First Holy Communion

Late April or May is the month for first communions for children. I witnessed one yesterday at the 4:30 p.m. Mass at St. Thomas a' Becket parish in Canton, among 16 children.

It's always fun to watch. It reminds me of my own children, and my own experience when I was younger: Catholic School (Our Lady of Lourdes), school uniforms, daily prayer in the classroom and the pledge of allegiance, CYO basketball, spelling bees, nuns, walks home from school.

I was in eighth grade with a few of my peers, being assigned a special project on dentistry, when word came over the intercom that President Kennedy had been shot. After we were dismissed, it was a long walk home, followed by a weekend of TV-watching. I was at my grandmother's for a visit on Sunday morning when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot to death.

But I digress. A few things have changed about the Catholic church in the years since, but the respect for sacramental tradition does not wane. The children who are judged to have reached the age of reason, and are henceforth assumed to know right from wrong, are dressed in bright white lacy dresses and pretty little headpieces, dark suits and ties.

I talked briefly with three kids before Mass began yesterday. They acted a little uncomfortable in their dress clothing. But it was swell to joke with the kids, as their well-dressed extended families gathered in the sanctuary, chatting with each other, preparing cameras, ensuring the young behave as if they're in church.

It was a great liturgy. And congratulations to the new communicants and their families. As Pastoral Associate Debbie Miller says, "Welcome to the table of the Lord, boys and girls." Welcome indeed.

The Corps of Discovery

I read a while ago that the famous exploration westward after Napoleon sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States early in the nineteenth century, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, called itself the "Corps of Discovery."

I was thinking about how this applied to us as my grandson Noah and I embarked on our own journey of discovery in my stationary car (its newness to Noah and the many gadgets inside make the normal locomotion associated with a car a secondary consideration), a walk around the neighborhood to witness the controlled destruction of Coolidge Ave., and scouting for animal lawn ornaments.

At my age, I've experienced much of what I wanted to experience, and a few things that I hadn't wanted, so that although I'm not jaundiced, daily surprises are fewer for me. But when I'm with Noah, discoveries abound.

There's a double benefit for me: I look at the most ordinary things through new eyes, and I am able to take my experience and teach him something. And the reward is, well, consistently amazing. He has a memory that is unmatched, and we can refer back to something that happened even months ago and he remembers.

Our fun and friend relationship as he moved toward the toddler stage began with drumming with our hands; any hard surface would do. The first time I pounded out a quick rhythm, his face lit up as if he'd just discovered the Louisiana Territory. We still drum together, facing each other, on the phone with each other, and he always lights up.

And I am proud and pleased to have briefly entertained this kid filled with gobs of potential, who will someday so far surpass what I've accomplished in my life, that I'm proud simply to have made his acquaintance and to spend a little time with him. And I think the feeling is mutual.

If he's initially wary of something like airplanes flying through the sky, we work on it until his curiosity and sense of adventure win him over, and we explore airplanes.

Yesterday as we watched the road destruction on Coolidge Ave., I pointed to a porta-potty that the construction workers used, and explained it to him. Later at home, when we talked about with Amma, I mentioned that he pointed it out to me after seeing it for the first time a half-hour earlier.

Amma asked him what color it was. Strange question, but she's been working with him on his colors for a few weeks now. He said "pink," and I thought, bad guess, but nice try, kid. And then I recalled that the facility was a light red shade, what some might characterize as the color pink. Color me impressed. I still think it was a lucky guess, but you never can tell with this kid.

A couple weeks ago, I thought about telling him about the Ford Oval logo on all Ford vehicles. I pointed first to my Taurus, and then to his Dad's Taurus. There's an oval on the front and the back of the car, and he walked to the back of the car to show me the other logo. Later, inside the car, he pointed to the Ford oval in the middle of the steering wheel. I had not noticed it until he pointed it out to me.

On the way home after babysitting, we passed a Ford dealership with a tall sign featuring the Ford oval that Amma pointed out to me. And I thought, wow, would Noah be impressed. And then I thought, shoot, imagine taking him to a Ford dealership!

Dozens of cars and trucks to sit in, a shiny dealership showroom to walk around, salespeople to talk with, engines to admire. The Corps of Discovery has a plan for next week.

School schizophrenia

I turned to a neighbor in last night's Van Buren Public Schools' board meeting and said: "It all seems so schizophrenic sometimes, doesn't it?"

At the time, the board was listening to a spending update on the new Belleville High School - total spending budgeted at $80 million, including the approval last night for a $335,000 for projectors, screens, document cameras and interactive devices. An embarrassment of riches, thanks to those who passed the high school millage after several attempts.

