On the last Sunday of every month, Father John Jamnicky gets on a scale. Within moments his weight loss is posted on a big chart in the fellowship room of his church. “At 65, I have probably lost and gained more weight than the whole parish combined!” says Jamnicky, laughing. So far, he’s lost 36 [...]
I grew up in Providence on Lennon Street. It was a street of families, each contributing four, five, six children to the tumble — the backbone of the American dream, ’60s style. Ours were endless days of four-square, red rover and hide-and-go-seek. We swam in the summer, burned leaves in the fall, starred in Mr. [...]
Lately, I’ve been seeing Our Lady of Guadalupe everywhere—on hubcaps, T-shirts, and bumper stickers that read “In Guad We Trust.” Driving on Los Angeles’ Hollywood Freeway recently, I spotted her again—this time as a 12-foot-high sculpture projecting from the highway barrier wall. I shouldn’t have been surprised. The Virgin Mary leaves her fingerprints, as Patty [...]
A while ago, just as summer was ending, I went to an art opening at Yale University. I met a student, a young girl about 18 years old, who possessed the kind of guileless beauty that needs no embellishment. As we talked in the heat of the crowded galleries, she took off her jacket, revealing [...]
Lounging this morning with the Sunday New York Times has already provided considerable food for thought, and I’m not even into the Week in Review yet. The front page of the Style section features a story about the lengths to which people will go in order to bask momentarily in the marketing-glow supersonic jet fuel [...]
Today, perhaps, judged by the media’s polished criteria, the historical Mary, a peasant girl from dusty Palestine, might not have looked good. But she was good. Over the past 2,000 years, the Virgin Mary’s face has been imagined anew by every generation. We depict her beauty according to current standards of attractiveness, re-inventing her to [...]
My favorite form of procrastination is house dreaming—that is, hanging out on Zillow and zooming around maps and photos of houses listed for sale. Usually, I’m hovering over New England but sometimes, wanting a complete break from life’s quotidian obligations, and these days there are plenty of them, I’ll travel out West or south of [...]
When my Honda broke down on Labor Day and couldn’t be revived, it was a catastrophe. Epic fail, as my kids would say. The car, you see, decided to die on the Outer Cape, Cape Cod, which, in the last hours of the last day of summer might as well have been Mars.
On the last day of August, with school starting this week for many of us, it’s a good time to reflect on some summer lessons from the sea. I’m from the Ocean State, Rhode Island, with its miles of sandy beaches. I love going to the beach to swim, sun, and walk on the tide’s [...]
On a recent flight from Austin, I watched as my seatmate threw her bag in the overhead, snapped on her seat belt, and dove into a book. It was a well-loved copy of Memoirs of a Geisha, the mesmerizing tale of a fisherman’s daughter whose beautiful face and natural grace propels her to the upper [...]
