Skip to main content

Still here

I saw some clips yesterday of the New England Patriots rally at Foxboro Stadium, just before the team went down to Atlanta to prepare for next week’s Super Bowl game. There was video of Tom Brady addressing the thousands of fans there, shouting over and over through the microphone, “WE’RE STILL HERE! WE’RE STILL HERE!” I was little caught off guard and out of context. “Okay,” I thought, “if you’re still here, then I suggest you get on the bus to the airport so that you can be over there.” Then I realized, now I get what you mean. Don’t be so literal-minded, Mike. And I realized it applied to us as well.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Homily

This is the homily delivered by Fr. Austin Fleming at the funeral mass for Aidan McHale Sierra, Holy Family Parish Church in Concord MA, August 15, 2017: Since last week I’ve been reflecting on what I might preach this morning. And I’ve been thinking about to whom I would address my homily: to Ellen and Mike, Aidan’s loving mother and father? to Isabel, Aidan’s doting big sister? perhaps to Aidan’s young friends and their families? Everyone here today loves Aidan, but each of us in our own way, To whom might I speak, then — without leaving anyone out? Well, I decided to resolve that dilemma by preaching to the one person we all would love to talk to today. I want to speak to Aidan — and so I’ve written him a letter which I want to share with you. Dear Aidan, You’ve left a lot of people behind, people who love you — the very people whose love you knew so well. But, oh my, Aidan: you’ve left us with a lot o...
Post a Comment
Read more

A dream

I’d like to share a dream of my son, Aidan. I had this dream a bit over a year ago, a few months after we lost him, some time during the winter of 2017/18. I had a couple of other dreams of him before this one, but with very few words spoken that I could remember. In one, I got to hug him for a long time and tell him how much I love him and miss him. I don’t recall if he said anything back. While hugging him, I pressed my nose against his shoulder, inhaled, and was able to smell him. I recall that very clearly, because he was at that age where he was starting to smell like a man. (We already had the deodorant talk.) It’s a common belief that you can’t smell in dreams, but not true. In another dream, we were all together as a family, visiting Aidan in a sketchy ramshackle house where he was staying for some reason with a mysterious woman. The front yard was filled with a mix of toys of various ages and random junk. I got to hug Aidan again as he came out from ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A ChatGPT AI prompt

Haven't written here for quite a while. I snapped a photo today, and had an idea for something I’d be more interested in reading than writing. It's phrased as an API prompt. Write a children’s story for adults, about a bunch of books in a town's mini-library box. All the books are unwanted cast-offs, and they all want to have someone take them in and read them, and hopefully keep them, much as a child in an orphanage wants to be adopted. All the books are anthropomorphized, and have ongoing conversations with each other, as humans do. All the books talk to each other in the same voice as their authors. So, one book is by Dan Brown. Whatever that book says as dialog reads like a sentence in a Dan Brown novel. Another book is a romance novel by Danielle Steel. One book is Class, Race, and Gender , by Michael Zweig. One book is about how to get teams at work to better collaborate. One book is a volume of cute poems about cats. One is by a Portuguese novelist who won the Nobel ...
Post a Comment
Read more