And yet, earlier in the same meeting, the board voted 7-0 and 6-1 to lay off a few dozen schools staff and teachers. I understand the difference between already-approved capital spending and ongoing operating expense, which is the critical difference here.

Nonetheless, the feeling is a bit schizophrenic - feast and famine, as it were.

Overtime - bane or boon?

Overtime, in which as a full-time employee you work more than your normal 40 hours each week, is an interesting phenomenon. It has at times helped careers. Excess amounts have admittedly divided families, but it has enriched families at other times. For those who work overtime, it becomes a personal issue: Do I need to? Do I have to? Most of us could use the extra money, that's for sure.

But at what price?

I worked a goodly amount of overtime for many of my years at Ford Motor Company. There were two kinds: paid overtime, in which I was paid 1.5 times the implicit hourly rate of my salary (aka "on the clock"), or casual overtime, in which as as an exempt employee I was expected to do because I was a well-paid professional, expected to get the job done despite tight deadlines and limited resources.

I recall that casual overtime was defined as up to two additional hours each day beyond the eight hours of straight time, five days a week. Although I worked it when needed, the different working cultures in Ford regarding overtime practices differed among exempt salaried employees.

As a Finance person responsible for engineering expense, I often reviewed the rates of paid overtime for different types of employees. I recall that, in good times when Ford was profitable, the overtime as a percent of straight time for design engineers was about 15 percent. In other works, for every 40 hours of straight time the engineers worked, they were paid for overtime for six additional hours each week.

In Finance, I was paid overtime for some types of work through about 1992. I recall working on a new global engine program with my European colleagues in the late 1980's. We were gathering and analyzing results from a cost study for the engine program, which we had requested a few weeks earlier.

I went into the office on a Saturday morning, and didn't leave the office till 16 hours later, at midnight. As I was faxing information to my counterparts in Europe, my phone at my desk a few feet away began ringing. I answered it, and it was my friend, my colleague in Europe. I was in the office at midnight, but England being five hours ahead of the Eastern Time Zone in the United States, he was in the office at 5 a.m. Ouch.

But for me and for them, the work weekend wasn't over. I went home shortly after I sent the fax, got some sleep and returned bleary-eyed to the office early Sunday morning. I worked till early afternoon that day, and went home and crashed.

It was around that time that our management concluded that overtime was a costly and habit-forming trap. Casual overtime continued, but hours of overtime required to meet deadlines for key projects was henceforth compensated with what was called "compensatory overtime." For each hour of non-casual overtime that we worked, we were given an hour off.

Now, the time off coming from compensatory overtime had to be used before vacation time off; it had to be used in the year earned, and like any time off, you were asked to be sensitive to yours and others' workload, and not take time off during unusually busy times of the year.

In 1992, I was working on another major engine program, a new V-6 engine for our F-150 truck. An engine designed by engineers in the United States and manufactured next door in Canada was competing against an engine designed and manufactured by our European colleagues. I was asked to put together the cost picture in a manner fair and acceptable to both competing sides.

I burned a pretty fair amount of midnight oil on that project, and it was all compensatory time off. In fact, I had burned through my 80 hours of available compensatory time in February 1992, and I still had ten months to go!

Oddly, however, the additional amount of overtime hours I worked that year were not too bad. It was either dumb luck or conscious management of my workload by me and my management, to avoid overtime spikes to complete important projects.

I concluded that it was in fact a little of both, but Ford's increasing sensitivity toward the issue of overtime, including its cost and its toll on peoples' lives, helped Product Development Finance to wean itself off what one of our Controllers called a "narcotic."

Like a narcotic, you use it when convenient, and it's helpful for a short while, but the cycle of dependence has begun and you are sorely tested to kick the habit, as it were.

Ford PD Finance in my last 20 years managed to kick the habit. Certainly it reduced my income, but the additional hours I was afforded with my family paid dividends, I thought, back then and even today.

Quoteworthy: Quiet

Almost done with a book on personality, focusing on introversion. It's titled "Quiet: the Power of Introversion in a World that can't Stop Talking," by Susan Cain.

Introversion is a behavioral mode I lived for many years, and one I still default to in many situations. And you know what: it's a good thing, much of the time.

