On some Sundays, I sit at Mass and look around at all the people whom I’ve seen for years, most of whom I know only by sight and not by name. I’ve watched them grow up. Some of them were once children here, annoying people by making noise or by running up and down the side [...]
Back in the 1980s, I was living in New Orleans in one side of a double shotgun on Dante Street. The other side was occupied by Don, a psychiatrist who played lovely classical piano when he was depressed. Don and I went out a few times, but nothing serious ever happened between us, not even a [...]
Yesterday I was in the checkout line at Publix behind an elderly lady in a scooter. An employee was helping her out by placing her groceries on the counter, but the process was very slow, and made even slower by the chatty exchanges between the lady and the checker or the helping employee. She looked behind [...]
I remember Herman Wouk’s This is My God, a marvelous testimonial work on his Jewish faith, written sometime in the fifties. Describing a young girl’s protest against conformity, he says he had to smile as he listened and observed the slight folds in her sweater placed so correctly, the sleeves pushed up so correctly just below her elbows, [...]
A friend’s husband is being fitted with a prosthetic leg, his natural one lost to a lifelong scourge of Diabetes. Another is being fitted for a denture for all her upper teeth, scheduled for extraction when the denture is ready. It will be put in place while she is under anesthetic for the multiple extractions. It’s [...]
…get a lot of bad press in modern times. In political and academic venues, writers and speakers are chastised for abstracting concrete events or conditions. An example or two may be in order: A political science teacher, or perhaps a history teacher, abstracts an event like war; a student may object to the teacher’s non-mention of [...]
It seems that “cradle” Catholics are more interested in conversion stories than converts are. Perhaps they enjoy the experience of seeing the faith in which they were born and reared affirmed, perhaps it strengthens their own fidelity. As a convert, I’m not as interested, though I have noticed from time to time that initial conversion most [...]
For some reason, it’s in the church parking lot that conversations often become memorable. As I stood by my open car door last Sunday, a deacon’s wife complained to me, in the familiar tones of classic outraged victimhood, that some parishioner had criticized her husband for putting a pro-Biden sign in his front yard. It was [...]
So much of what is happening now in political and public life (and private life too?) reminds me of a story I heard so many years ago that I can’t remember when I first heard it. It sounds a little bit like Little Red Riding Hood at first, but it couldn’t be more different. A young [...]
This may sound incongruous beyond enduring, but, while I never confuse an apple with an orange, it’s true that I make, almost habitually, apparently incongruous connections. For example, Yeats’ poem “For Anne Gregory” and racism. The young woman complains that men should love her for herself alone and not for her yellow hair. While the poem [...]
