Hawkeye
A suitable public mien, for a man of any age, consists of purpose and mild distraction. What my father taught us as a question of prudence on the mean streets of New York, is also good manners.
religion
Weedpatch
For a moment, suppose migrancy decriminalised and all the border apparatus, the walls, the arrests, the holding pens, the clogged courts, the caged children, the separation of families, all dismantled.
It is not true
The old Danish Christmas carol, repeated endlessly on Christmas Eve, dancing round the tree—or, in a big house, snaking in and out the parlour doors—asks if Christmas will last till Easter.
Least hop clover
Walks become botanising expeditions to an internal litany of names. Heal-all, toad flax, cranesbill; yarrow, tansy; a rare moth mullein, the ubiquitous birdsfoot trefoil. When a name escapes, the thing has escaped and the world is lessened until the name is recalled, rehearsed, fixed again in place.
3 John
The Third Epistle of John, the shortest book in the New Testament, is tucked away in a sort of water meadow between the towering peaks of St. Paul’s dialectical masterpieces and the terrifying bog of Revelations.
Silence
I have only now learned of the death, over a year ago, of Fr. James Coutts, former vicar of St. Mary’s, Monmouth. The news brings a rush of memories of a most gentle and saintly man, and a reminder of a debt.