I learned about gobs of things, and wrote down some terms the author uses:

• Core personal projects: for something you're really passionate about, something that really turns you on, you become a pseudo-extravert to push it. She uses the example of a highly-successful university professor whose students adore him, and he has to be speaking in public quite often. But because he loves it so much, he does it.
• Hideout sessions, also known as restorative niches: Introverts are defined as being high-reactive, meaning they react more strongly to external stimuli than extraverts. Large crowds, particularly a requirement to speak in front of them or to schmooze with a roomful of people at a cocktail party, are something introverts resist. Now, put them in a corner of the room with one or two people discussing an idea about which they're passionate, and they begin to have fun.
• Between lectures, the university professor would take walks along a riverbank, and when that wasn't available, he would hide in the building's rest room stall number nine for as long as 90 minutes, simply for downtime to collect himself, to become himself again, and to re-enter the extraverted world that he became quite good at it. But he insisted on the downtime, to become himself again.
• Self monitors: Introverts who view the social scene and their naturally-introverted behavior and manage it to a degree to become more extraverted, if only for a while. Easier to do for a loved one, or in support of a core personal project.
• Emotional labor: the work your personality does to deal with the practical and moral issues arising from exposure to stimuli with which you're not emotionally comfortable - crowds, confrontation.

The book is honest, it is thorough, it is thoughtful. I learned a lot.

Haggerty school career day and me

I was recently invited to talk about my journalism career with Mrs. Cathy Cutting's fifth-grade class at Haggerty Elementary School.

They're nice people there at Haggerty. I received a cheery hello from the school secretary Stephanie Karlinski, and I chatted with Principal Aleisa Pitt for a few moments, before walking down the long hallway toward Mrs. Cutting's classroom.

Haggerty school will close in June, one of two elementary schools in the district slated to close, and students, teachers and staff will find themselves elsewhere come September. Probably a few already know where they're headed, but when you break up a team that is several hundred people working together each day toward a clear, shared goal, it will take a little while to get up that head of steam again. But I have no doubt that they'll do it, as will the team at Elwell School.

As I arrived in the classroom about 10 minutes early, I was warmly greeted by teacher and students. I walked to the front of the classroom, and began talking about myself. My wife has gently suggested to me more than once that I am a bit loquacious about myself , and particularly about my reporting job, so I was enjoying myself.

I brought business cards and a few copies of The View to illustrate what I do, and told the kids about writing, fairness in reporting, and working hard to get it right. I told them about my younger days and my interest in reading and words, and my short-lived experience as the fair-haired child at Our Lady of Lourdes Elementary in Syracuse, N.Y., as the school's best speller for three years running.

The students asked questions, and then we set to work on their assignment. I had taken a column that I wrote a few weeks ago about preparing to visit my two-year-old grandson Noah, and the amount of stuff that Amma (my wife Jan) and Pa (me) bring to Noah.

I had introduced into the column about 20 spelling and grammar errors. I read one paragraph at a time, and the kids raised their hands, ready to identify my mistakes. They did very well. I had highlighted for myself most of the errors, but they found about five more that I had missed.

Hands shot up throughout the classroom. Many students raised their hands more than once, and it was great fun working with them. After the exercise, I talked a bit more, they asked another question or two, and I took my leave. They applauded and thanked me.

As I walked to the parking lot to return home, I was on Cloud Nine. But that's the way it is when I visit these schools. It's usually not about me so much, as it is about the mission and the very human faces who push each other each day to get a little better, to learn a little more. It is, in  a word, thrilling.

Now let's see if they (or you) can find any errors in this blog post.

When the story comes to you

Journalists are told they shouldn't become part of the story. That practice is at times violated, but the guideline stands.

Until recently, the only time I as a reporter became personally involved with a public issue was several years ago, when a subdivision developer sought approval for plans to build a subdivision on Haggerty Road, in a parcel across from Riggs Road known as the Horste property.

I rose from the audience to ask that the water and sewer management system in the sub be carefully designed and maintained to ensure that pollutants would not flow into Woods Creek, located just to the north of the sub. I live in a home west of the planned subdivision, and Woods Creek flows through my backyard. It can be beautiful at times.

But it floods a few times each year. A heavy rain, a winter thaw, and the at-times luscious valley that runs between homes on Riggs and Fret Roads becomes flooded, and it takes a few days for the waters to recede.

Word is that FEMA, the federal agency that helps manage natural disasters, took an updated look recently at areas at risk of flooding in Wayne County, and declared 529 properties in Van Buren Township at risk.

There is a map of Van Buren Township with colors showing where the areas are, and the areas in red are where the highest risks of flooding affecting a primary residence are, according to FEMA's admittedly cursory look.

