerily all alone under the lights, way ahead of my old peers. There was a fiftysomething guy ahead of me, and the recent collegiate stars were roistering along, as always, in their own rarefied bubble ahead, but I’d arrived in a new land. All I saw before me was a thin white line of snow, spooling out into space like a rope, and it seemed that if I clung to that rope—if I thought of nothing else but clawing my way along it—all the troubles of the world would fall away and, for a moment at least, I’d glimpse bliss.

Could I have arrived in such a flow state skiing alone through the woods of New Hampshire? I don’t think so, for there was something communal about the moment: It sang because I was laboring with like-minded diehards, with some of the few people around who understand that our obscure sport is worthy of fanatical devotion.

I finished 12th that night (trust me, I am a student of results sheets) in a stacked field. In Worcester afterward, I was so ecstatic that V had no choice but to stay up late and listen as I told the unabridged tale of that evening’s journey, polycone by polycone.

In the next race, I finished ninth. It was becoming clear that I’d take the 60-plus men’s laurels for the season. Then came Race 9, during which I wriggled past bodily threat and managed to take a three-way finish-line sprint and crack the top 10 for a second time. Afterward, a friend emailed me, dropping the name of a young Weston racer who typically finished around eighth. Could I reel him in?

It seemed mathematically possible: Race 9 fell on March 4 with tons of snow still on the ground. Hopes for a rare Race 10 rippled through the TNR regulars, and as if to celebrate winter’s lingering bounties, one competitor, Will Meehan, cradled a can of craft IPA as he skied a few dawdling post-race laps. Later, on social media, he proclaimed, “If you aren’t doing the no pole, beer in hand, cool-down ski, why are you even here?”

Meehan, mid-20s, stocky and mustachioed, was my favorite among the series’ top dogs, for he brought a punk-rock insouciance to the proceedings. As I skied beside him after one race, he reveled in the cat-and-mouse game that played out among the leaders, and on the TNR email thread, he encouraged all of us to head north to Vermont for bizarre “Nordic Ski Cross” races featuring “jumps and downhill slalom turns, all on Nordic skis,” he wrote. “It is truly awesome.”

I was with Meehan in hoping that our weekly Weston bacchanal would play on forever—or into April, at least.

But winter is shorter and shorter these days, and in the week following Race 9, temperatures reached the mid-50s in Greater Boston. Race 10 became a costume party—an unscored tragicomedy that played out on tiny islands of melting snow. I skipped it, and now my Weston racing career is officially over. V is no longer in Worcester—she left the city this summer, and we now live together in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region, where, inspired by those Tuesday nights, I just helped resurrect a moribund ski-race series: the Headlamp Hustle, held Thursday nights at the Dublin School.

Whenever a highlights reel of the TNR series plays in my mind, the racing action seems high octane—it’s as though the soundtrack should be AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” But then I see pictures of myself racing, and the story becomes more poignant. I see an old man, stiff and hunched, fighting to hang on.

I’m pretty sure that I was not the only TNR skier bringing my foibles to the starting line. None of us on hand, not even James Kitch, was a pro. No, we were all amateurs, and sometimes we stepped on each other’s skis. Sometimes we even yelled at one another. But we found connection under the lights. In the darkest season of the year, we shone brightly. We lived.

This article was first published in the print edition of the February 2026 issue with the headline: “The Other Winter Games.”

In the car heading west to Aunt Dot’s funeral in Chicago with my sister, Nancy, I’ve been raging—or not raging, exactly, but going on at some length about how angry I often feel with our mother. My anger isn’t about specific things that happened so much as her take on the world. Anxiety and fear loomed large for our mother. She didn’t go out much, since the world was a dangerous place, and it seemed to be our job to get on board with her view. I didn’t—I left at 20. Nancy, for the longest time, stayed put.

Since I’m driving her red Impala, barreling west on the Ohio Turnpike, I don’t look at my sister as she makes a point to show me that she’s not blind to Mom’s darker side. Our mother, now 92 and not up for a road trip to bury her sister, has been talking about a newfound closeness with Nancy ever since my sister retired a few years ago and has more free time. But Nancy knows the supposed warmth between them is really something else.

“Mom is having her needs met and is confusing that with being close,” my sister says. I know without looking that Nancy has closed her eyes tight as she tells me this—something she does when another person’s presence threatens to disrupt her thinking. Groceries and homemade soup delivered to Mom in her old-age home, her cable-TV issues figured out, her simple finances double-checked, all by Nancy, always the worker bee. My sister is tan. At 65, she’s still good-looking. Fine age lines spiral out from those closed eyes, as if something irreversible is only beginning from within—I notice this as I glance at her.

“My problem with Mom is that she knew better—she’s not dumb,” I tell my sister. Our mother told us early on about her tough childhood, when she was never sure whether her father was going to stick around, whether they would go down the tubes financially, whether she and her two sisters would get cast off to live with some relative. Yet for a long time, it had bothered me that our mother constantly perceived danger for Nancy and me, too—not from our parents having problems, but from the trouble she was sure lurked around any corner.

I am 62 years old. I continue complaining to my sister about our mother’s view that disaster was never far: “How were we supposed to live our lives?”

Nancy, as if to get my rant to stop, tells me, “Mom is the reason I didn’t have children.”

I don’t react, at least not outwardly, though I’m thinking, Jesus. Maybe it is even worse than I thought.

Instead, I’ll let her confession—that Mom was the reason she didn’t have children, outrageous as it is—sit. There is time. I’ll dig in and find out more; we’re still a few hours from Chicago. But our mother doesn’t come up again for the remainder of the trip. It’s for another day.

A day that never comes.

Three months after our road trip, Nancy is dead. It happens suddenly, randomly. My sister chokes on her dinner at home, passes out, and though her husband, and then medics, and then doctors at a hospital over four days all try mightily to save her, they can’t.

I am now left with a hole—both from losing my sister and from never fully understanding her. Eight years later, that understanding still feels paramount. My sister became a mystery, and finding her has become a mission.

Nancy once told me that we weren’t part of the same generation. This seemed odd, given she was only three years older than me.

Still, she had a point. For the longest time, I resented doing all the work to get our parents to see how the world was changing circa 1969. Nancy’s big contribution was coming downstairs to breakfast as a high school senior wearing a raincoat, because underneath she had on culottes, which our mother forbade for school. She would graduate number two in her class of 1,100 students.

