Given the choice, would you rather eat dinner at a restaurant or in your own home? The data on American eating habits suggest that you are likely to opt for the restaurant.

Almost half of us adults eat out at least once a day, 44 percent as the National Restaurant Association measures it. Reportedly, we spend close to 50 percent of our food money on away-from-home eating.

As a rule, I much prefer to eat at home. But when did anyone ever accuse me of being normal?

My main gripe with restaurants in general is that they serve too much food. To my taste, it’s downright unappetizing to confront plates loaded with whatever.

Almost always, I would prefer half as much food for half─or even three-quarters─as much money. And yet, only one restaurant known to me features a menu giving a choice of larger or smaller portions.

Also, eating out is often an activity hazardous to our health. As the AARP Public Policy Institute warns, good nutrition becomes much more difficult when we buy meals or snacks outside.

And the same source urges us to avoid eating places that entice customers with rich dessert carts and all-you-can-eat specials. Preferring restaurants that offer fruit, salads, and other healthy foods, instead of opting for the nearest pizza or burger joint is better for us.

These initial thoughts may tempt you to indict me for nutritional perfectionism. Not guilty. I do stand for healthy eating habits, but pleasure in eating remains important to me.

Over-analyzing food robs diners of enjoyment. Focusing mainly on the nutritional effect of meals is a surefire way of depriving us of pleasure. This attitude can drive us into judging that whenever food tastes good it must be bad for us and vice versa.

Such a negative approach to eating can make us wish for the innocent days of our youth when we ate Spam or Franco-American spaghetti without giving a thought to their nutritional impact. Canned hash, slices of bread topped with butter and sugar, and thick frappes were other features in my young eating life.

But that was long before Americans worried about such things as fat.

Risking cultural elitism, let me cite as good eaters our old allies, the French. The recently published book “French Women Don’t Get Fat,” shares some reasons why one does not often see overweight women (and men) on the streets of Paris.

What makes the difference? “French women take pleasure in staying thin,” says the author Mireille Guiliano, “while American women see it as a conflict and obsess over it.” Both women and men in the United States have become obsessed with weight, much to the detriment of our enjoying food.

Weight will remain an important issue in the United States, however, as long as so many of us continue to eat large helpings of stuff that poses a threat to our health. For the senior generations among us, the stakes are higher: good eating habits can more easily make the difference between our physical/mental flourishing and eating-induced illness.

To help with eating well, in this time of nutritional high-mindedness, a few rules-of-thumb can help. To me, the single most important rule is not to eat too much of any one offering. This approach goes far to help us eat healthily and, I am persuaded, enjoyably.

At the risk of seeming merely precious, let me also propose the ideal of each major meal being an event. Like all ideals, it cannot always be achieved but it’s still worth aiming at.

One factor that makes it an event is not the food itself, but its presentation. The difference between serving dinner out of Styrofoam packages and dishing it out from china bowls may seem trivial, but it actually counts for a lot. People who appreciate food care about how it looks.

In the course of my work with elders, I remember meeting a retired single woman who lived alone: each evening she would lay out the tablecloth, light the candles, put on sweet music, and serve herself a well-cooked dinner. Her income was modest but she knew how to live.

If we have the luck to eat without feeling rushed, that too makes meals  incomparably better experiences. Gulping food down in a hurry makes for neither good digestion nor feelings of contentment.

Meals that bring old and young together also strike me as highly desirable: the contemporary decline of family meals surely serves to impoverish the lives of Americans young and old.

Compressing morbidity, the phrase that the medical pros use to talk about reducing the time when we are sick at the end of our lives, can in large part result from smart eating.  

A robust appetite for good food counts as one of life’s greatest gifts. If only we could eat more of what is good for us and do so in amounts suited to our best interests!

Richard Griffin

Any novel whose narrator and central character is my own age certainly gets my attention. That’s the way it was reading Gilead, the beautiful new book written by Marilynne Robinson. I consider it the most satisfying piece of fiction that has come my way in many years.

The author already had a fine reputation with the critics. They loved her first novel, Housekeeping. But that appeared in 1981 and she had published no other novels till this past year. Gilead thus rates as a literary event in itself; beyond that, it offers valuable insights into aging and spirituality, two subjects dear to me.