I was sitting in yesterday's Van Buren Township work study meeting, when the reporter beside me wondered whether the tiny red dot on the map along Woods Creek represented my home. Red's not good in this scheme; it's not necessarily gloom and doom, but it invites a bit of concern. Does FEMA think my home is at risk of flooding?

Currently, it's hard to say. The map is tiny, and it's hard to sort out what's what. Last night, my wife concluded that the red dot was just west of us. We shall see. I'm getting a digital copy of the map for a better look, and we'll go from there. Not that I have much choice.

Finding Casablanca

I watched the 1942 movie "Casablanca" for maybe the tenth time on Thursday. My TiVo has a feature that allows you to find TV shows by actor, and among a pretty long list of my favorites is Humphrey Bogart. I admired the lifestyle, his long marriage to Lauren Bacall. He looked great in a suit. He appeared to have fun with his life.

Casablanca is a great movie. It is a superb movie for its pace, particularly because nothing noteworthy happens during the movie.

The movie keeps you off balance throughout. It's like an open marketplace, and everyone is dealing, trying to snare an advantage for themselves. Will the letters of transit be obtained? Will Rick get back with Ilsa?

There's a pending sense of doom in the movie, and with good reason: it is 1942, and for the United States it is the worst year of World War II. The outcome of the war was not at all clear at the time. The Nazis and the Japanese seemed to be unstoppable, their armies sweeping across Europe, Africa and the Pacific Ocean. The conquering Nazis had already goosestepped into Paris, confident, cruel.

The dialogue is snappy and clever. The protagonists are multidimensional, with a generous helping of self-interest and a willingness to cheat to achieve their ends.

Beautiful Ilsa had an affair with Rick while a married woman? Those eyes of Bergman's are luminous. Only Elizabeth Taylor, for me, matched Bergman's beauty.

In the end, the good guys win - sort of. Husband and wife fly off to continue the struggle, and Rick decides to carry on the fight with the Nazis. But unlike Rhett Butler who joined a lost cause toward the end of the Civil War, Bogie stands tall despite his disappointment, and walks off into the airport fog with Captain Renault, vowing to fight on.

Each of the characters is flawed, at times deeply so, and yet each, except the Nazis, is redeemed in some manner. It's quite the movie, for a myriad of reasons.

Everything in its proper place

It's interesting to observe our own selves and others with respect to the very daily chore of putting things away. Like so many things in our lives, it's a habit that may be developed over a long period, or it may be something inborn, and a bit hard to explain.

I'm an example of habit-driven discipline, where you pick things up because you know the consequences of too much indolence.

My grandson Noah, on the other hand, it appears to be part of his young constitution. Don't get me wrong - the living room can at times look like a toy storm had just passed through, and I think sometimes that he would be content to leave it if he were distracted by something else. And I think that's about right for someone his age.

But when he's reminded to pick up his toys, he becomes purposeful and goes about it fairly efficiently.

And it's amusing to see this neatness in others. It differs by degree, and it's always interesting to compare, and to wonder about the motivation. As I washed my hands in my bathroom this morning, there were on the shelf were the Stridex pads that I keep there, and atop them were three tiny containers: two of wetting drops to lubricate contact lenses, the other a little sample of skin lotion for my poison ivy.

The three of them were neatly arranged on the top of the jar as if they belonged there. They were in their place. And I thought, it's our cleaning lady, someone who has just the right touch around the house, taking these stray things lying around and arranging them in a sensible way.

It's a little like Stonehenge - you come upon it, and you wonder very briefly how it happened. And you think, ah Diane. There are many good things that she does around our place, but among my favorites is her creativity with taking LaVaute household detritus and making sometimes-artful sense of it. Thanks, Diane.

A retirement secret

Most lives are filled with change: birth (duh!), infancy, childhood, the teen years, young adulthood, school, jobs, dating, marriage, raising children and so on. Others, not so much: separation, illness, death. Sorry.

Among the big changes is retirement. It's a word that means many things, depending on the individual. The involuntary image in my mind is that of a gray-haired kindly old man or woman, perhaps putzing around the house, or fishing or golfing, or playing with their grandchildren.

No image is fully satisfying, because retirement, for those lucky enough to experience it, is played out in countless ways, none the same as the other.

For me, it has many benefits: I get to continue doing something that I love, partly because I prepared for it before I retired, and I have an amazing amount of flexibility in my daily schedule. Sans the responsibility of children at home, I have vastly more control over my life. Free choice is good.

