"In the night also my heart instructs me."
For those of you who don’t know, Donald Patrick is in seminary. By day, he’s a mild-mannered software developer. By night, he does battle with Thomas Aquinas and…Greek conjugations, or something, probably…on interminable Zoom meetings. By dawn’s early light, he chatters to me about complicated theology over his tenth cup of coffee. Every couple... Continue Reading →
This morning, a little before 8, my phone rang. It was Don, who should have been back from the gym a half hour before. He told me the workout was great, but the drive home had been interrupted by a collision with a deer. “I mean, it’s drivable,” he said. “But the front end’s kind... Continue Reading →
I began my official morning with an excerpted quote from Jean Pierre de Caussade’s Abandonment to Divine Providence: “The divine action, although only visible to the eye of faith is everywhere and always present … There is not a moment in which God does not present himself under the cover of some pain to be... Continue Reading →
Every so often, when I stop to look at a thing, I find that more than the thing is there. Every so often, there are, beneath and within and around a thing, so many ghosts. The thing, mundane and innocuous, occupying its place in time with perfect and blithe naivety, calls up unwittingly the ghosts... Continue Reading →
One of two things is happening, and its been happening for years. EITHER, every Sarah Franzen on earth is incapable of remembering her email address, OR this selfsame host of Sarahs is beset by friends, colleagues, and corporate entities who can’t get their address right. I know this, because I get all their email. It... Continue Reading →
“So, when do we need to be there tomorrow?” I asked. Don and I were having dinner on Saturday night. I don’t recall what we were having for dinner, since, as you will soon see, that was 473 days ago. Don said, “Be where? What?” I said, “Aren’t we doing that bike ride?” Don said,... Continue Reading →
I am striving, in middle age, to avoid growing stale. Stagnant. Fetid, like the water that collects in the pool behind the pier and fills, as summer progresses, with dead fish and algae. This goal is often in conflict with a different desire of mine, which is that everything, forever and always, fall into predictable... Continue Reading →
Spring has been touchy this year — easily offended, like a cat who leaps from your lap at the slightest twitch of a thigh muscle and stalks off to stare at you balefully from beneath the coffee table. She’s come several times (spring, that is, not the cat). She’s made dramatic entrances with showy, cumulous... Continue Reading →
If you drive out of Angola, Indiana, towards Fremont, past the American Inn and the billboards advertising fireworks and a squat, white cinderblock building called The Butt Hut, you’ll find (if you know what you’re looking for) a turn-off that leads to a trailhead. It’s a maybe 2-mile loop through the woods that brushes up... Continue Reading →
"Whelp! Those hornets won't bother us any more," said Don. "I've caught them in this jar!" It was Sunday evening. He was was complaining that I make him sound ridiculous in essays and offering a generic example of something Essay Don might say. "I have never once had you say anything about hornets in a... Continue Reading →