The Narthex

One early weekday morning six years ago, I was steering my enormous shopping cart in narrow Walmart aisles when I heard this announcement: “Welcome, lucky Walmart shoppers. We have an exciting giveaway this morning at the orange desk in the Housewares section. You must be there in the next two…

Casey, the homeless offspring of Gen. Robert E. Lee whom I wrote about last October, sat at a concrete picnic table in our small neighborhood park. The purple Jacarandas were in full bloom everywhere. As I approached during my daily walk, he closed the book Pillars of the Earth by Ken…

Joyce was seven when she experienced the Battle of Britain. After WWII ended, she won two swimming championships, then night-schooled for 140 words/min in shorthand. She quit working at sweatshop textile mills after she got a better paying job as a secretary in the Manchester police department. She had a…

During a Sunday morning walk in my lower middle-class neighborhood, I came across a City employee matching paint for a sidewalk wall which had been marked with graffiti. I asked him, not expecting an answer, “Why do kids do this?” “Maybe to feel important, to mark their territory like a…

During my city engineering career, I mentored a young fellow worker. When he was a child, Michael—whom I nicknamed Grasshopper (Kung Fu)—had a narrow escape with his parents from Vietnam just before the Communists took over. He later graduated from UCSD and started working as a civil engineer. Back in…

When I was working as a city engineer in my senior years, I found occasion to advise younger coworkers about some curious issues. When Pope John Paul II died in 2005, the Church was in the midst of electing a papal successor. Because I was known among my fellow workers…

Joyce hears the thunderous drone of German bombers flying overhead, so dense that they blot out the sun like a dark storm cloud. At seven years old, she’s experiencing The Battle of Britain. Citizens must stay at home with black-out conditions at night. While trying to fall asleep, she hears…

In the early 1980s, while walking through an enclosed shopping mall I decided to visit a gaming arcade. The place was buzzing with youth decked out in spiked purple hairdos, dragon tattoos, riveted leathers blazoned with gang symbols, and long drooping chains from hip pockets. The din of silicon pings…

About 20 years ago, the children of tenants renting my house pasted glow-in-the-dark stars on the master bedroom ceiling for their parents. When I moved in, I noticed the virtual galaxy the children created. Lying on my bed, I turned off the lamp and looked at the ceiling, surprised and…

In the mid-1960s, I could be seen on the Boston Common dressed in surplus military fatigues, complete with jacket and boots, sporting a chestnut brown beard. I wasn’t aware at the time that all us hippie rebels were enacting a spectacular resurgence of utopian socialism. Our rebel cause was to…

Recently I read this news clip: “The Andromeda galaxy ate our sister galaxy, and now it’s coming for us.” An astrophysicist used poetic license to describe that star-studded dinner event but it got me thinking. Maybe I need to expand my narrow definition of living things. My biology textbook made…

Sometimes I feel like Rip van Winkle waking from a 20-year sleep to find drastic changes, not only social but technological as well. Our standard of living has improved more in the last 100 years than in all recorded history. Such rapid innovation is startling and wondrous. But it’s also…

I went alone for a long walk around my neighborhood after California’s self-quarantine advisory. A bit fatigued, I sat to rest on a bus-stop metal bench, the kind with handles between the seats. The traffic at this local intersection was now a tenth of the usual rush hour traffic. A…

During a homily, the priest lifted our bored faces by boldly declaring, "So not everyone’s going to heaven.” A matronly woman sitting next to me looked up for a moment from thumbing her cell phone. Somehow assured that her Judgment Day was not imminent, she then returned to marking the…

A young boy in my neighborhood walked up to me, spotting something in my hand. “What’s that?” he asked. William was a mixed-race child with handsome features. He was fatherless, so I once helped him fix his trainer bike. “It’s a chrysalis, I told him. “Soon the shell will split…