Nancy was busy, besides studying. She played field hockey, basketball, and softball in high school. None of us ever thought to go to any of her games. Evenings, Dad and I would be in the living room watching The Dean Martin Show and other network fare—me on the floor, Dad in his armchair behind me smoking—and my mother, who made most of my sister’s clothes, would be on the couch sewing, her kitchen table already set for breakfast in the ethereal light of an overhead lamp pulled down low. My sister would be upstairs in her bedroom doing homework. We knew it was calculus if, every once in a while, a “Goddammit!” with her foot pounding the floor would rain down, which meant the answer she came up with didn’t match the one in the back of her math book—this drove her nuts. I could hear my mother’s sewing plop down in her lap with each wrong answer, as if she worried there could be real damage from that pounding foot, but I knew there would be a little smile as well, for my sister going above and beyond what a girl had to do. Nancy was so…ambitious! She achieved; I watched. Dad smoked. Dean Martin was smooth and good-looking and always seemed to be on the verge of kissing one of those dancers.

It was pretty cozy, in its way. But not really so simple.

Small disruptions threw our mother off. When my sister and I were young, Dad got a promotion into management at a turbine factory, and he started coming home at 7:30 or 8 at night—we’d be eating as he came in the back door, and Mom would tell him, more panic than annoyance in her voice, “I can only hold dinner for so long!” She was really afraid, I think, that our father was going to fail, that he might lose his job, though her doctor decided she was suffering from “housewife syndrome,” and prescribed “green nerve medicine,” which is how we always referred to it. Mom’s green nerve medicine, probably Valium, resided in a handy spot on the kitchen counter for some time, just in case her day got out of control.

That was when I began to see my mother’s view of things as strange. She made the mistake of telling Nancy and me, when I was maybe 11 years old, that one day, when my sister was a baby, just after they’d moved into our house, she was vacuuming the bare maple stairs. Midway, she dropped her vacuum cleaner—the one she still used, about the size of a pot roast—right on a step, putting “a big dig in the maple.” I didn’t know why my mother was telling us this, but it seemed important.

“I sat down on that step and cried,” she told us.

“You…cried?” I said. “Because you dropped the vacuum cleaner?” This seemed…weird.

My sister laughed, nervously, at my audacity, as our mother stared at me. Her eyes were very blue. “You don’t understand,” she told me. “You don’t understand how important building this house was to your father and me.”

Oh, we knew. That my father had come along and saved her as a young woman still living with her parents, as Grandpop was still at it—drinking and smashing up cars in the city where Mom grew up, sometimes chasing other women, and that in courting her my father told my mother, “I’ll build you a house myself,” one where he would always come home for dinner. Our mother liked to say that she had a perfect marriage, that she and my father had never had an argument. Not one.

This house was the place where everything had changed for her. And it was her job to make sure that nothing intruded on that.

But here I was laughing about Mom’s reaction to the fresh dig in the maple stairs, and before I upset her with anything more about that, my sister disappeared upstairs, to her room, as if she was the one who had messed up. At 11, I did not understand the depth of our mother’s need to wipe the past clean with a pristine present—all I knew was that something small was suddenly a huge deal.

Sex was another area where Mom had to be vigilant. Once, when she picked up Nancy and me at the local pool, she spied my best friend chasing a thin girl through the water in an endless game of tag.

“He’s going to get that girl in trouble,” Mom announced to us in the car on the way home.

I laughed. Timmy and I were 13. “He doesn’t even know where his dick is,” I told my mother.

My sister, up front with Mom, gasped. Mom was silent for a moment, and then said, “I don’t know what is wrong with you,” which captured not just her annoyance that I would talk to her like I had, but something much bigger: I was missing the real danger here of what was about to happen. This seemed crazy—Timmy, like me, was just a kid playing in a pool, having innocent fun. Why did my mother see a crisis looming?

Later—much later—I would understand a fundamental difference between my sister and me: While she certainly felt my mother’s anxiety as I did, her method in dealing with it was different. That day, home from swimming, Nancy went right up to her room, probably to work on her summer reading list. She didn’t rebel. She never even gave our mother a hard time. Nancy was most comfortable alone in her room—she was like our father in that way, who spent almost all of his spare time in his workshop—becoming the smartest girl. My sister would perform her way past the danger Mom saw.

Later, I would understand a difference between my sister and me: While she felt my mother’s anxiety as I did, her method in dealing with it was different.

But that idea fell apart fast.

Graduating number two in high school got Nancy a partial scholarship to a private liberal-arts school. Making friends, though, was always a struggle for her, and she couldn’t connect: The other girls had more money, privilege, and assurance that they were in the right place. After freshman year, Nancy transferred to an inferior teachers’ college closer to home that Bill, her high school boyfriend, had gotten into, and with that, all those hours she had worked and worked, up in her room alone, came to nothing.

Nancy had leaped back to the safe life our mother saw for her: a husband, a house, and when kids came, you’d quit the teaching job to stay home. Midway through her senior year, Nancy and Bill got engaged and planned a wedding for that June, right after graduation. It could have been 1957 instead of 1973.

A small problem emerged, though: Bill slept with Nancy’s roommate. He and my sister had not even done the deed yet, she told me—Bill wanted to marry a virgin, though apparently that didn’t mean he had to be one (1957 was intact there, too). After he confessed, the wedding was off.

My mother was sure tragedy had befallen my sister. Nancy was embarrassed but certainly not heartbroken over Bill—something only I seemed to see. I told my mother, “She’s okay. She’s fine.” My mother looked at me like I had two heads: “Her heart is broken.”

I felt bad for my sister, but maybe getting rid of Bill was a good thing, and not just because he’d cheated on her. She called me into her bedroom one night, where she was lying under a sheet just as it was getting dark, as if she were some sort of invalid. As I sat precariously on the end of her bed, I learned she was doing a lot of thinking, and that even when she was engaged to Bill, she’d fantasized, sometimes, about older guys, which sounded like a confession, not quite as bad as what Bill had done in screwing her roommate, but in the same general ballpark.

That fall, my sister would find that fifth-grade boys were brutal in their assessment of everything, including her, their teacher, and she soon quit to take a job with the Social Security Administration; at an after-work happy hour she met Scott, who was slightly older, in law school, wore Mickey Mouse T-shirts, and, as an only child, had dinner every Saturday night with his parents. He struck me as a dweeb. One day, Mom popped over to my sister’s new apartment, decorated with my parents’ old porch furniture, and slipped in—there were Scott and my sister, naked from the waist up. Back home, my mother said to me, “You’ll never imagine what I just saw.” Once she told me what was apparently going on over there, I asked her what, exactly, she expected my sister to be doing in her apartment, alone, with her boyfriend.

Nancy was accused by our mother, after that episode, of “having hot pants.” Leave her alone, I thought. Just let her be normal.

