Tommy Dorsey's Spiritual Journey vs. Heorge Harrison's

A friend of mine sent me a link to a George Harrison song, something about Sunshine, or having to do with it, and one's spiritual journey.  He wanted to know my reaction.  I simply replied, after listening to Mr. Harrison, "Poor Guy."  I'd rather listen to Tommy Dorsey.  Maybe you would, too.

Riding That Train

I grew up in Kingsbridge, a neighborhood in The Bronx, which is the only place in the world beside The Vatican preceded by the definite article when commonly referred to.  Not even Brooklyn can make a claim like that.

Anyway across the street from the old pre-war walk-up that was home for my first 23 years was a New York Central spur line going all the way up to someplace near Albany.  There was a small freight yard right about dead in front of my house, too.  A perfect place to play, and practice running away from cops.  I was a kid just at the end of the Age of Steam, and got pretty used to the deep huffing and clouds of steam and smoke punctuating the day as rich guys from way up near Albany came down to the City each day so Tom Wolfe could write "Bonfire of the Vanities" when I grew up.  I played in and around those big black bulls, scary and powerful and dreadfully attractive all at once, and remember dancing on the rails with my ragamuffin friends as they bore down on us just to provoke a few roars from the warning whistle. Toreadors before Iron Bulls.

I knew trolleys, too, and their clanging bells, and subways charging above the street near where I lived before plowing under Manhattan's hills a couple of miles south from the Harlem River where I learned to swim in open sewage, water that would make a kid from Calcutta wrinkle his nose in disgust.  I cannot count the number of times I hitched rides on the back of trolleys up to Van Cortlandt Park, a place much larger that Yosemite Park.  Me and Eddie Haviland would spend days hunting squirrels in the woods and snakes and salamanders in the little streams and swampy places and swimming in Charlie's Hole, a wide spot in Tibbets Brook, more mud than water.  I got to be a pretty good marksman with the stones from the railway ballast, and could hit a squirrel and bring it down from high up in almost any tree. 

I sneaked onto Subway platforms all over the city, too,  before they were patrolled by those spoil sport Transit Police and rode the trains to places like Elmhurst, which, with a name like that had no right to be in a city where there were neighborhoods called Hell's Kitchen.  Come to think of it, what was the Bronx doing with Kingsbridge and Riverdale? Well, we do have Rat Island.  Among my favorite destinations on the subway were the Museum of Natural History, Penn Station and Grand Central Station.  I could walk to the New York Public Library Central Branch from Grand Central, climb on the lions, sit in the main reading room, run up and down the stairs, and occasionally look through a book.

The trolleys were the first to go, replaced by buses, a much harder mode of transportation to sneak a ride on.  Steam trains gave way to diesel locomotives, ugly boxy black things that sat and growled, or stank along the tracks trailing oily smoke when they passed.  Commuter service stopped running up the Putnam Line sometime in the fifties after Gov. Dewey's New York Thruway ruined everything for me and my friends, and put a barrier between us and the freight yard about which I still dream, full as it was then with tanks and guns during the Korean War, fruit and produce for the city's kitchens  during the spring and summer, and always inviting whatever the time of year.  I still hate Dewey...and Rockefeller... for that crime against children, especially city rats like myself, in the name of progress.

All of these things ran through my mind this morning after reading two things.  The first was an e-mail from an old school mate, a fellow from Highbridge, another neighborhood in the Bronx.  He and his wife traveled to DC on Amtrak from his home in Connecticut last weekend and paid $258.00 for the privilege of several hours of discomfort, noise, lack of information and bad food in dirty dining cars.  It was an experience he says he will not repeat, though he may have to.  Driving down there, he has also learned, is a purgatory of crowded highways, confiscatory tolls and more bad food and dirty dining areas along the way.  It was a sad end to a long story, a romance, really.  I’d ridden back and forth between New York and DC on the Metroliner in the 80’s and thought it a wonderful way to travel; better than four hours in a car and much better than just the same amount of time at La Guardia and National Airport on either end of the Eastern Shuttle, even if the fare was only $20.00 one way.  It was till an airport, all glass and steel and no style, and still hours of slogging driving home or to your hotel.  The train dropped you near the subway and in an hour you were where you could get a beer and kick off your shoes.

The second is an article which appeared in Human Events Magazine, written by a fellow named Michael Barone who snarked about some multi-billion dollar plan to build high speed rail lines all over the place and put everyone to work.  The way he explained it, I had to agree with him.  The plan is just plain stupid.  I don’t believe trains ought to go as fast as planes darting from here to there like cobras.  Hell, they even look like snakes!  But, Baron argues against high speed trains because they just cost too much.  I’m not against dumping a losing proposition like that, and for that reason.  Up to there, I’m friends with Mr. Barone.  We part company towards the end. 