Some advantages are more personally and emotionally stirring than others, a bit quirky, even. One of my favorite things this time of year is the steady advance through spring toward summer. I let the dogs out this morning, and the weather, at a chill 28 degrees, was bracing. The layer of frost visibly blanketing much of the lawn was a delightful visual surprise, and I looked to see that the tulips had survived. Jury's still out on that.

One of my favorite things, oddly, is crossing the road to go to the mailbox. The brief walk fills me with anticipation, and a vibe that is superb and extraordinary.

When I think about friends vacationing in warmer climes, I have to admit I'm jealous of the vibrant sunlight, the sparkling water in the pool, the freedom from most cares, the umbrella drinks or ice-cold beer.

But I wouldn't trade my opportunity to walk to the mailbox each day, not for a week in the Caribbean. Hooray for retirement.

My favorite thing

I watched a CBS Sunday Morning program report on Jim Abbott, the baseball pitcher who succeeded past his wildest dreams in baseball, despite the absence of a right hand. A great story if there ever was one.

Toward the end of the program, during a book signing, Abbott is playing catch with a young boy who is also missing a hand. Abbott is coaching the young man to throw properly, and the kid was making progress.

And I thought, I love to do that stuff. I love to coach the young, be it sports, knowledge, behavior, whatever. Progress may be slow, but each attempt brings with it improvement. Add a little positive reinforcement, continuing focus and, voila! Eventually, you have the results you wanted.

Sometimes, the road is long. I remember well an incident many years in which a child who had initially been acclimated to a swimming pool lost it on the second lesson. My wife and I never did figure out why. And we couldn't get a decent answer from the child, who was less than one year old at the time.

My wife Jan and I made the decision that we would continue to go to the pool for the rest of the swimming lessons. And it got worse well before it got better. Tears and crying attended our sessions each week.

During the last swimming lesson, however, we achieved success way beyond our hopes at that point. The child came around during the lesson, had a ball in the swimming pool with us, and went on to swim some years later on the the Tigers swim club that operated at the time.

Jan and I have been working with my grandson Noah to catch and to throw a ball. We've been very pleased with his progress, and I think he has fun with it. I have a tennis ball that I've kept away from dog slobber that I bring when we visit, and he's doing very well.

I look forward to it. Practice makes perfect, and it's easy when you're having fun. And there is little that compares with the joys of coaching young people.

Ebb and Flow

I was returning to my seat when I saw the daylight streaming through the windows. I walked toward them, and looked down on the parking lot.

It was filled with vehicles; some were double-parked. There were people walking from cars, toward cars, a hive of activity on a sunny Friday.

They had come to spend a few moments with Jesus, on the day that he was crucified and died. Inside, as the Good Friday service began, it was as crowded as a weekend Mass.

The liturgy and the faithful on that day ebb and flow. It's quite unique. St. Thomas conducts a blood drive throughout the day; a "live" Stations of the Cross is performed by the youth group, and the Good Friday service itself begins at 1:30 p.m.

People come and go, very unlike an ordinary weekend Mass. The priests, at the beginning of the liturgy, prostrate themselves in front of the altar, literally lying face down on the ground in the midst of the faithful.

The choir today, which must be over 30 people shoehorned into their normal space, is dressed in bright red and is fully prepared. We listen to hymns that we listen to each Good Friday, and the significance of where we are, and what we've done, grows for me with each passing year.

It's as if God has bestowed a special gift on me, allowing me to discover quite by accident this special secret, this place that I return to each year, and that I seem to derive more from each year. Jan is beside me, as she has been for over three decades now, and life, despite the message of the day, is good. It's good to be back.

Violins, horns, a bass guitar and several other unusual instruments complement the choir, in one mournful song after another. It's as if I've begun a descent into Mordor. I can't yet anticipate the joy of Easter, except as relief to this sadness.

As the liturgy ends at 3 p.m., I think, there's a lot of work to do in this world, and I wonder about my role. I don't know where this journey will end. Shoot, I don't even know where it begins.

But I'm ready to go one step at a time, forward. Happy Easter.

My favorite pilot

The story the other day about the JetBlue pilot freaking out during a flight received a lot of play, for two reasons: the potential horrifying consequences, and how unusual it seemed for that to happen. A man bites dog story, as it were. I'm aware of some other negative stories about pilots, but they do seem rare given the volume of air traffic each day.

And why? Because we generally view pilots as responsible, of decent moral stock, in a word - stable.

You've seen them as they walk through the airline terminal to the plane. Generally trim, confident, with good, commanding bearing, yet not unfriendly or overly full of themselves. The word that always occurs to me is stable - specifically mentally stable. And thank goodness.