A couple of years later, though, the stakes got higher when Nancy and Scott got married.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I lived in a converted chicken coop at the base of a mountain in the mid-Atlantic. It was a cozy little place, $50 a month in rent, with a bedroom the exact size of a single mattress. I had cable television. I had heat, too, though the plumbing would freeze in winter. My sister came to visit one fall for a weekend, before the cold set in, when my kerosene heater could still get the place plenty warm enough.

I had mixed feelings about Nancy’s visit, which was her idea—what would I do with her?—but I sensed she needed something, some relief from her regular life, which was very regular. Scott had become a lawyer for the feds on immigration, in order to keep the bad guys out of the country. Saturday-night dinners with his parents remained. He had all the charm of Joe Friday.

I was a cabdriver with an English degree, and I told people, especially girls, that I was a writer. Most nights, I got drunk.

I took Nancy to a nearby college town on Saturday, to a café where I was unlikely to run into certain friends I didn’t want to meet her. My sister had very short brown hair, like Billy Jean King, and a certain…nervousness that got worse in public. Our waitress wore a tight white top that showed off her large breasts. She and I had never had a conversation apart from ordering, though I was a regular there. After delivering menus, she returned with just the slightest smile that seemed to say, So you have a girlfriend, before she asked: “Do you know what you want?”

I took my time, looking up at her. Then I held her eyes for a moment. I said, “Yes.”

She smiled.

“Wait until I tell Mom!” Nancy exclaimed.

That evening, in my chicken coop, I lay on the floor, and Nancy sat in my armchair, holding my cat, petting it briskly as she told me she wasn’t sure what was going to happen. Nancy was talking about her marriage. The job at Social Security was the easy part of her life; she was rising in the government ranks. Nancy said that if you had an affair, you should not tell your spouse—she was speaking hypothetically, testing the waters. It was about survival. She sounded hard-edged and selfish, not like my sister at all.

I wanted to tell her that things would be okay, that it would all work out. But we had arrived at the same spot, my sister and I, from opposite directions. She always did what she was supposed to, which seemed like a fool’s errand. I was doing whatever I wanted, which at the moment wasn’t looking like a lot. Most days, it was a challenge for me simply to get out of bed. Now neither of us knew what was next.

After a decade and a half of marriage, Nancy would leave Scott. She had needed a push and got it from the guy redoing her kitchen. He had arrived by way of my parents—Tom had remodeled a bathroom for them. And by way of once having tried to pick up my sister in his ’54 Chevy when he went cruising and spied a girl outside her house one day: Tom was 16, Nancy 14, and she went running inside to report what had just happened—this boy out there—to Mom.

Here she was, at 40, finally ready. I had just moved back East from California, where I’d gone to grow up. I’d gotten married, had a son, and was taking a real stab at writing.

Nancy had transformed; it was a big surprise, and miraculous. She became 18 again. Her skirts came way up. She stopped wearing a bra. She grew her hair.

My parents disapproved of getting a divorce, which had me, during one dinner alone with them, lecturing my mother as Dad smoked, drank his coffee, and, as usual, said nothing. I stared at her blue eyes. She was an open book on the way she felt about everything, including Scott—she didn’t like him. But now it felt like she’d put my sister in a box with no exit, that she was more concerned with moral opprobrium than her daughter’s happiness.

Nancy taking up with a divorced man with two teenage sons—awfully dark, murky waters. I was all for it. They took skiing vacations, she and Tom, with Tom’s sons; they jet-skied and biked all over. He got her to check out NASCAR. There were certainly no Saturday-night dinners with his parents.

Nancy married Tom. I had a second son and began working as a freelance magazine writer. With that, my sister and I were locked in place with our families. I didn’t see Nancy much; it sometimes felt like we were still living a continent apart, as time, that great equalizer, slipped away.

I called Nancy out of the blue one day to ask her to lunch, a few months before the road trip to Aunt Dot’s funeral. At this point, Dad had been dead for some time, though making it to 74 after five decades of two and a half packs of Salems a day was a minor miracle. Mom had sold the house and moved to a nursing home. Now there was something I wanted to confess to my sister.

“I judged you,” I said to her at a tiny café. “A long time ago, I decided I was cooler and smarter.”

Her face was going WHOA, with her eyes wide and unmoving as if they were stuck—this was another habit of hers, the opposite of closing her eyes tight in search of solitary thought.

“It’s bullshit, but that’s what I did,” I told her. “I think it was mean. And I’m sorry I did that.”

“Oh…” she said, as our father might have, and then he would have taken a drag from his cigarette with a big exhale, though she had no way to hide, and to my surprise, didn’t need one.

“I had my own way,” Nancy said, her face calm now. “I had the idea that I had the superior career.” She had ended up running her local Social Security office; my long run as a freelancer had ups and downs. “It’s natural for siblings to be competitive.”

That didn’t sound quite right, coming from my sister, who had always given my creative juices appropriate respect.

“You came out of the gate much faster,” I said, feeling a little ridiculous. “Whereas I…”

“You needed time,” she said. “For me, ambition went out with leaving Scott. My goals changed.” She had retired at 57. “Anyway,” she said, “you are smarter and cooler.”

“It’s bullshit.” The stance of being above it all, from the time we were teenagers to deep into my twenties—that’s what it was, just a stance. “We’re all so vulnerable,” I told her. “I was as afraid as you were.”

My sister smiled and then reached across the table and tapped my head. “It’s all in here.”

Later that day, I got an email from her: “Very touched that you felt you wanted to apologize. The compelling thing was that it was important to you. On the one hand, I want you to know that there’s no need for you to say anything, because things are good between us. On the other hand, I don’t want to diminish the emotion that lies behind your desire for us to connect. That’s what touched me.”

I thought two things about her email: She wasn’t just letting me off the hook for judging her, but admiring my risk in telling her so. That was very kind.

The other thing: When the hell did she get so smart?

Three months after my road trip with Nancy to Aunt Dot’s funeral, she and Tom were eating pizza on their den sofa, watching baseball. He happened to look over at her—Nancy’s lips were blue. She slumped over. He called 9-1-1, which advised him to pound her chest to revive her heart. But it wasn’t her heart. She had choked on the pizza and, for some reason, did not make a sound or lurch toward Tom for help before passing out. When I met him at the hospital, my sister was on life support.

It was up to me to go tell our mother what had happened.

She was calm as I talked. In fact, she was so calm when I told her that the prognosis was not good at all, I asked my mother if she understood what I was saying. From her adjustable armchair, command central in her efficiency, Mom said, “I understand.”

I knew she did.

It was the power of our mother, and the strength of her, to take on truly bad news as if it were the order of the day. (What might happen, large or small, that was something different. That was trouble.)
I asked Mom to stand so that I could hug her; tiny now, frail, she did.

Our vigil for Nancy, looking for some sign that she wasn’t brain dead, lasted four days—with Tom and his sons, in their thirties now, and my wife and our sons, in their twenties. I advised Mom that coming to the hospital was not a good idea.