I think he’s really not interested in trains. Really, I think, not interested too much in public transportation at all.  He betrays himself in just a few words implying things would be much better all around when a guy has his car and isn’t forced to take a pre-planned route from A to B.  As if roads and streets and superhighways are like English (or poison) Ivy, randomly spreading out all over.  As if the 40,000 square miles of paved roads and streets and parking lots we have laid down since Henry invented the assembly line are an "unplanned cow-path-improvement on anything.  Forty K square miles.  That's roughly the size of Ohio; whiich wouldn't be a bad thing if the black top was actually all IN Ohio.

“Passenger rail is an old technology that is particularly attractive to planners, the folks who want to force us out of our cars and into subways that travel only on the routes they design. Let’s make everyone live the way people do in Manhattan!”

The rest of what he says, I buy.  I wonder, aside from the rents, what’s wrong with living the way folks do in Manhattan., where you can sing about riding in a hole in the ground.

The Lives and Writings of the Saints

“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,”  so the saying goes. If it is true, then this last century should reap a great harvest of souls, given time. There have certainly been many martyrs throughout the world, during this century! and there continue to be. The problem is, most of us think that the Age of Martyrs is long past.  in fact, Christians continue to die for their faith, but in today’s world that isn’t news when compared to the comings and goings of celebrities.   One wonders where the real heroes have gone, and how one can find out the truth about them. One might wish to learn to recognize the pattern of sainthood, of heroic virtue, the depth of saintly faith and the reason for love so great that so many could and do “lay down their lives”.   To use an old and neglected word, one might wish to know the reason for a true holy “theosis” --  that quality in these holy men and women that binds them to God so closely in love that they become divinized and their fame lasts hundreds of years while people invoke their names, using their lives as templates of virtue to follow.
In any hagiography, any life of a "saint" (a holy man or woman recognized by the universal church as having led a life of heroic virtue), we will find keys to understanding what great love for others really is, and how to allow such a Love to lead our lives. Saintly men and women from the early church to the present day  were in every other aspect of their lives BUT this,  ordinary men and women. Their exceptional heroism of virtue, their inspirational writings, their virtuous lives and deeds should be studied and taken up by the rest of us who are called to live out a similar discipleship of Christ. In the early church, members called each other by the name “saint”, and we should recapture that habit today, thereby encouraging one another in the pursuit and practice of sanctity.
Here at The Christian Book Corner we are assembling a growing collection of works about our virtuous and saintly brothers and sisters as an aid to your own growth in holiness -- to inspire the young and comfort the old, to act as a guides along our common way, and so that, in learning about these others who have gone before us and their great Love we may feel called to ask them to help us. You will find among t-CBC.com's carefully chosen collection of inspirational writings about the saints something for yourself as well as things that will make a perfect gift for friends or family members which will open up for them interiorly a better world, a better Hope.

Holy Editorials, Caped Crusader!

Full disclosure here, in the interests of "Brutal Honesty".  I have not bought a copy of the New York Times in more years than I care to count.  I do read the occasional story that appears in that rag if (a) the paper is left behind on a park bench, the bus or subway or gets blown into my face by a gust of wind, or (b) I come across it as I wander around the internet like a virtual hobo picking up scraps as I go.  That was how I came across the bit of drivel that occasioned this, my own drivel.

It is, the found drivel, actually a well written piece I think as I read it.  But then, I also think, the author is a big cheese in what may still be called the "paper of record" in these Untied States, so why not?  He's none other than the soon not to be Executive Editor of the whole thing, and that doesn't get dropped on you because your french fries look good to your hungry pals.  So let's get ourselves straight, here, I tell myself.  Mr. Bill Keller is a wordsmith of more than normal skill, and his drivel.is a fine consomme, a superior vintage, a good cheese.  Even when it stinks, you wanna spread it on a nice cracker and polish it off with a swig of perfectly chilled Chablis, and maybe a strawberry.

Umm, before I go any further I'd just like to say that I have never met Bill Keller, and may never meet him on this side of the grass.  I am not subtle enough to talk about him being a big cheese and then mention stinky cheeses in the same paragraph as if I wanted the reader of anything I write to draw a conclusion therefrom about Mr. Keller and how he is or what he thinks, says, does or writes.  I don't.  For all I know, and I don't really care to, the fellow may smell like the flowers in May.

