If an attendee is someonewho attends, why is not someone who sins a sinnee?
Barack Obama at Notre Dame
To view your country’s leaders from abroad can be an instructive experience ─ even when “abroad” is a country as near and as friendly as Canada. That happened to me last weekend when visiting with friends in Montreal.
Hearing French spoken and recognizing certain cultural differences create shifts of perspective about the United States. This helps explain why Barack Obama’s commencement speech at Notre Dame made such an impact on me. I watched it on a Canadian television channel that, to my surprise, broadcast the talk from beginning to end.
The Subtle Satisfactions of Letters Exchanged
Our rapid-fire exchange reminded me of London in the eighteenth century. Or James Joyce’s Dublin, at the beginning of the twentieth.
In those times and places, people were accustomed to sending a letter to a friend and getting a response delivered on the very same day! In an age without telephones, the postal service made correspondence almost instantaneous.
Leaving Religion
Many, if not most, of my Catholic friends have adult children whom they raised in the Catholic faith but who no longer profess themselves Catholic.
Among these middle-aged or older parents, this fact often provokes discussion. They wonder how this happened, how their childrens’ strong Catholic upbringing did not “take.” Sometimes, they confess to being unhappy at this outcome.
Hess Flies to Scotland
On the evening of May 10, 1941, Rudolph Hess, the Deputy Leader of the Nazi Party, parachuted out of a Messerschmidt Me 110 and landed in a field near Glasgow, Scotland.
This event took place at one of the crucial turning points in World Was II. I was 12 years old at the time and I remember being baffled by the news of what Hess had done. Why had Hitler’s second in command undertaken such a strange journey?
Son’s Letter To His Father
“Kids, I was conceived a slave but born free.” That’s what John Israel Stamps used to tell his children.
A lifelong Arkansas sharecropper and Baptist minister, he entered this world on May 1, 1865 and left it at the age of 74. I know these facts about him because his son and my friend, Emerson Stamps, himself now 85 years of age, decided last November to write his father a letter.
Unmistaken Identity
On the elevator at Symphony Hall:
Jack: “I thought that was you.”
Me: “I thought that was you.”
Fellow passenger: “You were both right.”