Then we pulled the plug, and she was gone.

Nancy was like my mother in a sense. She would escape her childhood home with something different. But family trauma has a strong hold on who we are.

I did figure out, in the end, an answer to my mother being the reason why my sister did not have children. My sister, I knew, was well aware of Mom’s feelings about Scott, her first husband. Our mother didn’t like that he was wooden and stiff, that when he and my sister came to the house, he had virtually nothing to say to her, that he would sit in the living room and pick up something to read, that she could never quite figure him out. When my mother would go alone to their house to drop off, say, some fresh peaches, she would walk right in. Scott told her not to do that, that she had to knock on the door. Even though my sister had married a successful guy, on one level, given his government lawyer career, it didn’t matter, because my mother had no idea who he was, though she was sure he did not measure up.

Our mother came of age when options were limited. Her one goal was to have a marriage—and family—utterly different from her upbringing. That was all she thought she could do, or wanted to do. My sister’s life, as she saw it, would mirror the one that Mom had escaped to, the one that she had created for us, the one that was trauma-free.

And Nancy was like my mother in a sense: She would escape her childhood home with something different. But family trauma has a strong hold on who we are. She would take in how our mother felt about herself—fearful and limited. Those feelings roiled in my sister as well; they were the air she breathed as a child. The one shot she had was achievement, but when she bailed on her first college at 19 years old and took up again with her boyfriend from high school at an inferior school, she had leaped back into the orbit of our mother.

With Scott, our mother put a veil of judgment over my sister—your marriage is not as good as mine—that Nancy simply couldn’t lift. She felt paralyzed until, at 40, she broke free when Tom came along.

By then, though, the window on having children had closed.

Certainly, she got to a better place with Tom, but not, in the end, fully with herself. As my sister was dying, a nurse revealed that there were two drugs in her system: an antidepressant and another to treat anxiety. This was a surprise to me—and even to Tom—and I knew it would have certainly been news to my mother as well. My sister’s trouble was hers, and hers alone.

She had told me on our road trip to Aunt Dot’s funeral, “What I am doing now is taking care of Tom and Mom”—Tom, at that point, had several medical problems. She was sure she would outlive them both, maybe for a long time. Nancy said she imagined selling their house and living in some garden apartment alone. There was no reason she had to be alone—early-morning sculling had given her the body of a 50-year-old. But I knew that’s how she saw herself, as if it was the inevitable end for her, and in her red Impala crossing Ohio into Indiana, I imagined her living in an apartment building that circled an inner courtyard of beautiful flowers—a sweet government pension had afforded her a comfortable last stop—and Nancy would go out into that courtyard with a paperback and a cup of tea. No one would come to see her. She wouldn’t have a boyfriend or any friends, and she’d read some historical novel written for the masses. Alone.

I knew she was conjuring something like that for herself, as if she had never gotten past the residue of old business. I didn’t challenge her on it, on our road trip. Instead, I talked about my anger at Mom, how difficult her fear and anxiety had been. I privately wanted, even at this late date, for my sister to rise up with me. Nancy didn’t take the bait.

There is, however, another way to look at where my sister landed, especially in her ongoing commitment to our mother. Nancy believed in duty, in coming through on the things she had been taught. She was a girl of her generation, when certain obligations trumped everything else. Now, as I think of my sister up in her childhood bedroom alone, working so hard, a richer possibility comes to me: That she was trying, in the only way she knew how, to make up for what Mom had gone through when she was young. To somehow solve our mother’s fears by being the smartest girl. And that’s a pretty incredible thing.

Over the years, I would learn more about my mother’s childhood: How there was a phone call one day from a woman my grandfather had taken up with, a call that my grandmother answered, with Grandpop God-knows-where, and how Grandmom would confide in my mother, the oldest daughter, about the woes of her marriage. There was no way to know, through the Depression and then the war, if they would make it; though finally, by the time my sister and I came along, my grandfather had stopped drinking, and my grandparents stayed together.

My sister gone, I started visiting Mom often, which surprised her. I asked why. “Your attitude,” she told me in her blunt way—I laughed, but she was right. It was the attitude I’d always had toward her. If my sister had not fully come to herself in the way I thought was so important, I hadn’t gotten all the way there either—not on Nancy’s terms of duty. Since our mother could still see right through me.

Toward the end, though, Mom and I reached a sort of truce. It helped enormously that she was a doting grandmother, and I was finally able to appreciate her smarts and toughness. Mom became a big cable-news junkie, and we’d have at it on politics; lo and behold, we landed in about the same place, able to share our mutual outrage at a world falling apart in her last couple of years.

There’s one more thing, about my sister: She had paved the way for me so that I could be the one to go off into the world. Nancy once said, about the time she came to visit me in my chicken coop after college, that she felt like an only child—she meant it in terms of the responsibility she took on, not judgment. Which allowed me to fumble my way to myself, whatever that might mean. We did reside in different generations, and my sister doing the work of hers gave me the escape hatch I had to have, an opening as big as the freakin’ moon, to do whatever I wanted.

She was a wonderful sister. It seems, in a way, that she was always working on my escape.

When our mother demanded that we weed the flower beds around the house on a summer morning long ago, and I would hem and haw and whine and move maybe 10 feet under the firethorn while my sister did her half through the azaleas and boxwood and rhododendron and hemlocks lickety-split, and then come over to my half, which was probably only a quarter to begin with, and weed almost all of that, too—well, just like that, we’re done!

Did Mom ever know that I couldn’t hold up my end? My sister never said a word.

This article was first published in the print edition of the December 2025/January 2026 issue with the headline: “Searching for Nancy.”

This is part of a winter series on things to do indoors in Boston.

On a Sunday that was too wet to go out and too cold to play ball, as Dr. Seuss so eloquently put it, I found myself at a crossroads: Should I spend the day inside the house, becoming a de facto kiddie cruise director, or go out and let someone else do the work? That’s how I wound up at the Natick Mall’s unofficial children’s wing, staring down a gaggle of tables covered in plastic at the Crafts Zone, a DIY spot offering unique projects that can be completed and taken home the same day.

The most exciting offering for my seven-year-old daughter was decoden, the Japanese art of decorating an item with “cream glue” that resembles frosting, then covering it in fun, quirky charms. Essentially, if you love baking, you’ll love making this craft.

After walking into the gray-and-yellow space, we chose our projects from a sample wall: a jewelry box for my daughter and a digital alarm clock for me. Next, we moved to the charm area, which had boxes full of tiny plastic pieces, loosely organized by color and theme. We picked everything from mini cheeseburgers and ice cream cones to Paw Patrol and Hello Kitty characters, along with plenty of stars and bows. After selecting the recommended number of charms, we chose the colors for our cream glue, which was already neatly loaded into piping bags.