OK, so you've checked the link above and know whereof I speak.  I like the way he opens up with a kind of Common Man homage to guys like Breslin and all that: "If a candidate for president said he believed that space aliens dwell among us, would that affect your willingness to vote for him? Personally, I might not disqualify him out of hand; one out of three Americans believe we have had Visitors and, hey, who knows? But I would certainly want to ask a few questions. Like, where does he get his information?..."

Anyone who gets this far figures two things:  This is going to be a lighthearted, fanciful piece.  And, two, it's going to be about kooks and wing nuts, which is what I would have thought it was going to be if I don't already read something by "Bulldog" Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious AND Civil Rights, or something.  The "Dog" takes a bite out of Bill Keller's keister because of what he does say in this column, and not what I think he might say.  You see Keller goes on at some length insinuating that folks who have  what might be called a personal relation with Jesus, and also are interested in being a candidate for president of the country oughta be very closely watched.  They all have googly eyes, he hints, and googlier ideas behind them.

I said Keller was good at what he does, and he is.  He never calls them wing nuts or whackos, at least not right out where guys like me can see, and maybe give him a punch in the nose for it.  He's a dancer, and he does a Fred Astaire, classy and cute, all around the thing.  Like here where he's talking about a questionnaire he says he sent to all of the Republican candidates for President which also includes some specific questions for each of them:  "My note to Representative Bachmann asked about the documentary produced last year by a group now known as Truth in Action Ministries, in which she espoused the idea that all money for social welfare should come from charity, not government taxation. Is that a goal she would pursue as president?"

Struggling Catholic that I am, I read that sentence about what Bachmann says and I try to figure out what's wrong with it.  Does Bill Keller say here that he thinks anyone who's a candidate for president in this day and age should run like hell away from anything connected with the Second Greatest Commandment?  Nah, he can't be that stupid, I think. But, I do wonder, as I'm thinking about this, if  Kathy Sebellius has some nekkid pictures of the guy he's trying to keep out of circulation.  I wonder, further, what's wrong with something like that?  I mean the charity thing, not Sebellius holding out on us all.  For instance, I think that all of the assistance given to folks in Muslim countries comes from, or through, the local mosques, and not from the deep pockets of Uncle Sammah down at the executive palace.  Does Bill Keller know this and would it suddenly change his mind about Bachmann, charity and welfare if he found out that, oh say, Hezbollah operates hospitals and schools and day care centers?  Who's the Progressive, here?

The article is full of those "Do you still beat your wife?" questions.  And, I can just see his follow up column about the ones they didn't answer, or the guys and girls who never even bothered to answer his questions.  A little further on he mentions a biography some guy wrote on Robert E. Lee.  The writer, he says, happened to think that white people and slaves in the South got along great because they all had the same religion.  News to me!  But then, because Bachmann liked the biography he thinks that she oughta be asked if she "stands by her recommendation of that biography" because the author thinks something crazy.  It takes me a second or two to connect the really spaced out (in every sense of the term) dots, here.  Like I said, he's good.  He's also a little crazy himself if he believes no one sees through it.  I mean if I could...

But, don't take my word for it.  I spent about ten minutes today seeing if anyone else was as amused as Bulldog Bill.  Well a few folks were.  One or two even tore themselves away from a good nap to mention something about it, here and here.  The second piece, by Francis Beckwith depressed me a little.  Do you want to know why?  You see, here I've been saying how good I thought Keller is at what he does, and it's like stage makeup; a little paint over sloppy and shabby stuff underneath.  And, this guy is a BIG CHEESE....at the New York Bleeping Times!!

Good Lord!

Oh, before I let you go I have to connect you with this piece from Commentary, a thing I rarely look at.  But this one is priceless, given that it talks about who's going to replace Keller as the Executive Editor.  Do take the time to read it, and maybe you'll want to send your own questionnaire to some of the maroons down there at the Gray Lady.

Tuna Salad?? Yup, Tuna Salad Tonight. Aww, Gee.

You've gotta wonder why they always say that.  I like Tuna Salad, even when I get it between two slices of limp white bread.  It's an Old Standby.  It was only one day a few years ago at my sister's house that I learned there were other things to do with canned tuna besides add a chopped onion and a half ton of mayonnaise to it.  Stephanie likes to tune it up with some apple and raisins.  I adopted that for my own plate and kitchen.  (Hey, is that the title of another blog?  Peter's Plate, or simply Plate and Kitchen?)  Then I thought of adding a squeeze or two of lemon juice from time to time, a sprinkling of nuts of one kind or another, and I was off to the races.

