On the trip home we sat in traffic, caught in gridlock, watching the signal change and going nowhere. As a man walked back and forth along the side of the road, my daughter asked, “Mommy, what does that man want?”
The Irish banded together on Chicago’s Southside. They fixed each other’s roofs, watched each other’s children and fed each other’s husbands. They married and had children who dropped the Irish brogue and grew up American, but with Irish culture woven tightly into their lives. Then they married other Irish and had children. Children of the children of the Irish immigrant population. Children who have an even more watered-down Irish-American upbringing, but still some sort of one. I am one of those children.
I stepped off the plane into the daylight, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep and an ineffective sleeping pill. The line at immigration stretched down the airport, overflowing with people and excitement.
There’s still a lot of games to be played this fall, but Notre Dame’s 125th football season is off to a thrilling start.
As the red-gold Indiana sun sank into the western horizon, the nightmare named Denard Robinson returned to haunt Notre Dame Stadium.
Welcome to Molarity Redux, the 36th strip in the updated, continuing adventures of Jim Mole and friends. Those Mayans, causing trouble again.
I’ve used much of my time thus far to prepare myself to get to this stage of life. Time was spent in class, doing homework and filling free seconds with outlandish numbers of extracurriculars so I could bolster my college apps and get into school and find a job. But with a job, the end to which I’ve worked, secured and underway, now what?
The first day of the strike was going to be my fifth day on the job. There aren’t many things I know about being a teacher, about life on the South Side, about the union demands, or about the teacher’s needs. I can’t even pretend to understand the “legal-ese” involved in collective bargaining or why it takes a whole week to come to an agreement.
Nicolas was in tears. And I, his father and coach, needed to do something about it.
William Kennedy, one of the foremost Catholic novelists of our time, has turned his light on injustice and racism, the powerful and oppressed, and on the redemptive power of love, family and our essential humanity.
Summer is so over for me. We have hiked it and biked it, been to parks and been to camps and been camping; we’ve gone to the lake and the pool; we have sprayed it down with bug spray and covered it in sunscreen. I’m out of tricks, and I’m letting everyone watch too much television.
“Her name is Billie, named after Billie Holiday,” my friend John said to me over the phone, the day after his first daughter was born last month. I was happy for him, but felt a profound sadness for myself at the same time.
As Tommy Rees strapped on his burnished gold helmet, he heard two roars crashing through the South Bend bluster. First was the growling chuff of a locomotive. But deeper and more distressing was the dark grumble from the many thousands in the Notre Dame Stadium benches. With the band’s sonorous metal blowing martial sounds, Rees trod through boos that tore the Stadium’s concave.
Eat, drink and get busted. Check out strips 150-154 of the popular comic Molarity, which previewed in The Observer in 1977.
Hayden Piscal Howell is cut from the same Army-green cloth as her father. Howell ’08 moved among seven states during her “Army brat” childhood. At each stop she brought along a horse named Pebbles, a fascination with the camaraderie of military life and a deep respect for her father, Army Colonel Richard Piscal.
In American medicine, every symptom is seen as something that needs to be acknowledged, addressed and solved. Drug company commercials have created an entire society of hypochondriacs, myself included. Patients in Rwanda walk around with pain or a massive tumor on their face, and even then they hesitate to complain.
Twenty years ago, a young couple settled into marriage, parenthood and Notre Dame grad-student housing.
Rockne was known to be a superstitious man. Many of the game-day rituals that are still being used today at Notre Dame had their birth during the Rockne Era. Team Mass and breakfast on game day was one of those rituals.
Responsible finance has been an awkward subject for Christians at least since Jesus attended that dinner party in Bethany where one of his hostesses poured a pint of rare spikenard (worth roughly a year’s salary for the average Palestinian wage earner those days) over his feet and wiped them with her hair.
As sometimes happens in life, I was looking the other way when Jim Naughton died. The loss is just now sinking in. His life offers good thoughts on a Labor Day. Here’s why.