Finally seated at our table, a staffer guided us through the design process, demonstrating how to pipe the cream glue (the shell technique took me a couple of tries). Once the “frosting” was down, we arranged our charms. The final, and most fun, step was the sprinkle station, where my daughter chose five different types of non-edible jimmies to give her masterpiece a sweet dusting.

Walking out with our sticky-fingered handiwork, I realized we’d successfully killed a couple of hours without a single screen—and created something that would take up precious space on her bedroom dresser for months to come. Totally worth it.

Natick, crafts.zone.

This is part of a winter series on things to do indoors in Boston.

On a typical winter weeknight, the Dance Complex in Central Square buzzes with a diverse array of classes, from tango to West African dance. Despite the talented crowd it attracts, the affordable classes welcome all levels, which was essential for me, as my moves had become decidedly “dad-like” in middle age.

I chose a bhangra class, the energetic Punjabi folk dance traditionally associated with the harvest and familiar from Bollywood films. Run by the nonprofit Boston Bhangra, the class on this particular evening included three novices and one expert dancer, all of whom were instantly put at ease by instructor Kit Tempest. Before getting started, he offered these words of encouragement: “Don’t be afraid of failure, and don’t be afraid to feel silly!”

Bhangra is based on heart-pounding, nonstop patterns of jumping and hopping to the beat of the music. I managed the footwork fine, but adding the arm movements threw me completely out of sync. Thankfully, a class regular who danced bhangra all four years in college gave me helpful tips to get me back in rhythm.

With the basic steps somewhat established, Kit moved on to actual choreography: the Horse Dance, a sequence where the gestures tell the story of tough young horsemen confronting rivals. Before we finished, the expert dancer gave us one final instruction: “Smile.” Bhangra audiences always want to see a smile. While I won’t be onstage anytime soon, I was smiling the whole time anyway.

Cambridge, dancecomplex.org, bostonbhangra.com. 

This article was first published in the print edition of the December 2025/January 2026 issue as part of a winter activities package with the headline: “The Great Indoors.”

I’m standing next to my friend on adjacent towers in a fantasy world, aiming bows and arrows at incoming enemies—dragons, orcs, and soldiers—trying to protect our village from attack. My arms are getting tired from holding up my bow, but we’ve made some progress. We’ve gotten to round six, our team of two racking up nearly 200 points, even as we’re slowly losing ground. Our village is near destruction.

To an outsider, we’re standing in the middle of what looks like a dance floor at Key to Amaze VR in Kenmore Square, strapped into VR headsets with controllers in each hand. But from our perspective, we’re fully immersed in the world of “Elven Assassin”—a sparkling, tropical ocean in front of us, towering palm trees surrounding us, the stone gates of our village at our backs. As we stretch out our arms, notching arrows into bows and releasing the controller’s trigger to shoot down enemies, our virtual selves match us move for move.

Key to Amaze offers dozens of VR options, and during our 40-minute window, we sampled mini golf, a pirate-era cannonball fight, and a zombie apocalypse survival game (unfortunately, we did eventually lose our elven city to the oncoming attackers). The full immersion was disorienting at first—we were completely blind to the real world, seeing only the virtual reality through our goggles. But once we adjusted to the physical movements—ducking, dodging, and moving our arms to shoot guns and swing golf clubs—the adrenaline started pumping and the competitive energy kicked in. It beat playing video games from the couch by a mile. Next time, we’ll be back with a bigger group of friends.

Fenway/Kenmore, keytoamaze.com.

This article was first published in the print edition of the December 2025/January 2026 issue as part of a winter activities package with the headline: “The Great Indoors.”

Walking down Old Colony Avenue after sundown used to be a dicey proposition, but strolling into the brilliantly lit Mei Mei storefront reminded me that those memories of the old Southie have long since passed. I arrived late to the evening’s DIY dumpling class, checked in, grabbed a name tag, and received a plastic container of minced-pork filling. I quickly realized I was the only person flying solo and was directed to a table of six between two married couples—a seating arrangement that surely ruined someone’s symmetrical date night.

After introductions to charming pairs from Southie and Franklin, we surveyed our stations: water, pork mix, and a stack of delicate wrappers. Wine, beer, and cordial cocktails flowed swiftly as our instructor, Agnes—an architectural designer by day, dumpling enthusiast by night—began the tour. She pointed out the small dining area and a large window revealing the industrial kitchen, where we could spot “Hal,” a machine that can crank out up to 10,000 dumplings an hour.

Ready to begin, we learned the first step: priming the wrapper by tracing the heavily floured rim with water-wet fingers. Next came the crucial moment: depositing a “tater tot”–size dollop of pork filling into the center. This naturally sparked a brief, vigorous debate over the precise sizing of a tater tot, but once settled, it was time to fold.

Agnes wisely started us with the easy half-moon—simply folding the round disc in half and sealing the edge. The complexity quickly ramped up, progressing to the bellybutton, triangle, and multiple-pleats methods. While some students expertly executed the intricate folds, my attempts at the advanced styles mostly came out as deformed mutations of my half-moons.

Once our pork supply ran out, we moved to one of the 16 cooking stations and lightly pan-fried our creations, introducing water into the oil to achieve that golden-brown, restaurant-quality finish. Gathered around our misshapen masterpieces with wine in hand, I had to admit: Being the third wheel at dumpling class wasn’t so bad after all.

South Boston, meimeidumplings.com.

This article was first published in the print edition of the December 2025/January 2026 issue as part of a winter activities package with the headline: “The Great Indoors.”

Coming to at 3 a.m. after blacking out halfway through snorting a line is an unpleasant cardiac experience, to say the least. And it was only made worse by the fact that a lunatic was pacing the room, his nose bleeding and his heart pounding beneath his sweat-soaked T-shirt. I’d known plenty of gangsters—some would scoff at my calling this guy one, but this wasn’t the time for semantics. He was deep in cocaine psychosis, and he had a gun. Three days of whiskey and coke always end in madness. This one closed with me, the lunatic, and the demons only he could see.

When the gun turned on me, my sprint for the door ended with a brutal kiss from the sidewalk that tore the skin off both palms. I bounced up and kept running, heart pounding to the edge of explosion. If cocaine came with a prescription label, it would read, Warning: Do not sprint.

That night wasn’t an outlier. It was my world. I came of age in the shadow of Boston’s opioid epidemic, where hip-hop became both my escape and my weapon. The underground drug culture shaped my language, my dreams, and my music. And also, my finances. The only way to get enough money together to make an album was to partner with, let’s say, gentlemen who traffic in large quantities of dry goods. That came with its own pitfalls and dangers: The lunatic in question that night was one of them.