Some of the stuff was not fit for the cat...if I had one, but every bit of it was healthy.  But, so is boiled cod and beans healthy.  And, no self respecting "moggie" would lift a paw towards that.  Not even Mikey could be persuaded to eat it.

The other night, though, I prepared something that I thought good enough to serve Mariellen.  It was a tuna and bean salad with some peppers, a bit of lemon and chopped fresh basil.  We just finished our second evening with it, and, by my word, it was as good as if not better than the first night's adventure.  So simple is it and so good I think, that I have decided to be brutally honest and tell you that I got it out of a book, an ad in a book at that.  Here is the recipe:

One 5 ounce can or 3.5 ounce package of tuna (I used the envelope and chunk light, not white tuna)
One 15 ounce can of cannelini beans drained
One Tbsp of lemon juice
2Tbsp of olive oil
One half chopped red onion
One half chopped red pepper
Salt and pepper
Two Tbsp chopped fresh basil
Zest of one half lemon
One clove of garlic mashed

Mash and mix the garlic with lemon juice, lemon zest, salt and pepper.  Whisk oil into it and set aside while you chop and mix the peppers and onion with the beans.  Mix the tuna with the beans and toss the add the dressing and chopped herb.  Toss again to mix the dressing, turn into a serving dish and garnish with fresh picked basil leaves.

I doubled the recipe and it easily will serve six as a main course.  Serve it on a bed of lettuce with some hearty bread and a good dry white for a light summer supper.

By the way, it's quite accommodating.  I had no red pepper, but did have some yellow and orange ones in the fridge.  They went quite well, and added some pleasant color appeal to the whole dish.

It's easy, quick and good.

To Be Entitled Means To be Enslaved

I spent a few moments this morning watching a You Tube video of some fellow on Judge Judy.  He had gotten a couple of dozen thousands of dollars from some government agencies to go to college and become a driveling idiot whose only apology for his life was "I am Me!"  This, I suppose would be what would be praised in the circles which believe in Head Starts for the underclasses...always with the hidden understanding that the real purpose of such things for the "underclasses" is to keep them that way.

I don't really know how that may be proved, since I amn't a scholar.  But, I do see the results of such things as Head Start and free rides of all sorts on the back of tax paying mules.  I know what I see parading before me daily as I hand out pieces of chicken at my very important post-retirement job to wrecks who will have nothing better in their lives than a 60 hour a week minimum wage job behind a counter somewhere, and another one later on in the day behind another counter somewhere, a succession of girl-friends or boyfriends and five, six or seven kids with no idea who is what or who in their lives.  This is the harvest of 50 years of social experimentation in toleration, educational reform, diversity and inclusivity, rights and entitlement...to name but a few things.

I recall the day when CCNY decided not to require any entrance exams for freshman students, and the horrors that resulted from that, because they believed that they should open their doors to students who had not proven capable of passing them through no fault of their own.  NO FAULT!!!  Well, perhaps not.  But they sure as hell didn't do anything to deserve entry and all the remedial BS that necessarily went along with it.  However they were lied to and believed the lie, that they could with no effort at all become the best they could be; that they had a right to a college education and access to all of the things that a college education woudl give them.  They were, in a word, ENTITLED.

A friend of mine who IS a scholar wrote something that made me think some of the thoughts above, not that they hadn't already been bubbling along in my brain for some time.  He wrote in reply to someone who had said that liberal government programs bespoke a certain empathy for the poor which was lacking from the motivational philosophy of conservative politics.  He said this:

"The basic,fundamental distinction in the conflict of visions that we see is, loosely and generally speaking, the tension between liberty and equality.  What we have had, in the last 40 years, in many countries,including our own, is the enlargement of the government sphere with woeful consequences.

And about taking the LEAP OF EMPATHY for the POOR ------- more harm has been visited upon them from ill conceived policies on their behalf than from the indifference of conservatives.  When I read AMERICA and COMMONWEAL, I feel that I am in the company of people who are making hortatory appeals utterly unrelated to social and economic realities.  It takes more than rhetoric to make some accomplishments.  Look around you and behold the squalor and detritus heaved up over the last 40 years.  Why even JOE KLEIN,a standard run of the mill liberal,just wrote a column several months ago, in TIME, on the utter,abject failure of HEAD START.  Yes, that HEAD START!!  I could go on and on.  I will keep it short by conluding with this advice ------- go check out Pat Moynihan who said all this from the mid 60s when he was an LBJ advisor until his last days.  Such is/was the sorry,squalid state of the equalitarian LEFT in the U.S."

