I have been a news junkie almost all my life. I've read a daily newspaper since grammar school, progressing from comics to sports to the front page. I was the first one in my family to get up in the morning, so I was the first to fetch the newspaper from the driveway.
Alfie Evans was born on May 9, 2016. He died on April 28, 2018. For 16 and a half months, he was a patient of Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool. By the time he died, a good portion of the world was aware of his short life and the battle his parents waged to prolong it.
I often follow along in my missalette the words of the entire Mass, not because I am pious but because I am a chronic daydreamer. Looking at the words on the page and thinking about them can keep me focused ... for a while. But then something sends me off again.
My wife and I have taken to watching the population boom of dogs in commercials. Have you noticed they are everywhere? Dogs are the new children, but better groomed.
Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address after being elected president, saw the looming inevitability of civil war. In that first talk to the nation, he emotionally appealed to his divided countrymen to not become enemies nor "break our bonds of affection."
In 1961, there was a best-selling book called "Black Like Me." It was the story of a journalist named John Howard Griffin, who changed his skin color from white to black and traveled through the South so that he could learn, as the book's subtitle said, "what it is like to live the life of a Negro by becoming one!"
Now as we contemplate when to take down the tree and who will take down the lights, it is time to focus on the year ahead, which of course means another to-do list: creating New Year's resolutions.