That was the last time that I ever saw him, but a week later, the studio where I had been recording, and where I’d racked up a large debt, was robbed by gunmen to steal my masters. After that, I slept with a borrowed gun in my empty South Boston apartment, watching cars circle O Street. I knew at that moment that I was in over my head, and I desperately needed a miracle.

I soon got one. In 2004, a year after that crazy night, I released my first mixtape. It moved through the streets like contraband, passed hand to hand. The drums and fractured lyrics were both a celebration of the lifestyle of addiction and a memorial to the many lives it claimed. Before I knew it, I had what every young artist wants but few ever get: buzz. In 2006, the Boston Herald ran a feature on me. At the time, I was squatting in a warehouse near Mass. and Cass that had no electricity, heat, or hot water. The night before the article hit the newsstands, I was partying in an after-hours bar, where I would go to get drunk and charge my phone. At 7 a.m. I stumbled outside to a gas station, bought copies of the papers, and then went home, where I passed out on my mattress before I could even read the story.

Chaos had carried me to this place, and chance was about to carry me out. When I woke up at 3 p.m., my phone lit up with missed calls. Ben Affleck was trying to reach me. He was casting Gone Baby Gone and wanted me to audition.

After I got the role of Bubba Rogowski, everything shifted. I had gotten back together with my high school sweetheart, we married, bought a house in West Roxbury, and had a son. I signed on to make a record with my boyhood idols, House of Pain, and soon I was touring the world to sold-out crowds with our supergroup La Coka Nostra. I collaborated with legends Snoop Dogg, DJ Premier, and Cypress Hill. Ben cast me again, this time in The Town, which opened as the number one movie in America. For a while, it felt like this was it. I was living the dream.

It was only a Cinderella story until midnight hit, and the magic died. My marriage was fracturing under the weight of my addiction. On stage, I was annihilated. My shows had turned into a sideshow. I told myself it was part of the act, but my bandmates knew better. They weren’t impressed anymore. Confrontations among us became common, and sometimes they asked me to travel alone.

I was drunk on the set of Killing Them Softly and later passed out with a vodka bottle on the roof of the Omni hotel in New Orleans after shooting a scene with Brad Pitt. Shame. The whispers started in the film industry: He’s talented but crazy. In that world, no one says it to your face. The phone just stops ringing. It made sense. I belonged in detox, not on a Hollywood movie set.

I grew up in a neighborhood that doesn’t really exist anymore. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, Lower Mills in Dorchester was an Irish-American, working-class stronghold where it felt like there were a hundred kids on my block. I got my ass kicked regularly. My head bounced off the sidewalk. Someone ripped the tire off my Dukes of Hazzard Big Wheel. I got an early look at alcoholism on every street corner before I even knew the word.

Despite the mayhem, it was a good childhood. My friends and I ran the streets until the lights came on, with scraped knees and Kool-Aid mustaches, calling out “Ollie ollie oxen free” like it meant we were safe. Like no matter where we hid, we could always come home. My father was a Boston Public Schools teacher, and my mother worked at the famed Dorchester florist Cedar Grove Gardens. I had two parents who loved me, and I couldn’t imagine anything ever coming between us.

That feeling didn’t last. I learned young that families break, people suffer from mental illness, and sometimes they don’t get better. I remember pressing my forehead to the glass of an ’83 Chevy, waving goodbye as I drove away from Dorchester. My parents split up, and for the rest of my childhood, I bounced between their houses. I had to learn how to find family on my own.

I found it in two friends I met in ninth grade. Erica was my first real love, the woman I’d go on to marry. Her family took me in when mine was falling apart. Their house had the kind of stability I couldn’t find anywhere else. She was the best part of my youth. Mike was my best friend and the big brother I never had. Hip-hop was our soundtrack: Wu-Tang Clan, Gang Starr, House of Pain. I was already writing rhymes, though nobody knew it yet. Together we learned to drink, get high, and throw punches as if they were rites of passage.

But nothing gold stays. The nights got longer, the drinks stronger, and the fights meaner. As the opioid epidemic gripped the city, my friends started dying or doing prison time. The streets became both playground and war zone, and I couldn’t tell the difference anymore. I was chasing something I couldn’t name. Pride. Power. Numbness. I guess it was whatever filled the empty space that used to feel like home.

Mike and I started on the same ride, but while I leaned on booze, cocaine, and benzos, he chose heroin. In our early twenties, we shared an apartment in Southie that we rented from my uncle. One day, I came home, and the furniture was gone. Mike had sold it all because he was dope sick. Not long after that, he was hauled off to detox—his first of what would become countless trips.

I, too, would be on the detox train soon enough. My career had spiraled into chaos. My marriage, to a straight-laced non-drinker, began cracking.

Paranoia ran my life. I thought everyone wanted me dead. When a fan came running for a photo, panic hit first. Once, on Newbury Street, I dropped a guy before he could even speak. Turns out he just wanted to tell me he loved me in The Town.

Erica pleaded with me to get sober for the sake of our marriage and our son. I tried with every ounce of my being to make that happen, but I just couldn’t do it. Before long, I was back in detox once again—and I came out that time knowing another relapse would mean I’d be out of the house for good.

What I didn’t know was that benzo withdrawal doesn’t end on day three. The mental torture stayed with me. My thoughts skipped like a scratched CD. I didn’t sleep for more than 15 minutes at a time for weeks. There was just sweat, confusion, and anxiety. I was swallowed whole by fear.

On day 27 out of detox, I stopped by a liquor store on my way to the recording studio. I was set to make my first solo album, something I’d worked for my whole life. I needed the magic. But I didn’t know how to create sober; I’d never done it.

I set my bottle of Grey Goose on the monitor and told my producer, Lou, “Don’t let me drink this, unless I can’t write.” I couldn’t write. I drank it. Then I hit the drug spot on the way home and got good and high. At 7 a.m., I walked through the door of my house. My wife was standing in the kitchen. “Get out.” That was the last day of our marriage.

The next two years took me to lows I can barely describe. I screamed at my son’s mother that I deserved overnight visits, but the truth is, I wasn’t fit. I saw him only under supervision at 4 p.m., usually the only hour I drew a sober breath. I spent more time in L.A., but I wasn’t getting work. I frequented bars and after-hours clubs instead. Panic attacks were constant. I was so terrified I’d drop dead when using that I’d get high on a bench outside the ER in East Hollywood. At least there, I figured, someone might be able to save me.