I like those terms, squalor and detritus.  Most of the campuses of the country are awash in it.  Most of the schools and most of the legislative chambers.  And, not to put too fine a point on it...most of the boardrooms and trading floors.

That fool on You Tube is not as rare a bird as one might think and more common than cat caca today; so do not laugh at him, the poor victim that he is .

Who is at fault?  You know the answer.

What the Hell Is Wrong?

Do you wonder?  I used to, but I don't anymore.  I know.  We are wrong.  The problem is that we think we are right.  Not only do we think we are right; we believe, against all the evidence piling up before us that we are right, as individuals, as communities, as a nation.  And, we have every reason, we think, to believe we are right.  Ten years of war and waste.  Ten??  Try fifty since Vietnam.  Four(?) years of darn near depression caused by a few thousand at most greedy and unprincipled bankers and the complicity of another few thousand  or so careless, stupid or greedy politicians and regulators.  A country full of politicians who cannot agree on the time of day, and children who from the age of reason onwards believe they know everything; children who cannot read, write or think because we have decided teaching them how to do those things isn't necessary. Children who are parents and parents who are children, to put not too fine a point on it.  Finally, public perversion promoted as virtue and codified in law.

The other day I  briefly took part in an online conversation about education these days, such as it is.  Some folks I know were discussing the changes in grade school curricula in some of the school districts in places near where they lived.  It seems that the districts decided it is no longer necessary for teachers to concern themselves with teaching cursive writing to children.  All of them have or will have computers and be more familiar with keyboards than pens and pencils.  I joined them and commented on my mother and aunt, the former who was able to write well and clearly, type 120 words a minute and using Pittmann could take dictation with the speeed and accuracy of a court reporter.  Her sister's hand was indistinguishable from the book illustrations of Palmer.

Both had only grade school educations but were more learned, better educated and more prepared for life as an adult than most college graduates today.

Yesterday I read something that caused me to blink, then shut my eyes and shook my head in disbelief.  I did not think such stupidity could be assembled in one place and kept together in that place for long enough to do harm.  You see I had a theory about stupidity; that it was incapable of binding itself into large masses  (being too stupid so to do) , of attraction and accretion if you will, like clumps of matter, bits of atoms and molecules, slowly building galaxies over time.  I was wrong.  It was when I began to look at children these days more or less as a disinterested, distanced observer that I began to revise my theory about stupidity; children are the products of education as one might say stars are what gravity builds and education has become stupid.

It was when I began to notice the increase in news reports of children forming mobs and attacking citizens in the street, beating them into hospitals and then disappearing that I started to doubt my theory; or the other reports of mobs of children invading subways and buses, stores and malls for robbery and mayhem sprees.  These are what our schools produce, the consequences of stupidity.  These are the result of our education system; ignorance and bestial behavior on a large scale, terror.

Stupidity has built something ugly in our children, stupidity realized in the form of educational practice and policy; a massive life sucking black hole of stupidity drawing us all into destruction, not building but tearing apart everything which comes near to it.   Nothing shines in the galaxies built by stupid educators.  All is distorted and the light is destroyed.  Well, not quite destroyed.  Each child is, rather like a mini black hole, rendered incapable of escaping its own well of stupidity and shedding its own spectrum on the rest of creation.

Do please take the time to read this article. It should make you laugh, cry and scream with anger and frustration. The frame of mind, the incomprehensible stupidity, of the people responsible for this bleak "comedy" the author describes is not limited to the University of California system, nor to colleges and universities.  It can be found repeated in high schools and grade school systems all over the country. 

If there is one paragraph in this thing which is bone chillingly frightening it is this:
"UC San Diego is adding diversity fat even as it snuffs out substantive academic programs. In March, the Academic Senate decided that the school would no longer offer a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering; it also eliminated a master’s program in comparative literature and courses in French, German, Spanish, and English literature. At the same time, the body mandated a new campus-wide diversity requirement for graduation. The cultivation of “a student’s understanding of her or his identity,” as the diversity requirement proposal put it, would focus on “African Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, Chicanos, Latinos, Native Americans, or other groups” through the “framework” of “race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, language, ability/disability, class or age.” Training computer scientists to compete with the growing technical prowess of China and India, apparently, can wait. More pressing is guaranteeing that students graduate from UCSD having fully explored their “identity.” Why study Cervantes, Voltaire, or Goethe when you can contemplate yourself? “Diversity,” it turns out, is simply a code word for narcissism."