The 76-year-old narrator is John Ames, a Congregationalist minister who lives in rural Iowa in 1956. Both his father and grandfather were also ministers, each quite different from the other. The elder Ames was a Civil War veteran with a missing eye to prove it, while his son─the narrator’s father─debunked that war and all others.

The novel does not come with individual chapters but takes the shape of one long letter that John Ames, at the request of his wife, addresses to their six-year-old son. It is a testament that will inform the boy about his father’s life and character, after the latter’s death. John feels that death to be imminent, following his doctor’s diagnosis of angina pectoris.

“I do hope to die with a quiet heart,” he says of his spiritual preparedness for that event. About the place which became his home two years after his birth in 1880 and where he expects to die, he turns eloquent: “I love this town. I think sometimes of going into the ground here as a last wild gesture of love.”

Reverend Ames appreciates the woman, Lila, who wanted to marry him despite his being 35 years older than she. And having a son in his old age also means everything to him: “The children of old age are unspeakably precious,” he states. As one who became a parent only after 50, I can give a ringing endorsement to this sentiment.

Though he is prepared for death, he does not feel all that positive about old age. “I don’t want to be old,” he explains to his son. “I don’t want to be the tremulous coot you barely remember.”

Using a reference to baseball (a sport he loves, even to the extent of watching a Red Sox/Yankees game on television), John envisions what his body will be like in the next life. “I imagine a kind of ecstatic pirouette, a little bit like going up for a line drive when you’re so young that your body almost doesn’t know about effort.”

Belief in God is central in his life and his preaching of the word gives expression to that faith. His attachment to church, extends to the physical building where his congregation meets. He loves to slip away from his house at night when he cannot sleep, sit in one of the pews, and pray while allowing himself to fall peacefully asleep.

What he calls “the deep things of man” have become his familiars through the practice of his ministry. He speaks about “grace as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials.” I find touching the relish he feels for the rites of religion as he reaches out to God and the people whom he serves.

Of spiritual bravery he speaks with further eloquence: “To acknowledge that there is more beauty that our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.”

Ames’s closest friend is a fellow minister and age peer, a man identified only as “Boughton.” Their relationship brings much support to John but also has become the source of complication. His friend’s son, John Ames Boughton, now in his 30s, has led a checkered life that troubles both his father and the man for whom he is named.

When the younger Boughton returns to Gilead and seeks counsel from Reverend Ames, the latter feels turmoil and must wrestle with conflicting emotions. His working out of these issues ushers the minister into another stage of spiritual development.

The author brings to this novel, not only a creative talent for entering into the life of a man in old age (at least, as people used to think of it), but a sensitive understanding of religion and ministry. Insights abound but they do not impede the smoothly flowing narrative letter that John Ames writes for his son.

Marilynne Robinson is an artist who, among much else, evokes a sense of place, remote from my own. And yet, she makes me feel a kinship with this Iowa minister, a man approaching the end of his life with faith in God and love for the people God has given him.

Richard Griffin

This month marks the 30th anniversary of what possibly counts as the most important personal decision I have ever made. This decision was to break with the structures that had previously ruled my whole adult life.

On a February day in 1975, I signed official papers from Rome, releasing me from the Jesuit society and the Catholic priesthood. At age 47, I faced the world for the first time as an independent adult without the intimate support of the religious family that I had joined a quarter century before.

A few year later, an ecclesiastical iron curtain shut down against priests applying for church approval of their release, part of a new policy of Pope John Paul II to keep clergy from leaving. I had escaped in time.

As I walked down Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue that morning, I felt as if I had taken myself back and reclaimed the freedom I had willingly surrendered at the end of adolescence. It may have been winter outside, but for me the season of spring had emerged interiorly. I was taking on a new stance toward the world, and the prospect excited me.

One night, twenty years earlier, I had dreamed of leaving the Jesuit Society, only to wake up in a sweat and discover with relief that it was not true; now it had become true, but I no longer felt any terror in it. Some apprehension about my being on my own, yes, but I also felt a strong admixture of relief and anticipation. Leaving would not be a horrible, irredeemable mistake as it had been in the dream, but a deliberate action that I had taken and would not regret.

No longer was anyone around who would protect me; from now on, I was responsible for myself as I had never been before. But that was part of the adventure of setting out in middle age toward an unknown future in the world.