That December, I flew back to Boston to see my son. I visited him on Christmas Day and told him, “I’ll be there tomorrow.” Tomorrow never came. I was on a bender and had a concert in Philly. I chewed through a bag of MDMA and collapsed after the show. On January 2, 2014, I finally called my ex-wife. “George, do you have any idea what you’re doing to our son?” she said. “You left him waiting on the steps. He said, ‘Mommy, Daddy tricked us again.’”

I had hit thousands of bottoms. I’d faced endless consequences and gotten far too many second chances. None of it was enough. I still wore the lifestyle like a badge of honor. But this was different. When my little boy said those words to his mother, something broke inside me. I knew that nothing—not movies, not music—mattered if I didn’t have a relationship with him. I knew I had to get sober for my son.

I wish I could say I got sober that day. I didn’t. I stumbled through two more miserable months because I didn’t know how to sit with a feeling like that—how dark the night gets before dawn. On March 3, 2014, I walked into a 12-step meeting at the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard. I wasn’t new to meetings; I’d been ducking into them since I was 18. I had only once managed more than 30 days sober.

Now I was 36 years old and felt like my life was over. This will never work for me, I thought. But I had nowhere else to go.

I learned what they meant by “one day at a time.” I climbed out of that hole one step, one breath, and one slow day at a time. My body and mind yanked at my soul, begging for booze and drugs. Nights were endless. I was enveloped by doom, praying sleep would save me and I’d wake up different. “This too shall pass,” I whispered until the mantra numbed me. In hindsight, I should’ve been in a medical detox. Upon further review, I should have been dead.

When most people picture a spiritual experience, they think of a white-light moment. Mine wasn’t that. It was messy and painful, full of tears and hard truths. Over time, I learned acceptance, faith, community, service, forgiveness, and how to clean my side of the street. Through these principles, I have found a new state of grace. It’s carried me through the highs and lows of life. I have not picked up a drink or a drug in almost 12 years, something that’s allowed me to build an amazing relationship with my son. My son was too young to remember the way I was before I got sober. What he does remember is that I showed up for all of his baseball games.

Erica and I have co-parented our son successfully for years, and I’m grateful to call her one of my closest friends. Early in my sobriety, she married a good man from a big Greek family. They have two kids. I spend a lot of holidays with them. They call me “Uncle George,” and I love those kids like my own.

I found my own love story with Kristina, whom I met in 2016 and got engaged to last Christmas. I’ve become a stepdad to her girls, and they bring so much light into my life every day. A few years into my sobriety, I was still telling myself the sad story that I lost my family in active addiction. I’ve since come to a different perspective. I didn’t lose it at all; it just changed shape.

I did, however, lose my best friend, Mike. At 6:30 a.m. on the morning of October 1, 2017, I got the call that he was gone. He was 44 days sober before his fatal relapse. He was doing well this time. I know because I was his sponsor. I’d seen the lights come on for him. It was like old times, the way we laughed and talked about life. When he passed it left a fracture in my heart that will never fully heal. As kids, we fist-fought as a rite of passage; as grown men, we had a different fight, but we always fought together and for each other. That’s how I’ll always remember my friend. He was my biggest advocate.

This is the hardest part of addiction: the hope. We hold onto glimmers of it in between the long stretches of brutality while the disease takes its toll. Mike’s family loved him and did everything in their power to help him. I pulled every resource and tool I could. The truth is that he did his best, too. And still we lost our boy. My faith in my ability to help anyone else was shaken. So for a long time, I didn’t.

Service is a crucial part of staying sober, and that isolation almost broke me. A couple of years later, during a moment when I feared I might relapse, I did what I had been taught and spent the winter with a church group handing out food, jackets, and clothes at Mass. and Cass. The first time I stepped into a tent, it shook me to the core. People were openly smoking crack and shooting dope. The suffering was overwhelming. I walked out with tears running down my face.

Still, I kept showing up at this intersection, just blocks from where I had once been pulled out of obscurity by a barrage of phone calls from Ben Affleck. Maybe it was amends to Mike, or a debt I owed to the community that raised me. Whatever it was, it felt right. It felt like I had found my true purpose.

There’s a buzz that moves through the building at Charles River Recovery, the Weston treatment center I cofounded in 2022. I remember when it was just an empty shell, when we were still sketching ideas and dreaming about what it could become. Now, when I walk through, it’s alive with staff and patients who’ve come here for help.

Through a series of events I can only describe as guided by something greater than me, the chance to cofound and help lead this place was put in my path. We’ve run the facility for more than three years now and helped more than 7,000 people find a way forward. People like me. People like Mike.

In 2024, I opened Grand Rising Behavioral Health, an outpatient program in Norwood that focuses on mental health and the deeper causes of addiction. Between both programs, we have about 170 employees. I don’t think of them as working for me; they work with me for something we all believe in. To say it is rewarding is an understatement. I’m inspired every day by seeing people get well.

I think of my own journey and realize that if I’d never experienced the lowest of lows, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do any of this work. I understand that my life’s bottoms have made me uniquely qualified to help someone else.

Countless others are still battling addiction. Many of them have been lost in the crisis on Mass. and Cass and in cities across America. These are people’s sons and daughters. I may have made it through the darkness, but I’m just one story among many in the Boston community that raised me.

My name is George, I’m an alcoholic, and I finally found my way back home.

Over the summer, I was about to jump down from the second row of some bleachers—except I didn’t simply jump. I first had to pause and consider my 57-year-old back. I landed just fine, but then wondered, Am I done with 23-inch drops onto soft grass?

Maybe. If so, I’ve had a solid run. But then I slipped into another session of unfinished-business thinking, or as the desktop folder would read, “My_Regrets.” Was it about past relationships? No. Cities I’ll never live in? Nope. Career mismanagement? Amazingly not. It was about the things I’ve never done, and it’s a decent list. Like, I’ve never cooked a turkey, driven a motorcycle, owned rental property, lived on a kibbutz, or deep-sea fished.

But I’m cool with those things, because I’m a vegan. I’m not wearing pleather. I don’t want to worry about other people’s plumbing. I only speak prayer-book Hebrew. And I’m throwing up over the side of the boat.

On this day, though, one of the top items was the fact that I’ve never had a cast. I suppose that’s not the worst non-accomplishment. Back in the 1970s and ’80s, casts were big and plaster. After one day of attention and autographs, it was on to six weeks of being itchy and needing a bread bag to shower.

It’s not like I still couldn’t break a limb, but now it would be for tripping over a blanket or my dog. I know I never really wanted a cast, but…kids with casts seemed to be having a special kind of fun, doing stuff with dirt bikes, rope swings, the tops of fences, or some combo thereof. And there’s the regret—the things I didn’t do because I didn’t have the balls to do them.

