The World I Live In

“Catch Some Air” She glides behind me and I twist my body–with some arthritic squeaks–to watch. Our granddaughter Mairead is on the wakeboard and, though ordinarily she’s a solemn child, I can see a bit of smile even from the boat. Four years ago at seven, she had her first wakeboard experience, managing to “get…

Thank you for coming.” “Thank you for being here, Sangpen.” This ritual fragment of conversation begins every massage. Sangpen speaks as she comes in, closes the door and dims the lights even more than they are already.  I respond from face down on the massage table, my facing poking into the funny support, shaped something…

A recent casual conversation about Italian restaurants and neighborhoods triggered a whole chain of memories for me. I entered Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in September 1969 to begin a Ph D program in theology. GSAS was on the Rose Hill Campus in the Bronx, fronting the wide and busy Fordham road and…

Christmas Cookies or How I Spent My Christmas Vacation I’m not a baker. Several times a year, when it’s my time to bring choir snacks, I buy refrigerated cookie dough and bake up a dozen or two. Time was when I bought the kind you had to cut into appropriate widths. Now It’s always the…

I can still tie my shoes. I remember learning that skill and it’s one of my earliest memories. At the time we lived in an oddly configured apartment on the second floor what must once have been a private house. It had a large room at the front and another at the back, connected by…