Sunday has changed for me. I used to go to church as a duty; now I go as a relaxing pleasure. The choir at the 11:30 Mass this morning sang a song with the refrain, “It is well with my soul.” Now I still have a supercharged superego (according to Freud, that’s the conscience) and with that aspect of my mind at rest, I mellowed in the beautiful melody and words of that song. It was like watching a beautiful woman walk to our table in a restaurant. I use other symbolism too, but I’m still young enough to use this one.

I know God has created some amazing women. I don’t mean to exclude men, but I’ve dealt with that topic when I wrote about my sons. Nowadays, since we’ve discovered that the Creator’s method was evolution, perhaps I should say God evolved some wonderful women. Their evolution didn’t stop with birth, that was just the genetic part.

There were some of the remarkable women teachers I had, including the first, my mother. There were wonderful girls in high school, who attracted me both through personality and sexual attraction. And that was the mixture that pervaded through life, with the addition of character. I find not just Venus and the other heavenly bodies fascinating.

Thank God we’re not all the same. Loretta and I raised three sons, all different individuals. They were different in what I refer to as the nervous system, but maybe it was just in the way of thinking. The last of the three turned out to be the apex of what are three great men — I would be proud to leave this life having accomplished what the three of them did. I mean just any one of them.

The third one has a way to go yet, but what he’s done so far is to me fantastic. I have to respect his privacy. So let me write about the first, a research chemist whose name is in the U.S. Patent office in association with the drug that enables sick people to live with a donated organ. The second not only climbed the face of the Half-Dome (much higher than El Capitan) in Yosemite, but became a professor of English in New Jersey’s Paterson University. These are, however, temporal accomplishments. Only God knows what they accomplished eternally.

For me, prayer takes several forms, among them dire need and meditation. Dire need occurs once in a while, and it is usually answered, often in a way I had not anticipated. It is the joy of relief to have such a prayer answered, and is frequently remembered at a later date when one is engaged in a more scheduled form of prayer.

That with me is often the rosary, which, with practice includes meditation. When going over a topic in the mind, we often learn things on that subject, and can later verify it by consulting the computer. Another form of prayer is a petition to help a friend or someone else in need. If prayers are answered, why not for someone else’s benefit?