Our "diversity" will be our death.  "Snuff out" is the operative phrase here in regard to what this idiocy represents.  It is nothing less than the death of our civilization. The cancer of narcissism has infected us with us.


As Pogo said, and I love to repeat:  "We have met the enemy and it is us."  Truer words, etc...

You have read what I suggested  you read and you have shaken your head in disbelief.  While you are still dazed and reeling may I hit you again?  The referee you see hasn't sent me to a neutral corner.  Here, then, my knockout punch.  Governor Gerry "Moonbeam" Brown of California has just signed into law a bill which mandates all textbooks and other educational materials in California schools "cover the contributions of sexual minorities" in our history.  I will refrain from any Maureen Dowd styled snarkiness regarding what I might think are the peculiarly, or exclusively lesbian, bi-sexual, gay or trans-gendered or other sexual minorities' (shudder) contributions to our common weal.  But I wonder, if any there may have been, why it is necessary to identify the contributor of same by the use which he, she or it makes of its genitalia.  If there is a more stupid idea in the history of the species I am open to suggestions as to what it may be.  It borders on child pornography.  What questions might run through the mind of an otherwise innocent seven year old child (if any still exist) who hears that it was Poet A, who was a lesbian, who wrote this lovely series of poems.  Would a young hand be raised to ask what in the nature of lesbianism causes one to write such things?  Would they wonder whether or not one should become a lesbian if one wishes to write poems, or if one is a lesbian for desiring to write poems?  Would a teacher be required to mention such things?


Professor Anthony Esolen of Providence College has written about the abyss we seem so eager to hurl ourselves and our children into with much more eloquence and quite a bit more insight than I can possibly claim.  This morning I read another piece of his in Crisis magazine.  He identifies the problem as a failure of the culture to support any sort of moral development in our youngsters.  We have emptied homes of mothers and fathers, replacing them with social workers, drive by dads, teenaged Moms, liberated single mothers, over worked and over-wrought grand parents and 500 channels of TV.  And, we have emptied our schools of everything, it seems but diversity, tolerance and something that the schools in California call "equity".

As Professor Esolen says in his good and earnest essay: "The first thing to do is to cripple the family."  Anyone who has not seen that as being the result of most of what is happening in our schools, courts and legislative chambers for many years, and resulting in chaos and aimless pursuits all over the land has no eyes.

I know a young woman who is an unwed mother.  She works .  Her mother takes care of the child.  The child's father is "somewhere" and comes by to see his child "sometimes".  She would like: a tattoo.  She thinks: that the men in another city nearby are sexy.  She is not unusual at all.

Last week as I stood in line at the bank I heard a bit of conversation among a young lady and two young men.  It was difficult to tell which was which, except for the soprano tone of the lady.  Profanity punctuated the speech of all three,  tattoos coverd most of their exposed skin...of which there was a lot.  various bits of metal pierced other bits of skin.  They spoke about another young lady who had a child, and another young man who was the father of the child.  He had the child with him.  They said it was foolish of him to think he would get custody, or be allowed to keep the child since he was merely on furlough from prison.  Furthermore, he is father to five other children by three other women.  This is not unusual.

I know another young woman who is a college student.  She studies quite hard.  She loves her mother and father, her siblings and her faith.  She wants to graduate and attend a university where she will eventually get her Ph.D.  Part of her studies include learning Latin, by God!  She is not interested in meeting sexy men in a city nearby.  She IS unusual.

What the hell is going on?  And, why aren't you doing anything about it?

Something Simple, Something Cool

The sun has almost set on the hottest day of the year and I have opened the window in this small and stuffy room.  My upper lip is dripping, and my shirt is wet, but I'm a happy guy.  I done good at supper and also fortunately I put the A/C in the window this morning and our bedroom is a cool and dry 76.  Not a bird peeps outside, but one or two young children laugh and play in the neighbor's pool a street over.  It's a nice sound, and makes up for the lack of song bird evening serenades.

Back to supper, though.  Today was my turn preparing supper.  Last night I announced that I was going to make something simple, something cool.  I was going to make a tuna salad. Immediately Mariellen reminded me that I'd have to keep raisins and apples, which I have been adding lately, out of the salad.  That's because I'm not supposed to eat fruit with my main courses or my stomach will explode.  Rats!!!  And Kathy very quietly wondered if I would be using regular mayonnaise.  I knew that meant she'd prefer I use something else.

"Why don't you make something using the herbs in our garden, Dear?" said Mariellen smiling her most lovely wife smile at me.  I had my orders.  I didn't just fall off the truck.

