Dr. Johan van Parys is Director of Liturgy at Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis, and the lead article in the Sunday June 27 church bulletin was this powerful commentary. Thoughts on Forgiveness Paris is one of those magical cities. No matter what time of year one visits, the city has a way of capturing […]
Monday of this week I delivered a 500 page family history to the printer. The history is of my Dad’s French-Canadian family, in North America since the early 1600s. That’s a lot of history. The 500 pages can only be a summary. The last photo I selected and inserted was the one below, the dedication […]
Overnight came a bulletin from the Minnesota Nurses Association, announcing a tentative agreement between Twin Cities Nurses and the Hospitals which employ them. The vote is next week, on the same day the strike was to begin. It is very good news, for everyone involved. Having spent a long career as a teachers union representative […]
A recent e-mail conversation on my own e-list has been focusing on the general question: “poll [the others on the list] and see which branch of the War Party they belong to: the Republicans or Democrats…?” So, I asked the question, and got a range of responses. If only things were so simple as labeling […]
After publishing #202, a long-time friend, a liberal Democrat, wrote with her comment on the post: “Maybe Republican was written too many times [some readers] don’t want to hear it.” The comment caused me to use my word search function at the blog, to see in how many posts, of over 200, the words “Democrat/Democrats” […]
Thursday afternoon a friend stopped by to visit. He’d been to a wake at a nearby mortuary, paying respects to a long-time colleague who, he said, had few friends and almost no family. A kindly gesture. We visited. Jim is a fairly recent retiree from a career position in state government. I suppose somebody could […]
Back in April, my son Tom alerted me to watch for a package containing a Sock Monkey. It was in Michigan, he said, and our home was its next stop. When I received it I was to let people who knew his daughter (thus my granddaughter) Lindsay see the monkey, and write a note or […]
Happy Father’s Day all you Dads, and those whose role is or has been or will be that of “Dad”. Wikipedia notes, without any fanfare, that this is the 100th anniversary of the observance of Father’s Day, it’s first observance on June 19, 1910. I’ve been around long enough to have been a Dad not […]
Previous posts on this topic: here and here. For years, when I’m “out and about” in our world I’ve made it a practice of picking up the local newspaper, however humble or exalted. So, when we were about to leave Denver on June 6, I picked up the Sunday Denver Post, and when I wasn’t […]
I clicked on “publish” on #197 – Taking Responsibility and went to watch President Obama speak to the nation from the Oval Office Tuesday night. The speech is short, well worth watching. As I anticipated in #197, the instant analysis – and criticism – began immediately after the lights went down in the Oval Office. […]