It must have been the purple, button-front sweater I was wearing, but some of the students in the senior high school amateur hour asked me if I’d play Mr. Rogers on the stage.  I’d watched enough of him while my boys were growing up to do an imitation, so I said yes.

I played him as best I could, and I must have done a good job, right down to the theme song of “Would you be mine, would you be mine, would you be my neighbor?”

I got a standing ovation, especially from the boys on the varsity football team, some of whom I’d had in class.

What was it that Jesus found attractive in fallen women like Mary Magdalene and the woman by the well?  He recognized the hopelessness of their situation and being a man with feeling, he sympathized with them.  Christ, as we will never understand, was a man with feeling.

I once mentioned that God is a being who loves paradox (an apparent contradiction).  Christ fulfilled the requirement for that in being at the same time God and a man.  As a man he had an uncanny insight into what makes humans tick.  I hope He sympathizes with me on the last day.

Last night I saw a television station was showing Going My Way with Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald.  I never saw the movie (But I did see The Bells of St. Mary).  From what I saw of Bing and Barry, they were good actors.

Now there’s a movie I’d like to show to a class, if it hasn’t become forbidden yet.  Christianity is becoming not permitted with modern lawmakers, as has  been pointed out by one Harvard professor, and this in the U.S.  Anyway, back to Bing Crosby.

He had some God-given talents, and used them pretty well.  His children may have a different outlook.

The winter seems colder than the last one, and the proof of it showed   up in our back yard the other day.  It was a squirrel with an unusually bushy tail and an extra thick coat of fur, making it look overfed.  Nature provides.  Or better, the Creator provides.  There’s something mysterious about our God.

A zoologist could probably explain it in terms of hormones and average temperatures, but it’s still a wonder.  So is the tableau of weather to which we wake up every day.  What, have we forgotten our sense of wonder?  No wonder Christ said the citizens of his kingdom were like the innocent children.

I was born a grandson of Alfred Kurth, the Swiss watch manufacturer (Certina watches), and president of the Protestant community, in Grenchen, Switzerland.  My mother, like a Protestant first lady, agreed to enroll us three boys in parochial school, once we had immigrated to these United States.

We were welcomed and accepted almost immediately.  My first best friend was Patrick McNulty, and the IHM nuns, many of them Irish, taught me English so well that I later became an English teacher and author.

My mother, largely through the influence of the Catechism we boys brought home, converted to Catholicism, but her father had departed long ago.  With the welcome we received from American Catholics, he would have approved.