So, before the temperature had reached the melting point of lead, I wandered out to the patch and snipped the tender tops off some green things: parsley, dill, tarragon and basil.  I got enough to satisfy me, and wandered back inside, washed the plants and put 'em in the fridge.  Then I grabbed three cans of tuna and opened them, squeezing the water into a little bowl for Benedict, Kathy's deaf white cat who lives downstairs and whom I need to like me.  He's a freak for water from the tuna can.  I'm waiting for the thank you note.

Next I took a lemon the size of Pluto out of the fridge and zested it, adding it to the tuna I had turned into a nice bowl and squished into little pieces, the juice, too went into the bowl with the tuna and zest.  Three stalks of celery and one onion both chopped into micron sized bits joined the growing mess.

I stood back and wondered what next.  I looked in the fridge and saw sour cream, Greek yogurt and real Hellman's calorie charged fat filled mayonnaise.  Guess what?  I came down half way between Kathy and me and mixed up some yogurt and mayo adding it to the bowl full of stuff.  Finally I chopped the weeds up and plopped them on top, mixed like I was making haroses for Passover and put it in the fridge until supper.

Kathy has cut up a little red onion and washed and spun some lettuce.  I had a couple of red tomatoes.  Mariellen fished two brand new cucumbers out of the patch.  There was a loaf of good solid bread, and soft butter.  So I assembled as they say on NPR, "plating up" the stuff in my best fancy casual style, and whistled them into the Dining Room.  Oohs and aahs told me I had done good...but I knew it all along.  The dishes were so clean after eating we just put them back in the cubbard.  (I really do know how to spell that word.)

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot.  The last thing I gave the mess of stuff was a blast of Dijon mustard.  I wondered about horseradish, and maybe I'll try that next.

"Did you write down your recipe, Dear?" she asked.  "Nope."  "Maybe you should in case we want to do this again."  Maybe.  Yeah, I've got your maybe.  Here it is:

Something Simple, Something Cool

3 can chunk white tuna in water
i/4 c. chopped fresh dill
1/4 c chopped fresh parsley
1t chopped fresh basil
1t chopped fresh tarragon
1 lge onion chopped
3 stalks celery chopped
1 lemon zested with juice added
1t Dijon mustard
1/4-1/2 c mayonnaise
1/4-1/2 c Greek yogurt.

Squeeze and drain liquid from Tuna, break into small pieces in large bowl.  Add all other ingredients.  Mix well.  Cover and let sit in fridge for at least an hour while flavors blend.  Serve on beds of lettuce or mixed greens with assorted raw vegetables and good bread.

The State of the Nation: Being a Periodic Review of What's Heppening Now, No. 3

Out in Chicago land they convict the former governor, and he's soon on his way to the rock pile to join the guy he replaced.  That makes the state 2 for 2 in convict governors.  They oughta move the State House to Joliet or some other lock up and save a lot of time on trials.  I'm a pol in Illinois and I think it's time to get an honest job.  As a matter of fact, I'm anybody in Illinois and I'm thinking a nice igloo on an ice floe might be a good place to relocate myself to.  I mean what is up with that place.  Now they have Flash Mobs stripping stores like locusts strip corn fields.  And, when they ain't stripping stores, they're beating the stuffing out of anyone they see.

This is called after school activity, I guess.


The news says Blago the Magnificent was convicted of trying to shake down a hospital and sell the Senate seat that once held the skinny butt of the current president of these Untied States, which leaving that chair behind to go to the highest bidder begins to look like the smartest thing that "Maroon's" done so far.  I dunno but that "Blago" the Con should have been convicted for two other things: having an un-spellable, unpronounceable name and having the most stupid hair cut of any adult male in the country.  Then they should have gone on and indicted every person in the state who voted for this jerk.

In the meantime, former community organizer and Illinois Senator Obama is flying out to someplace west of the Hudson River...where, exactly doesn't matter, it's all the same...to talk to the folks about something called the economy.  Used to be when we had one it was the biggest in the world.  A few weeks ago I read that India, the land of elephants and tigers, holds that spot, now.  You think we're Avis to India's Hertz?  Think again, 'cause China, who is coming to the rescue of the Euro, is there, trying harder.  I don't know what Stretch can say to them farmers and truck drivers except maybe, "I'm sorry."  I have a pretty good idea what he will say though, "George did it.  Blame him, not me.  Gotta go now and rent a luxury hotel somewhere for me and my staff."

Back closer to home Andy boy is looking for re-election gold at the end of a rainbow and learning show tunes, I guess, while he helps pull the chain on Western Civ.  Enough said.