I only know one pilot personally. He was recommended to me as a handyman by a friend about eight years ago, and we have had a great and productive relationship.

When I get things fixed around the home, I want them to stay fixed. I pay for efficiency, for know-how, for experience, for problem-solving aptitude and ability, and good judgment. And this guy has patience and superb judgment.

My next appointment with him for a few repairs at the house is in a couple weeks, because he's gonna be busy with his day job as an airline pilot, given the Easter holidays and all that. I can wait. I've learned for the last eight years that it's well worth it.

The gas prices matter

I was in Canton yesterday when I spied the scene in the adjacent photo. It was at the Valero gas station at the northeast corner of Ford and Haggerty Roads.

Did you know, by the way, that Ford and Haggerty is the most dangerous intersection in Wayne County?

I liked the sign for two reasons: the price is below $4 per gallon, and the premium for payment using a credit or debit card is just $.01 above a cash payment.

I look around lately for a price below $4 per gallon, and it seems I'm running out of options. My last fill-up was $65. When I passed the gas station yesterday, my tank was three-fourths full and I couldn't really take advantage of it.

The other reason that I liked the sign is that a credit or debit card user is not being gouged by the retailer. I've read that the increase to the retailer for a payment using a card is $.03 or $.04 per gallon, and to my mind the retailer is using this as a convenient ruse to pad his profits.

If the normal premium for a card is $.10 per gallon, the cost to me for the $.07 per gallon increase over the retailer's $.03 per gallon cost for an 18-gallon tank is $1.26. In the 21st century, that's an absurd amount to pay for convenience in a highly technical society like ours. I'm not sayin' there oughta be a law - Caveat emptor - but I can still resent it.

The price of gasoline is an odd duck in the marketplace. Most of us, particularly in the suburban Midwest, cannot avoid using it, and paying for it on a regular basis. It requires time to do. As you're pumping, the mind wanders, and no doubt the price you're paying as you pump arises in your mind. And it hits those with lower incomes particularly hard.

A politician would be wise to be wary of the specter of high gas prices, particularly in an election year. And it is this tightening vise into which Obama has stumbled. Imagine, the man who was going to reverse the rise of the oceans - he is tagged with being responsible for gas prices doubling since his inauguration.

Anyone with smarts and knowledge knows it's a complicated story. But when Obama said a while back that he would like to see gasoline prices rise to nudge us toward high-cost alternative energy sources, and the people left suffering can least afford it, I can't give him a pass. It is proving to be preposterously inept politically, in addition to his normal operational and leadership ineptitude.

But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

An inadvertent April Fools joke on my wife

I'm going to go to Cathy Cutting's fifth-grade class at Haggerty Elementary School on April 18 to talk to her students about my journalism career. I've done it before. It's sure fun for me, and the kids appear to be engaged.

As I was waiting in Mrs. Cutting's classroom the other day for Queen Isabella to arrive, I noticed she had a poster on the wall about grammar and punctuation. I thought, wow, I could make this a teachable moment, and talk to the kids about the importance of writing effectively, and the role of good grammar.

When I suggested it, Mrs. Cutting immediately bit, and I was thrilled. But, how to go about doing it with 30 some-odd 11-year-olds? I had the idea of taking a previously-published column I wrote about my grandson Noah, and introducing into the story grammar and spelling errors.

I put it on my wife Jan's family room chair for her to review it, and said no more. Early Sunday afternoon, April 1, Jan settled in the chair, and began to read the hard copy of the column, riddled with errors.

"What is this?" she asked. "Youuuu, you haven't submitted this for publication, have you?"

I paused for a moment, wondering what she meant. And then I recalled what I'd done, and why, and I explained it to her. We had to laugh. The column was an unmitigated writing disaster, precisely what I'd intended. I hope it plays well in the classroom next month. Here's a preview, errors and all. How many mistakes can you find?

Packing for Noah

The event roles around once each week. I begin to anticipate it like a little kid about 48 hours before it's scheduled. Theres a spring in my step as I look forward to it, and a lilt in my voice. Life just got a litttle bit - nay, a whole lot - better.

We begin to peck to go see him about a day before, putting staff on the kitchen table to bring to him.

A tennis ball. lunch. My work stuff, although I rarely do any real work that day; may be a phone call or two. New teaching tools, cleverly disguised as toys, like a "shape ball" that holds inside it different plastic shapes like a circle, a square, a hexagon, and about a dozen others.

Noah is asked to find the right fit in the plastic ball for each shape. On our most recent visit, he mastered the skill of holding the shape at just the right angle to insert thru the opening.

