I deeply regret that it took me this long to finally read Rick Pepe's charming sort-of-memoir of his final year of teaching at Schalmont High School, Thank You For My Children (the title taken from Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird). Rick, my brother Jay, Tom Quigley and the late Walt Scott were inseparable companions in high school at SMI and ( Read more... )

Veterans Day 1995 was one of the harder ones for me. I always remember Dad, of course. Actually, not a day goes by that I don't remember him. But 1995 was different. We had buried my mother the day before, and walking down to Guy Park Avenue to watch the parade represented my first feeble steps into Life After Mom ( Read more... )

Of her young life, I don't know a whole lot except for the basics, living in an extended Italian immigrant family in Franklin, MA and something of high school and college. I have her high school valedictory address and her report cards from college, but the best part of the written record begins when she meets Dad on a blind date arranged by her ( Read more... )

First, let me repeat what I said on The Judge Report when Bob and Jenna first announced their engagement, and that is that I do not know what Bob's first reaction was when Jenna Loepki walked into his life, but for the rest of us it was love at first sight. That this extraordinary warm and wonderful young woman, who laughs at all my jokes, should ( Read more... )

We had a built-in china closet in the house on Trinity Place where various and sundry items of trash and treasure were kept. The brother had taken it upon himself to rid the house of the former while I declared myself the preserver of the latter. Occasionally we had classification problems ( Read more... )

[Mom's funeral was a family affair, with children and spouses as pall-bearers, lectors and eulogists. Father James Gulley was the celebrant, assisted by old family friends Fr. Joe Cotugno and Fr. Joe Anselment. The readings included the one from the Book of Tobit which I had stumbled upon the day I learned of her cancer, and St. John's ( Read more... )

Abraham Lincoln was once asked about his ancestry.

"It can be summed up in a single phrase: 'The short and simple annals of the poor.'"

The reference is, of course, to Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard. The 18th century poem continues to fascinate, ruminating as it does about what might have been had these personages lived elsewhere. ( Read more... )

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So, I see where the Congress is talking again about banning "waterboarding" when interrogating terrorists who, by the way, happen to reject all norms of International Law and slit innocent people's throats on television, not to mention blowing up Downs Syndrome women and hailing them as Suicide Bombers ( Read more... )

In December of 1965, back when I was a high school freshman at SMI, I was invited to attend a Rotary Club luncheon as one of the three finalists from my school in the Four Way Test essay contest.  Michele Bazan was the winner and got to read her essay (notwithstanding that 9th grade English teacher Mrs. Going was one of the judges) and Gail Welch ( Read more... )