I'm really waiting to hear what B.O. has to say to those quiet folks out there in corn land about your dough and mine..  Maybe it's the first of a bunch of apologies, since three years ago he said he had a plan.  "Which one?" is my favorite question.  He'll be rubbing shoulders with the 14,000 Republican candidates all looking to come out on tope in the straw poll.  I figure there ain't enough straw in the world to go around.  Anyway, Bachmann and Ppalin are gonna shoot all the rest of them.

While they talk and shout and eat apple pie and apologize no one pays any attention to the hole in the roof and the fact that the floor's fallen into the cellar.

The hogs are happy though.

And, down in Los Alamos they're getting ready to have a fire sale.  What I can't figure is how do you have a wild fire in a desert?  It's a crazy ding dong place.  But, Oprah's got our back, so I ain't worried.  Not one bit.  I'm just gonna pry that horseshoe off the door and keep it in my pants.

Leastways with it there no one can whack me on the skull with it.

Victims

Mariellen and I provided the music during the recent funeral Mass of a young man who died in an auto accident.  He was 21.  We expected a number of his friends and former classmates from the town's High School to attend and our expectations were met.  I watched them as they came into the church singly and in small groups.  I could not call them mourners.  I could not call them anything more than curious bystanders, spectators, dis-interested observers who for the most part seemed not to have the slightest idea what was taking place or why they were there, these supposed adults. They seemed like what they really still were, a bunch of high school students who were summoned to the auditorium for some tiresome exercise.

It filled the time.  They sauntered, slouched, sneaked into the church, sprawled in the pews, chatted among each other before the Mass and through the preludes, gawked while the family, especially the young man's mother, staggered in their grief down the aisle and stared open mouthed at the coffin awaiting the Priest to begin the Mass.

As the procession with the coffin to the altar began they stood hands in pockets,sipping coffee, one or two texting, whispering and smiling to each other, or lolling around in their jeans and t-shirts, or too tight, too skimpy dresses exposing as much flesh as your average 8th avenue putana, teetering on stiletto heels and displaying garishly colored tattoos of roses and curlicues on arms and legs and who knew where else.

It happened about the time the second reading was finished, and the Gospel was read.  I noticed some of them looking forward toward what was going on.  Father Patrick gave a brief homily in which he reminded us all what would happen, and that no one knew when it might. By the time of the Consecration, something like order and a semblance of attention had taken place among them.  At least they kneeled when asked to do so.  I began to hope, as I prayed for it, that they were approaching some realization of the moment and its meaning.

At the end, as we sang the recessional hymn, I saw from my vantage many red rimmed eyes, and many sad and worried looks on the faces passing out beneath me.

I felt a great pity for these lost children who came into that place with absolutely no idea what was going to be done and were utterly unprepared to witness it and hear the message imparted.  Did I mention that the school was a public high school they all went to?  It was.  And, in one of those places from which God and all mention of God has been banished, and effectively banished from the lives of all of them beyond and after school, these victims of public education...for in this at least no one can say they have benefited...they spent four formative years being indoctrinated with the message that they are all they need to be; that there is, essentially, nothing more they need than what has been given them or what they can get with their own hands.  And, of both those things there is damn little if the evidence before my eyes that morning was any fair indication. 

 

We have raised up several generations now of people totally unaware of anything/one in which/whom to place their faith, and convinced that there is no need so to do.  There is, then, in my ever so humble opinion, absolutely nothing which holds us together as a people, no unifying set of beliefs.  It is the reason I refer to this place by what should now be recognized as its true name: the Untied States of America.

Spend an hour or two in any Mall across the land on a Sunday afternoon, especially, and ponder what Chesterton once said, "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything."  We have become empty.  Or, at least our children have.  As evidence of that I point to our chief legislative pornographer (pace Peggy Noonan in a recent WSJ article) Mr. Michael Weiner.

The Prince of This World is happy....if such a thing can be said of him.

What fools we all are for that, and what fire we build against ourselves.

Sky And Sand And Sea

Nothing is as beautiful as purity.

Shapes and forms catch my eye, the arrangement of lines, colors and shadows and light moving over them.

In That Summer Day

I was waiting for Mariellen to finish up in the Ladies Room on fine day in Boston a few years ago. Across the reflecting pool from me was a series of benches. Not a wader was in sight.

The sun was perfec, gently warming the benches, attracting all sorts of City Life. I wondered, from my "surveillance post" what the conversations were, what the lovers said to each other, where the walkers had come from, where they were going. They entered and left, or lingered talking.

They linger still, walk still and love still in that summer day