He knows now how to spell his name. I bring a small plastic lisense plate that I purchased inWalmart with his name on it, but I forget the zip ties that would secure it to something, and I bring it home. Next visit.

I work with him on how to spell "Pa”. He can repeet the spelling when I say it, but when I check a couple hours later, he's forgotten, Well work on it.

He point to where the poster of the Blue Angels, soaring skyward, used to be on his bedroom door. It's no longer there hanging on the door, and a couple missing paint chips are in its place. Pa did it.

He'd like a new poster of the planes, he says I say I'll work on it.

There are as many as three trips to the car to brung in the stuff when we babysit for Noah. I bet the stuff, all told, weighs several lbs.

We sometimes don't use the stuff that we bring in but no worries. Its best to be prepared.

When he suceeded at putting the shape in the right whole, I shouted "Ta-daaaaaaaaaaaa!" He got it right away, and as he worked on the next shape, we waited expectently for the big moment, andwhen he succeeded the room exploded with shouting and laffter , between Amma, and Pa, and Noah.

Before we left to go home, Noa and I hid in the bedroom closet. I go in 1st, he follows and closes the closet door behind us. Its dark in there, but only for a moment, because as I look down I can see the little hand reaching for the door knob.

The door opens (his parents have had to put new childproof locks that replaced the simpler ones he figured out and we tiptoe through the bedroom speed picking up as we reach the hallway, and it's a sprint toward the living room as Amma, who is evidently not aware not aware of our approach is blissfully relaxed until Noah hits the arm of the couch and says "Boo!" to Amma. She is startled, and shouts, and few moments later I run up and shoot "Boo!" again. Once again, she is fritened out of her wits.

A good day, by any defanition.

Meth Monster

I do well on six hours of sleep. I awoke this morning at 4 a.m., before the coffee grinder operates automatically at 4:30 a.m. each day, and turned it on myself. I plan to write to write two stories before I hop on the treadmill, fueled by two to three cups of coffee by then. Then my public day begins.

The photo of Noah is in my office as I write this, and it never fails to cheer me. The facial expressions and the colors leap off the page.

 

At night, I eat, and eat. I had a club sandwich after arriving home last night from Tim Horton's, after talking with a friend there for 150 minutes. I power through the sandwich, and with a smidgeon of guilt head to the refrigerator. I'm still hungry. My mood is tinged mildly with guilt, but I'm well past it. I'm still hungry.

Ah, the crazy bread we didn't finish. I microwave it, a measure of my hunger, and eat two of the three remaining pieces, dipping them in the remaining marinara sauce.

Say, aren't there the two pieces of Italian sausage I cooked yesterday? My, they look good. I'll have just one, with horseradish sauce, on a fresh bun. Delicieux. Yesterday, I had one with highly-recommended Beer N' Brat mustard, and chopped green olives; not bad.

I polish off the final sausage, cradled in a bun, with more spicy mustard.

I am on my third regimen of steroids to get rid of this poison ivy. This is my third week of it, and I am always hungry, always energetic, generally in a capital mood. This morning, for hopefully the last week, I bump the dosage back up to 40 milligrams for three consecutive days to deliver the knockout punch. Here's hoping it works.

If this goes on much longer, I may by then have launched a new career, or traveled to the Orient, something extreme, exciting, slightly dangerous. I just wanna get rid of this poison ivy.

A little fright

The other day, my grandson Noah was a little off his game. Since he grew out of infancy, he has never stopped. He is always talking, always moving, always listening, always looking for something new and fun.

He was a bit under the weather the other day - possibly an allergy - but he normally drives past that, his capacity for fun is so large. But the weather outside wasn't so hot the other day, and for the first time that I saw, he heard thunder, loud, startling claps. The dog jumped across the room after one of them.

Noah was genuinely frightened. We've seen this in a small way with airplanes overhead, even from inside the house. His ears appear to be tuned to the drone above, whereas I don't notice it until he says the word "plane."

As he does, he moves a few inches closer to me, to be reassured. And I do. We talk about airplanes. Later, we watch a wonderful movie about migratory birds, and I ask him if he would like to fly like a bird. I explain that we can't fly like birds, so we have planes to do it for us. I take my best shot.

But the recent thunder really got him frightened. He didn't freak out, but he wanted reassurance that everything was OK. I reclined on the couch, and invited him to come over and lay on me. I would hold him, and all would be OK.

I put my hands on his little back and pressed down just a little. We lay there quietly, and I spoke only to reassure him that there was nothing to worry about; that Amma and Pa would keep him safe.