Thirty years later, people still ask me why I left. In response, I tell these questioners there are two explanations. The first takes hundreds of pages, the other only two words. These words are: “I changed.”

Of course, this shorthand version merely hints at the countless events, outer and inner, that transformed me as an individual and the church to which I belonged. Incidentally, my leaving the priesthood and the Jesuits did not involve leaving the church, contrary to what many people have assumed.

In later life, I continue to place great value on the spiritual tradition into which I was born. However, I do confess disagreeing with authority in the Catholic Church seriously enough to be glad that I have not had to represent it officially during these last thirty years.

Strangely enough, at the time of leaving I felt greater admiration for the Jesuits than I had for many years previously. To me they remained members of an organization that had shown remarkable courage in making radical changes following the lead of the Second Vatican Council in the middle 1960s.

In leaving their ranks, I did not have to slink away under cover of night. Despite walking away from them, I retained the friendship of many of my former colleagues and have always welcomed further association with them.

Looking back from the vantage point of these thirty years, I feel my decision was appropriate, perhaps even wise. I wanted to change the angle by which I looked upon the world, and that has proven of much value. Greatest among the gifts that leaving made possible have been marriage and parenthood, of course, for which I feel highly privileged and deeply grateful.

In much of my first career, I would have scrupled to leave. Certain biblical texts ran through my mind from time to time, especially the saying of Jesus about the man who put his hand to the plow and then abandoned it. The Lord called such persons “unworthy,” a label that I shuddered to have applied to me.

I also thought about the promises Jesus made to disciples who left everything to follow him. Had I, by turning away from the call, forfeited the reward in heaven that had helped motivate me to leave home in the first place?

Fortunately I came to feel liberated from detached, literal readings of scripture, enough so as to reject these misgivings. The personal, unconditional love that I had become convinced God felt for me was enough to overcome these negative thoughts before they could become scruples.

This latter conviction became the ultimate reason for the freedom that enabled me to leave. I had made a theological and spiritual discovery that proved powerfully liberating. God’s love was active in my life, I came to see; and it enabled me to follow where my heart led.

Looking back over three decades, I see my first vocation as good and providential; similarly, I judge my life since then as a time of grace and blessings.

Richard Griffin

Is it possible to be in your nineties and at the same time be happy? Contact with two dynamic ladies born in 1913 has convinced me that it is.

Best of friends, Helen Grimes and Marcia Kleinman vie with one another in their zest for life. In a conversation of an hour and a half, it’s difficult to keep up with this duo. They bubble over with enthusiasm for almost everyone and everything.

Though both dating from the Wilson administration, they grew up quite differently. Helen’s family was Irish Catholic in Cambridge; Marcia’s was Jewish in New York. The latter’s father owned a window factory in Brooklyn and was affluent, while Helen’s family had little money.

Helen’s education came through the contacts she had with the families she served as a domestic. Marcia had the advantage of graduating from New York University to which she commuted by train.

Both have strong political views, neither cherishing any love for George W. Bush and his regime. Marcia’s political consciousness developed through her post-college work for the American Jewish Congress. She felt radicalized by seeing signs “No Hebrews may apply” and experiencing other forms of discrimination.

For her part, Helen would ultimately rebel against her inherited faith. “That Irish Catholic stuff was pushed down your throat,” she explains. She left the church in her 40s, in part because “I didn’t believe in heaven or hell.” Now, along with her daughter Dot Harrigan, she considers herself a Humanist, rather than a Christian.

Marcia’s evolution differs from that of her friend. “I’m Jewish,” she says, “but I’m ecumenical.” She takes great delight in having wide ethnic and religious variety in her extended family. Among the latter, she mentions a great-grandson whose name is Gabriel Wong.

Helen traces her intellectual development back to a single book that continues to inspire her thinking. That book is Will Durant’s “The Story of Philosophy,” first suggested to her by a Yankee woman in whose household Helen worked as a mother’s helper.

Both women feel devoted to the Cambridge Center for Adult Education where they have been involved for decades. In the spirit of adventure, they take a variety of courses.

Helen laughingly tells of taking a life drawing class and sketching a nude male model. “I did down as far as possible,” she recalls, “and up as far as possible, but I didn’t do possible.”

