It’s happened before, most recently with Ike (General Eisenhower), but the Democrats’ reaction to a non-politician in the White House has been horrific. I’m glad Pres. Trump stuck to accolades for his coworkers and stayed largely away from his personal experience in his talk (not a speech) following his impeachment acquittal. We are all learning to take another person as they are, if we haven’t done that yet as in the Our Father.

True, what we expect of someone we meet as a stranger should not be as high as what we expect of friends. But we ought to forgive our President, even if he has not met our expectations for a demanding job. What gets me is, why did he have to tell us himself what he has done, with all the newspapers, magazines, and television programs in this country? Because he was lying, you say?

Hardly. A man from Western Civilization may be prone to exaggerate, according to his personality, but he knows better than to lie to people who are in the know. Trump, more than anyone else recently, has alerted us to “Fake News.” As a matter of fact, that’s now become a byword.

Donald Trump delivered the finest speech I have ever heard in the Capitol. Not only was it fiery, but it contained the right amount of pathos, love, criticism, awe and the rest of the human emotions. It contained news sparsely covered, if at all, by The New York Times or The Washington Post because of bias (for understandable reasons).

What gives me the right to judge that speech? For forty-one years students competed for grades in my English classroom based on their ability to give a speech. I was, as far as I know, the only person to ever institute a school-wide oratorical contest at Division Ave. High School in Levittown.

I don’t base my judgment on the orator’s character in this case. But that aside, the man seems to be a reformed sinner. According to me (I am 85 years old), if you act like a reformed sinner, speak like a reformed sinner, and look like a reformed sinner, you are a reformed sinner.

He took the rhubarb roots I had dug up with effort for him years ago and threw them out with the weeds. He didn’t realize they were good for other seasons. With the price of rhubarb what it is, we needed some rhubarb to make that pie with strawberries or even apples. I solved that problem for him. They were on sale here on Long Island.

That’s what friends are for; they get us out of tough scrapes. He was a retired teacher like me, and getting older as is the custom with all of us. We make mistakes and they seem irretrievable, and then along comes a friend. Don’t you like it when an error becomes a base hit or a home run? Now he can grow more rhubarb with new roots, or bulbs, as they call them.

I revel in that kind of situation. How would we learn without friends or people to set things straight? Sure, there’s divine intervention, but how many of us have experienced that? Or if we have, who realizes it?

At the beginning of my career, I was wrapped one day in my own thoughts, and I decided to take a very radical step. I was in a chapel in what Catholics call “the real Presence” (the Eucharist) and the decision met with all kinds of opposition, from parents to the parish priest. I regretted that decision, but somehow, it turned out all right (after years of trial.)

I have now, in my old age, gotten to see that it was just the method God uses to show us a better way. The human brain, despite what some neurologists say, is not infinite, and cannot always grasp the best way out of a numberless choice. But the end result is magnificent for the believer.

What is life, if not an adventure? Wasn’t that it? As a child I gloried in the stories of Sir Walter Scott, of Mark Twain, of Edgar Allan Poe. Was I going to turn down the opportunity for something like that?

Of course it’s a little far-fetched, but neuroscientists who research the brain at Harvard have started to call the human brain infinite. This is a distinction from the evolutionists who classify us with the “mammalian brain” of, say, the chimpanzees. I’d say the Harvard men are not far off the mark, with the implicit acknowledgement that there is something in the human brain intended by a Creator.

They have been accumulating piles and piles of data on the human brain, which enables them to describe it, but as one neurologist said, “We’ll never understand it.” And you pester me with the phrase, “It’s only a mammalian brain.”

So you’re going to go with the archeologists and paleontologists, who know little about synapses and dendrites. And you’re going to ignore the fact that I’m pointing out that there is something of the divine in you.