Cleopatra-style hair and cigarettes

08Mar09

Since I liked the number 17, I scanned the list of sponsors’ names and found the seventeenth:  “Ray W.”  The list was written in various inks and in pencil on poster board and tacked with thumbnails to the paneled wall over the water fountain.  I wrote down Ray W.’s phone number, sat through the hour-long [...]

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Bootless cries

11Sep08

I cried out to God this morning and was surprised to hear not a thunderous response, nor a stern rebuke, nor a gentle cooing, but rather a velvet hush.  No, “hush” is too soothing, and “velvet” is too luxuriant.  It was more like a Mona-Lisa-smile of a sound.  No judgment, one way or the other.  [...]

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“Such a river”

16Jul08

It sounded almost like a wedding march and, in a sense, it was.  The organ in church this past Sunday at Point O’ Woods piped the first notes of “Glorious things of thee are spoken,” and in your mind you could see a bride walking down the aisle, smiling, her life-mate before her, beaming back.  [...]

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Grecian burger deluxe

30Mar08

Teak, who is 5, was beginning to feel the press of a long prayer (The “Prayers of the People”) at church, and it didn’t help that I, at the other end of the row, could hear him shout in a whisper, “But this is taking too LOOOONG!” which meant that people in front and behind [...]

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“Urban Haute Bourgeoisie”

02Mar08

My colleague was telling another colleague about “Metropolitan,” Whit Stillman’s 1990 true film about the upper crust independent school scene in New York City, in which I grew up but in which I was the protagonist in real life, the proverbial red-headed boy in a sea of tow-headed trustafarians, the one whose modest background remained [...]

Filed under: Christianity, Jesus, Upper East Side, faith   |  1 Comment