As a kid, I played sports and held my own, but I didn’t skateboard or climb trees. I didn’t want to play tackle football, and I stopped playing town hockey once checking was allowed. I’ve had exactly one fight—overnight camp in 1979. Billy Horowitz had been riding me all summer, and on the day that it became too much, I charged across the bunk and hit him with a flying shoulder tackle. We both went down, his head just missing the built-in cubbies. I looked up, knowing I had nailed him, and to maintain my dominance, I said, “You okay?” The man-beast had been let loose two years before his bar mitzvah.

Oh, he hasn’t stopped. I sometimes sub in my town’s softball league. In one inning of one game, soon after I knocked a high-percentage single to right center, I was rounding third, about to score, but the ball beat me to the plate.

But nothing beats me. I could’ve slid hard into the catcher, knocked the ball loose, scraped up my knee, and then jumped up and chest-bumped teammates I barely know as blood ran down my shin. Pain? Are you joking? I’d be so alive from scoring our fourth run (we were down 12), I could’ve walked home carrying the equipment bag in one hand and the stainless steel water bottle my wife, Jenny, made sure I brought in the other.

For this glory, all I needed to do was slide. Yeah, I wasn’t sliding. I got tagged out standing up. That night, I didn’t have the guts for such foolishness. I also don’t have the wallet for any injury. Jenny and I recently had to start paying for our own insurance, so there will be no ER visits, X-rays, or anything else that doesn’t apply to the deductible we’re nowhere near reaching for at least six months.

You know what I really can’t do? Tear my Achilles, which seems to happen without any heads-up. Like, you’re just rounding third or jumping off a bleacher—my God, maybe I have bigger balls than I imagined—and then, all of a sudden, you’re in a leg scooter for three months. I have two kids who can’t drive yet. I have that dog I don’t want to trip over. He’s 75 pounds, sub-mediocre on a leash, and we live in a town that doesn’t feel the need for even sidewalks. As soon as he gets excited—Hey, it’s a squirrel. Hey, it’s a dog I see every day—I’m going down and finally getting that cast I’ve been dreaming of.

Still, would-be injuries are an easy diversion. There are other unchecked boxes that bug me, like not being good with climbing ladders. I didn’t come from a ladder family. Dad didn’t climb. We had one ladder: six-foot, unstable, and it didn’t leave the mudroom. I’m also scared of heights. It’s not a combination that makes me ever say, “You stay here. I’ll get the kite.”

At the same time, this is an optional fear. If I want to deal with it, I could. If I don’t, I don’t have to. Shimmying up a ladder is not a test of manliness or worth to society…although it kind of is.

Screw the avoiding. I’m doing it. I’m going up, and I’m doing it this afternoon. Or I would if I had a ladder and any clue about what I’m doing. Fortunately, my buddy Tommy Bogusz is assistant facilities manager at my JCC, a handyman, and a former teacher who has access to many ladders, along with the willingness to take on another fix-it-up project. But first, I need to get my head right.

I know I have this one fear. (I’m greatly underestimating.) From my view, everyone else has none and I have too many, and I’d like that to change.

It doesn’t necessarily work that way.

Ellen Hendriksen, a clinical psychologist at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety & Related Disorders and author of How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists, puts it plainly: Change is possible, but it’s relative and individual. “Everybody’s got a range,” she tells me. “You can push yourself to the top of your range.”

Interesting choice of words as I’m about to climb a ladder. Tommy and I start slowly, and I stick to his basics. I keep three points of contact. I don’t rush. I look at where I’m heading, not at the ground, and soon I’m about 10 feet up against the building. It is amazingly anticlimactic.

I wasn’t totally shocked by the experience. I don’t seek out heights, but my annual Ferris wheel ride lets me know exactly when the jitters kick in, and I’m good at a third-story balcony party level—maybe fourth if there’s a tray of vegan steamed dumplings.

Still, I’ve got another little-ish big issue that I figure maybe I should tackle right now since I’m on something of a roll. For as long as I’ve played baseball and softball, and played a solid third base, I’ll admit this: I’m still a little afraid of the ball. It’s not obvious, but on certain hot shots, I’ll flinch just so, and eff me if my last thought is gonna be: Scared? Of a ball? Of a softball?

So on a late-summer Sunday morning, I’m standing on a high school field with Steve Busby, assistant coach for Endicott College’s baseball team. He’s hitting more ground balls at me than I’ve taken in, well, forever, and giving me solid advice that I’m trying to keep straight. Stay down. Keep active feet. Reach out to the ball. Watch it come off the bat and all the way into my glove.

Did I feel more comfortable after my session? Sure, but mostly I was just wishing that my back was 30 years younger. Am I appreciably better? No, and why should I be? My six-year baseball career, 10.5 percent of my life and dropping, ended in 1983. Even before that, it was over. I was decent in a Little League kinda way, but there was never the call to get a private coach who could undo the efforts of well-meaning dads who didn’t know fundamentals but said helpful things like, “You run like you have a piano in your pants.” (At the time, not totally untrue.)

Even if I played a whole summer of adult-league softball, I’d maybe get 14 grounders, two of which would test my fear. Those aren’t great pot odds. Besides, it’s softball. It’s slow pitch softball. There aren’t tryouts, and if I miss one ball, no one is fuming, “Good job, Calechman. That 17th run killed us.”

And yet, for some reason, I still think I should be an expert, have no fear, and never, ever, ever make mistakes. I know. I have amazing denseness. With a step back, I realize that ground balls don’t matter. Neither do ladders. They’re just physical activities I wish I could be better at.

It took all that for me to realize what I really want to overcome: my fear of sharing how I feel, especially when it means pushing back.

But doing all of this made me realize I have something else that would be actually useful to overcome: my fear of sharing how I feel, especially when it means pushing back. Again, it’s not always obvious when I don’t do it, but I don’t always do it. I’m good with my wife and kids, some friends. If I have the chance to think, compose, edit, and rehearse, I’m pretty awesome, but not every interaction comes with an overnight delay.

Sometimes, my opinion needs to be given right then and there—a brother, a fellow coach, definitely a contractor—the gist of which goes something like, “That doesn’t work for me.”

That’s hard to spit out. Someone might laugh, yell, mock me. They might say, “What a silly, silly boob you are. I’m clicking ‘unfriend.’”

I suppose I’m making this a touch more than it might be, but it’s hard to undo decades of living. To get to the top of my range, I’d need to stand in some analogous field and take ground balls. It could be a month of coffees with electricians, house painters, and HVAC guys rapid-firing quotes at me.

On Day 1, I’d be, “Sure, sounds great.” Day 15, “Um, um, I don’t know. Maybe not?” Day 31, “Explain that cost…I think you can do better for me. You come up with something while I get another oat-milk decaf latte.”

Who’s the silly, silly boob now?