Not surprisingly, both women draw much of their vitality from contact with younger generations. Of the wives chosen by her two boys, Marcia says: “I fell in love with my daughters-in-law.” As to those different from herself, she boasts: “I call myself the best ecumenical specimen in captivity.”

But don’t let the buoyancy of these women fool you─both have known heartache and disappointment. Helen lost her own mother when she was only eleven. And one of her daughters died of alcoholism at the age of 53.

Marcia’s first marriage ended in divorce when her first son was only two-and-a-half. “At that time,” she observes, “divorce was looked down on.” And she lost a wonderful sister at age 39.

At one point the ladies turned to this writer, asking me to explain why some people have long lives. Clearly, they were addressing the question to the wrong person. They have the answer themselves.

Helen Metros, another woman who recently shared with me her experience of life, says: “I never have time to be sick; I’ve missed but one day of work in seven years.”

Since the mid twentieth century, she has worked at two Harvard Sq    uare restaurants, finding satisfaction in waiting upon many different people, some of them famous. Among the latter she counts John Kennedy, Fidel Castro, Clement Attlee, George W. Bush (in his Harvard Business School days), Tip O’Neill, David Pryor, and Ben Affleck.

“To me they’re not big names; they come in and I wait on them,” she explains. What does count, Helen expresses in a favorite slogan: “It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.”

Like the other Helen, she grew up in South Boston in an Irish Catholic family. In the 1930s there, she says, everyone was poor but doors were never locked and no one went hungry.

Her husband, now retired, comes from the Greek Orthodox tradition. For worship, they are accustomed to go to both Catholic and the Orthodox churches. “That’s part of marriage,” Helen believes, “you incorporate what you have.” Her religious spirit shows in other ways: “I know I have God with me all the time,” she says.

She derives warm satisfaction from a party she gives every year for 50 of the oldest and neediest people around. Also, she sponsors an annual concert at Children’s Hospital.

These activities make her feel happy. So do her family relationships. “I love to be with my grandchildren,” she enthuses. Of her spouse she says: “He’s a good husband, father, grandfather. How can you ask for anything more in life?”

Richard Griffin

One day, when I worked at our local Council on Aging, a veteran Harvard professor of my acquaintance came into the office and registered for one of our discount programs. His doing so surprised me at the time and, frankly, shocked me as well.

Of course, I did not let these moralistic emotions show on my face, but I did wonder how a well-paid professional could justify receiving reductions in taxi fares and in certain store purchases simply because he was past 60 years old. The incident drove me to question whether it was right to make such benefits available to everybody of a certain age, even Ross Perot, George Soros, or other billionaires.

Long ago, however, I gave up such scruples and recognized that wealthy older people belong to a relatively small minority, most of whom do not care about discounts. For the rest of us, discounts are important to our financial well-being and we have no problem claiming them.

Many elders have precious few savings and little available cash;  discounts are a vital help to their finances. If those who are dependant on public transportation, for instance, had to pay the full fare on MBTA buses and trains, the expense would be a genuine hardship.

My friend Hugh, an 80-plus veteran of World War II, may be regarded as typical. When asked how he feels about discounts, he fires off this response: “I love them.”  

Also, young and middle-aged Americans seem readily to accept these benefits for their elders. Whenever I go to the movies, I am impressed by how cheerfully I am accorded my cut-rate tickets.  (I do confess cringing, however, when the ticket seller asks if I am an adult or not.)

This leads me to think that our society at large believes that our breaks are appropriate. And this kind of social solidarity between age groups, I am persuaded, is good for our national community

I have also consulted a professional economist, asking him how he and his colleagues look at this subject. He uses the technical term “price discrimination” to explain a factor that, ideally at least, works to increase revenues.

Economists are not often associated with warm and fuzzy feelings. In this instance, however, they help make me feel reassured about claiming discounts. I am aiding businesses to do both good and well. We discount hunters help make the world go round.

Many of us elders would presumably not go to the movies at all, or as often, unless we could count on discounted tickets. Nor might we buy a new sweater or a new dress at a certain store without the incentive of a lower price given because of our age.

Colleges and universities commonly offer elders access to courses for much reduced tuition. Here, too, it may be in the educational institution’s interest to do so for a double reason. They find it good to help in the education of older people. And, besides, the classroom seats might otherwise go vacant.   

Beyond this discussion of meaning, I want to make two practical points: first, discounts are much more widely available than most of us realize; and second, to receive many of the discounts, you have to ask. Many companies and agencies do not broadcast their availability.

