I’m making a “healthy breakfast” recipe I pulled from the New York Times. I core the apples, slice them in thin circles, cover the slices in peanut butter, layer them on top of each other, sprinkle them with brown sugar and cut the apple slices in half. The coffee is brewing, the dog has been out and fed and he is now asleep in the front room, the heat works and I’m happy. I’m having a good time, until my kids show up.
The deluxe supermarket represents the new Haiti, perhaps even the coming Haiti, but not the economy of the real Port-au-Prince, which is found on the streets, alleys, tap taps and sidewalk markets. Economists might label it the black market or underground economy, but in a country with seventy percent official unemployment, the underground drives the commerce engine that keeps the city alive.
Did a benevolent God finally send poor Jim a beautiful woman?
There might not be a more universally feared and derided form of communication than the commencement address. Every spring, individuals of various altitudes of notoriety and self-awareness have to stand in the heat talking to the legions of the sunburned and the hungover, charged with inspiring them in (preferably) 30 minutes or less.
It’s Commencement time at Notre Dame, several days of celebration, satisfaction and pride for graduates and their families. But how is it experienced by the faculty and staff, many of whom have seen a good number of these events come and go, year after year?
The temptation we have at Notre Dame, or in any community which nourishes us in faith, is to cling to it. We want to stay and have more and more of the good things. The sustenance is so great; why leave it behind?
It was six months away. Then two weeks away. And now, just days away. Each passing moment brings us closer to the day that perhaps all Notre Dame seniors simultaneously yearn for and dread: graduation day.
To those soon-to-be graduates, the class of 2013: because Notre Dame is the amazing place it is, when you leave, you may find a dark cloud overhead. It is a real, almost tangible loss, so of course it’s going to leave an ache. Probably more than you expected.
Mother’s Day is supposed to be about me, so I’m not supposed to do anything. My family tries to do the stuff I would normally do: make dinner, clean the house, pick up the dog poop in the backyard.
“How long have you had the mass in your breast?” I ask Natalie, a 43-year-old woman, in Creole. “Some time,” she replies, an indicator of the Haitian measurement of time. I prod and she eventually reveals that she has had the tumor for about a year. The first question to come to mind is simple and inevitable, but is so often tinged with judgment: Why did she wait so long?