It was an unlikely friendship. I was a 30-something University of Michigan transplant, newly hired as the alumni editor for the Notre Dame Alumni Association. He was a 99-year-old, long-retired tax accountant and class secretary for the Class of 1930.
Deaths of Notre Dame alumni
You could see the ripples created by 9/11 on a Friday in early February if you happened to be in the Annadale section of Staten Island. Inside a funeral home there, an honor guard of the Fire Department of New York stood before the casket of Lieutenant Martin Fullam, 56, who had died a few days before of what one doctor said was “without doubt the worst case of World Trade Center lung disease ever seen.”
Michelle McNamara ’92 tracks down serial killers from home, investigating cold-case homicides and writing in her True Crime Diary.
Creative work by Notre Dame people
Surveying the people seated in the Jordan Auditorium at Mendoza College of Business, John Bargetto ’88 smiled in wonder. “I’m impressed at your dedication to sustainability,” he said. “It had nothing to do with wine tasting, right?
“What happens next?” an audience member, her voice an urgent plea, asked when the reading ended. That’s exactly the question a novelist wants to hear at a reading — people so involved they are hanging on to the story.
Dick Conklin died this past Tuesday (May 28). The news of his death came as one of those sudden blows that stops you in your tracks. And so you sit and stare out the window, and one of the reasons you do is because it is hard to imagine Notre Dame without Dick Conklin.
On May 9, 2013, hundreds of men and women in uniform, their families and Hawaii residents lined the streets at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam as a C-17 Globemaster taxied to a halt on the tarmac. They watched in solemn silence as a six-man carry team in crisp ceremonial dress retrieved a brushed chrome casket adorned with the brilliant red, white and blue of our nation’s flag.
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.
An introvert and loner for my first 26 years, I married into a big, Midwestern, Catholic family. There’s just no preparing yourself for that.
My father said the women in my mother’s family had wills so adamant and granitic that you could get a fire started by using flint against their wills to get the necessary spark.
When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected pope, I was deeply disappointed. His reputation as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s “watchdog” agency, preceded him, and he received an icy reception in the press. But over time I came to respect this complicated and humble man whose views transcended American political categories.
Some years ago, before I was editor of this magazine, I wrote a shortish piece that the editor, Walt Collins ’51, rejected. I reworked it several times, and each version got a thumbs down from the bearded journalist I greatly admired.
Trying to park one’s car in the D2 lots east of Grace Hall is tricky at any time of year. But in December it calls to mind our human need for the Advent season — a time to slow down and hope for salvation, or at least promised relief from the world and its cares.
“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?
The only marathons for which a runner has to qualify are the Olympics (every four years) and Boston (every year). Only the best worldwide marathons are Boston qualifiers. For long distance runners the Boston is both Mecca and Jerusalem and it’s the world’s oldest annual marathon. Yet into this environment came unspeakable evil. But through that evil, the world, and I, witnessed tremendous good.
At first, my guard is up, casting glances around every corner, suspicious of every man I pass on street. As he recounts the histories of the buildings we pass, many of them destroyed by the earthquake in 2010, he senses my taut body language. “Don’t worry. This is Jacmel, not Port-au-Prince. You are safe here.”
The middle ground vanishes as America goes to the poles. And that’s a dangerous thing.
This trip to Viengkham was my introduction to life outside the tourist mecca of Luang Prabang, and it didn’t take too long after leaving town before I started to see a little more of what the development statistics for Laos really mean when they make bland pronouncements, such as: 27 percent of the population here lives on less than $1 a day. Or, more than 40 percent of the rural children under age 5 are undernourished.
The world needs to cool it — before it’s too late
The light is on inside Susan Sheridan’s lab, a scene a photographer describes as “a fun place full of bones.” Human bones.
From the beginning the human race has scanned the heavens for the meaning of our existence and signs of creatures living far, far away. The search itself says a lot about who we are.
Twelve years ago, we had barely purchased our first bulky Dell, much less consider taking the morning news from a backlit screen. Twelve years ago, we still had dial-up Internet, woefully barren email inboxes and asked Jeeves instead of Googling. A lot has changed in 12 years. That’s why my mom recently sat my dad down at the kitchen table to bring up a two-word, volatile phrase in my household: digital subscription.
Hellmann says she thinks it is unfortunate that climate change has become politicized. Regardless of political orientation, we all inhabit the same planet.
With a childhood in the waning days of the Cold War and adulthood in the 9/11 era, it’s a wonder it took so long for me to fall into John le Carré’s world of spies, bureaucrats and the regular people caught in their webs.
Recently I told two of my granddaughters, ages 13 and 11, that Winston Churchill was perhaps the most important man in the history of the world we know today.
Each pain or medical problem ends and begins with the excess weight. We can ease the pain with pills and control the infections with antibiotics, but the obesity complicates any treatment and prolongs every illness.
Welcome to Molarity Redux, the 45th strip in the updated, continuing adventures of Jim Mole and friends. First dates can be so slippery.
When the sun finally makes its annual reappearance for spring in South Bend, there is much justified rejoicing. But when you are a bald man, the celebration is blunted by the challenges warmer weather brings to those with a cleaner pate.