One Internet site I have consulted (www.seniordiscount.com) announces breathlessly: “Now over 150,000 discounts for folks over 50!” This serves not only to indicate the huge numbers of discounts available; it also reminds us that some of these benefits begin at an earlier age than we think.

The same site lists 22 different categories of goods and services for which discounts are available. It is hard to think of a type of business that does not provide these perks.

If you are like me, you will be surprised at the range of rake-offs and other special breaks. For example, one hotel in my urban community will not only give you a discount in your own room rate, but will extend it to other people who are traveling with you, even if they are not of your mature age.

Besides hotels, others give discounts that might not occur to you. Some public libraries, for example, will waive fines on overdue books. Car dealers will often give discounts on non-routine work. Newspaper subscriptions are frequently lower for elders, and cable companies may have lower rates for those over a certain age.

To my surprise, certain food stores give discounts, often larger on a given day of the week. Large chain stores selling all sorts of merchandise provide bargains for older customers. Barbers and hairdressers are wont to do the same.

If you have access to the Internet, you will find that the fabulous site mentioned earlier (www.seniordiscounts.com) features abundant listings by cities and towns all across the U.S. Also, some Councils on Aging have lists with names of local businesses and other agencies that have agreed to offer discounts.

But the best rule of thumb remains: ask.

Richard Griffin

“Wipe that smirk off your face!”  This shocking command came from my new English teacher in senior year of high school. It was a rude introduction to Father Francis Desmond who had joined the faculty that year to teach English to me and the twenty other boys in my class.

This rebuke hit with special force because it came from a man who was not only a teacher but also a priest. Almost 60 years later, I still remember the sting of that authority’s angry rebuke, a charge that felt like a slap in my face. If I had been smirking, I was unaware of it.

My recollection has taken inspiration from a short essay in which Robert Coles, the now-retired Harvard psychiatrist, recalls an experience that he had in the fifth grade of a Boston grammar school. The essay, “Here and Now We Are Walking Together,” appears in the newly published Best American Spiritual Writing 2004, and portrays his teacher as a formidable authority.

He still finds value in Miss Avery’s lesson: “We should pay attention to others, as well as ourselves.” This moral trumped the fear he felt in the presence of his teacher, who wielded her ruler like a rod of iron, sometimes slamming it on the desks of her students.

Fortunately, I soon discovered the softer side of my teacher. Even as an adolescent not brimming with self-confidence, I had the good sense to approach Father Desmond after class to plead innocence. In the face of my protest, he backed down and seemed to recognize his mistake.

Only a few weeks later, he and I had become friends and, in company with two or three fellow students, spent much time together. Our friendship, however, was not built only on compatibility; we soon discovered another bond – conspiracy. In league with Father Desmond, we became conspirators against the school’s administrators.

He would feed us inside information about the deviousness of the headmaster and his chief faculty assistant, people whose policies we disapproved. Our chief complaint was the way they overemphasized sports to the detriment of academic standards.

If this makes me and my co-conspirators seem, not mere rebels but also adolescent snots, that impression is not altogether incorrect. But, because of having a faculty ally, our small band of students had power that transcended our tender years.

The closest the headmaster, a monsignor, ever came to recognizing our rebellion happened one day when I was on the field in my baseball uniform. He sidled over to me and said: “Griffin, you are getting too big for your britches,” exact words that still reside in my head, some six decades later. The headmaster did not dare specify what he meant but he did not have to.

I feel thankful for these memories from adolescence and often ponder their meaning. This activity of memory and meaning seems to me beautifully appropriate for later life. In this connection I value the words of Sven Birkerts written in the Boston University publication Bostonia in 2002.

“Those of us lucky to live long enough, I now believe, discover that we have two lives: the original life, in which we first encounter the world, register the powerful shaping forces of family and our various relationships−loves, friendships, and antagonisms−and have the experiences that pattern us for later events; then the second life, the main work of which is to distill and absorb the meanings of the first.”

So here I am again, trying to distill and absorb the meanings of my first and original life. This activity always proves valuable as part of the ongoing drama of self- discovery. Though often played out on a small stage, this drama reveals large implications for the great search.

