The Narthex

The kingdom of heaven is like diving for sunken treasure and risking your life to find it. A coworker catalogued and filed "As Built" plans for us engineers after we’d finished our construction projects. I was intrigued by Sandy’s hobby of deep-sea diving, often done at great risk to life…

Mt. Everest is the highest mountain in the Himalayan system, located near the common border of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and China. Everest, at 29,032 feet, has drawn climbers from every nation. Even the blind have risked their lives to climb it. Sir Edmund Hillary famously did so on May 23, 1953.…

Inadequate nutrition afflicted many children in the WWII years, due to food rationing. At an early age I developed myopia, and I suspect poor nutrition partly caused it. Evidence is mounting that this vision problem is growing around the world, with recent estimates at 30% and forecasts that by 2050…

In the late 1980s, a friend and I rode a trolley south from San Diego to the Imperial Beach sandcastle contest. After a short walk from the station, we stood before a packed crowd assembled around various castle projects. Some were 10-feet square and upwards of seven feet high, with…

Quantum physicists have learned that subatomic particles change their conduct when being observed. That proven fact raises the question whether the particles respond to being watched, as we do. Psychologists call that response, in humans, the Hawthorne Effect. For who can resist presenting the best version of himself under the…

Down the road from my house is a nursery that cultivates sunflowers. I stopped nearby to ponder the hundreds of them, all aligned with the 3:00pm sun in the western sky. They stood like monks at their afternoon psalms, all transfixed by that scintillating altar monstrance representing the Son of…

After walking to San Diego’s Spruce Street in exploratory mode, I chanced upon a charming historical site, which still hovers in my memory: a suspension footbridge that looked to be about 400 feet long. Later I learned it was built in 1912 for access to a trolley line by homes…

On Bishop Fulton J. Sheen's Life is Worth Living show of February 2, 1953 -- the episode entitled "The Death of Stalin" -- Sheen enacted Mark Antony’s eulogy for Julius Caesar, substituting Malenkov and Stalin as the two characters. “And now Malenkov speaks: ‘Friends, Soviets, countrymen, lend me your ears;…

When I was twelve and going to Mass daily, my Masonic father slammed his hand on our kitchen table one evening and asked, “What’s this about daily Mass? No more of it.” I suppose my "excessive" religiosity was from watching Bishop Fulton Sheen on TV every week. Perhaps because my…

I received a phone call from my 91-year-old friend Lou, who had asked me for advice on several occasions. I had just awakened from a nap, but my grogginess vanished on hearing the urgent tone of his voice. Lately his health had been failing from a hiatal hernia that caused…

Houdini was the master of illusion in the 1920s. Like today’s David Copperfield -- the highest paid solo performer in history -- Houdini mystified rapt audiences with incredible death-defying acts. As a youth he worked his card tricks and vanishing acts in dime circuses. After training as a locksmith he…

In our everyday decisions we use hearsay reputations to decide, say, for or against a dentist or doctor. Reliable references from former patients are helpful, and as social animals we are inclined to run with the herd to survive. Hearsay statements are used to prove truth or falsehood but are…

I looked at the wall clock in our kitchen and saw both a large and small hand pointing straight up at an odd symbol. At five years old, I had an idea it meant food when the hands overlapped there. Whenever that happened, Mom would tell me it’s lunchtime. Now,…

Yesterday I saw a black toy car about the size of a shoe box with 3-inch tires zip around the street, zigzagging, bucking, and avoiding curbs and bushes. Then I spotted a young boy remotely operating it, using an electronic device with his thumbs, signaling that plastic beast what to…

Today when someone says Amazon, most think of the gargantuan retailer with tributaries throughout the world. But of course it's named after the Amazon River in South America, the world’s second longest river with 1,000 tributaries fertilizing Earth’s largest drainage basin. During the dry season, the Amazon's width reaches a…