He appeared to calm down, and I was glad I was able to do something. I recalled the story I heard a while back about the Haggerty Elementary school teacher Mr. TenBroeck, teaching his fifth-graders in the classroom on the horrific day in which 9/11 was unfolding, when the school went on lockdown.

Recall that school had just started for the year; teacher and students were not real familiar with each other.

From a story told by one of his former students, Mr. TenBroeck walked to the door of the classroom, closed it, turned around and said to each of his students: "I will keep you safe."

And he did. He confirmed his students' trust that day, which was all they had at the time.

But Amma, not I, is the masterful one at nurturing and reassurance. Noah asked her to rock him in the chair, something they haven't done in months. That lasted a few minutes, and then he asked to be put in his crib. He was going to take his nap.

Amma did so, closed the door, and Noah slept peacefully for about two hours. When he awoke, he was his old self again: on the move, inquiring, playing, happy. The photo is from those moments, in which does a kind of iron cross gymnastic move using the rocking chair we bought for him for Christmas.

That's my boy. Don't worry, Noah; Amma and Pa will keep you safe.

The faithful dig in

I was watching Bret Baier on Fox News the other day, and they were discussing the Catholic church's recent contretemps with the Obama administration over religious freedom.

Baier said that you if you go to Mass regularly, you begin to understand how deadly serious the church's leaders are about this issue. I see it every day that I attend Mass: the general intercessions always include a prayer for our political leaders.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan was interviewed the other day. He acknowledged that the opponent is clever, having selected an issue like contraception with which most Americans are comfortable, but which the church teaches against, except for medical reasons.

The belief is that the Obama administration is really after taxpayer-funded abortion, but they dare not say it now, because abortion is not a slam-dunk in the eyes of many.

It's a little like O's message to Russian leader Medvedev and his boss Putin the other day: wait until after O is re-elected in November, and he will have more flexibility to negotiate away our superior nuclear missile defenses. These defenses are to me a responsible way to cool it on destructive offensive nuclear weapons, and to be able to adequately protect ourselves.

I saw on the news last night that, when we have tested these missiles, we have been successful 48 out of 48 tries. Isn't this a great country?

But give away our defensive superiority in nuclear missiles? Impose the boot heel of Leviathan on the faithful? What is the man after, honestly? Is it to remake us in an image that can only be imagined?

In weekday Masses, the congregants are invited to offer their own prayers. Our priest begins, and he always says a prayer for our political leaders.

After the priest is done, about a half-dozen in the congregation speak up, and pray against illness, to the Blessed Mother, a variety of things. And then, in a sort of third act for our collective prayers, the lector steps to the podium and reads a prayer or two from a prepared sheet of paper.

And, a few days ago, the first prayer that the lector spoke was to pray that our next President is a Godly man. That caught me up short, and I had to think about it for a moment. I did not know whether it was the lector's own personal prayer, or whether it was prepared. I'm guessing the former.

As I heard the prayer, I glanced at the priest to check his facial reaction - nothing obvious. I thought - wow, this is really something, depending on how you interpret what was said. And, with the others, I responded, "Let us pray to the Lord; Lord, hear our prayer." Right on.

And so it begins...again

As I first walked in, the main vestibule didn't give it away. The palms spread on the table were something to be gathered, but I moved toward the sanctuary. It was there that it hit me: the beginning of Holy Week.

I knew the calendar, but I hadn't yet felt the emotional significance. My wife Jan and I have been experiencing this now for over three decades, the continuum of Lent through the Triduum and the Resurrection. It has an impact on your senses and perspective that is profound. It is undeniably there.

Your eyes lift toward the ceiling, and you thank God for yet another chance to live through the week, to experience it.

The baptismal font was drained of water, as it had been throughout Lent, but handsome red fabric lined parts of the font, in an interesting design. The church had been darkened. The recessed lights in the high ceiling above were on, but shadows fell across the altar, on which sat crucibles for the bread and wine.

It was Palm Sunday, perhaps the most liturgically schizophrenic day in the church each year. It begins with Jesus' triumphant entrance into Jerusalem, astride a donkey, a temporal, and temporary king. I suppose that's part of the message. Then you move on to the Passion, where Jesus clearly was having a really bad time of it.

Betrayed, denied, tortured, humiliated, mocked. And He knew it was coming. In a moment of weakness, he wonders whether the cup will pass from his lips. But he steels himself for what is coming, because he always knew, didn't he?

Now that's courage. That's grace.