About the incidents portrayed here, I can draw from them personal characteristics that remain in late life. Skepticism about authority runs through my years, except for a period in which I became excessively pious.

I now regret that time of lapsing from my native doubting about those who hold power. It was a kind of abdication of my native reluctance to accept what others say or do when they have authority over me. An attitude of critical appraisal belongs to my inner being and I am glad that I reclaimed it again.

The last four years of the Bush administration have done me the service of raising to a new height my distrust of the powerful. As I write these words, the awe-full results of the election are still not known but I hope not to have four more years of such instruction.

As for Father Desmond, he was more than a co-conspirator. He was also a man of considerable intellectual ability and he stirred in me a love of English language and literature that has been a resource for all of my life since. I feel thankful that our friendship managed to survive that first classroom encounter.

Richard Griffin

One snowy day last week, I spent half an hour talking on the telephone with a stranger located in the south of India. Our conversation did not focus on the horrendous tragedy of the tsunami that hit not far away from where this person lives. Rather, he and I were conferring to install a virus protection program on my computer.

If you share my ineptitude with computer technology, you may well find yourself talking with someone in Mumbai or another Indian city ten thousand miles away. Increasingly, American companies have found it economical to call upon workers in distant countries to provide technical assistance to their customers.

The people you talk with, I have discovered, are remarkably patient and polite. They relieve the anxiety that I suffer when I deal with the often ornery behavior of my computer. Though the conversation centers on matters technical, I often manage to slip in some more personal questions.

Never in my growing-up years, of course, could I have imagined the kind of exchange described here. Nor would I ever have dreamed of becoming addicted to a computer as an indispensable tool in my professional life. Maybe Buck Rogers did so dream, but the fantasies of that comic strip did not make enough of an impression on youthful me.

This subject flows from a conversation around the dinner table of my extended family on Christmas Day. At a certain point, my siblings and I remembered our beloved maternal grandmother, Hannah Barry, talking about what she had seen in her lifetime.

Looking back in her 80s, she mentioned the automobile and airplane as the two inventions that had most changed the society that she had known. Born in 1864, she knew as an adult a world in which neither of these great technological breakthroughs had as yet appeared.

Two generations later, my siblings agreed about having witnessed inventions just as world-changing. One of my brothers identified the transistor as perhaps the most important of the products that have further transformed our world. The chip that resulted from this breakthrough has given us great benefits in many different fields, medicine being among the most important.

More broadly, we judged the shrinking of both distance and time as the great phenomenon of our era. That we can casually send an email to almost any part of the world and have it reach a person there almost instantly, in itself reduces both time and distance dramatically.

Seeing television pictures of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in 1969 as they were transmitted to people all over the world, while the event was happening, meant the extension of this reach outward into space. I watched this epic event in a small Mexican town that, in its poverty, made the achievement of the moon walk all the more stunning.

The list of wonders can be expanded indefinitely, of course. So much has occurred in the lifetime of every person born before World War II that choosing which ones to mention feels arbitrary. Unfortunately, however, many people around the world hardly share in these benefits. More than one billion children, the United Nations reports, suffer extreme deprivation and have little or no access to modern technology.

If your psyche is like mine, you sometimes feel lost in this brave new world. It operates by a knowledge that is closed off to most of us. There was a time when parents always understood their adult children's jobs; now they assume that they will not.

Much of the world of work remains mysterious to me; my education did not prepare me to understand it. Who can reasonably regret having studied Shakespeare?  But a source of high tech know-how he isn’t.

This ignorance can be unsettling because almost everything has become so complicated. We receive Christmas gifts grounded in high tech that come with incomprehensible instructions. Our houses are now filled with technology whose workings escape many of us. When our machines stop dead, we find ourselves befuddled.

Though, like so many others, I often feel at sea, my main emotions continue to be wonder and awe. To the extent that such a feeling can be directed toward mere objects, I love technology. Much of it is maddening, but I feel thankful for the collective and individual genius of people who have brought us the wonders of the contemporary world.

If only we had wisdom to go with these smarts, this new world would be just marvelous instead of only partly so. But 59 armed conflicts took place in this world between 1990 and 2003, most of them within countries rather than among nations.

This new year of 2005 promises more of the same. Let us, however, hope for unforeseen breakthroughs leading to peace as we enjoy the benefits of the great inventions that have marked the time of our lives.

Richard Griffin