News that tennis star Andy Murray plans to retire this summer after the Paris Olympics and that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to become a backbencher has brought me back to a very bad summer day two years ago and thoughts of what it really means to let go of a a career — and your ego.
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Trump, Assange and the Navalny complex
Donald J. Trump is Alexei Navalny, haven’t you heard? And so is Julian Assange.
Indeed, just about anyone with an ax to grind who feels put upon is Navalny, the Russina opposition leader who died mysteriously in Siberia on Feb. 16 just as the Munich Security Conference, which wife Yulia Navalnaya attended, was underway and Russia was making headway in its war on Ukraine, thanks to the Republicans in the House of Representatives.
Read MoreThe greatest story ever sold
Today — Monday, Dec. 25 — is, as virtually everyone knows, Christmas Day, an occasion that has not always been about “peace on earth, good will to men.” Perhaps it was always thus, but it has become particularly more so in our politically divisive times.
There are those who resent what they see as their holy day being coopted by the commercial holiday. And then there are those who don’t want secular culture subsumed by what is essentially a religious tradition. What both groups have in common is that they see Christmas as an either/or proposition. In reality, it has always been a mix of the sacred and profane, as it were.
Read MoreSpeaker of the House, but never master of it
The Oct. 3 ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — a man brought down as much by his own ambition as by the hard right of the Republican Party and the united Democrats, who refused to oppose it — echoes ancient Greek and Shakespearean tragedies, to say nothing of the Hindu/Buddhist principle of karma and Randy Rainbow, who parodied McCarthy’s pathetic groveling for the speakership in a takeoff on “Les Misérables’” “Master of the House.”
Read MoreReunion and remembrance: Good Counsel revisited
When Katharine Hepburn made her first and only appearance at the Academy Awards as a somewhat old lady on April 2, 1974, she said, “I’m the living proof that a person can wait 41 years to be unselfish.”
I, now also a somewhat old lady, beat the great Kate by nine years, waiting 50 to be unselfish enough to attend my high school reunion on the former grounds of the Academy of Our Lady of Good Counsel in White Plains, N.Y.. A former classmate and friend who was on the reunion committee told me she had made it her mission to get me there and, not wanting to disappoint, again, I hustled my considerable butt to meet her at the chapel for the Mass that would begin our journey into the past.
Read MoreThe Supreme Court, Domingo Germán and the perfect imperfection of life
The Supreme Court made what critics would describe as some imperfect decisions in the week that New York Yankees pitcher Domingo Germán pitched a perfect game. While the two would seem unrelated, they both tell us a great deal about the unfairness and seeming randomness of life.
Read MoreThe challenge in letting go
Last summer on a very bad day, I attended the funeral of an affable, older relative whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. Distracted by problems at work, I made a wrong turn and arrived just as the priest was finishing the Gospel that is usually read at funeral Masses. In it, Jesus says, “I am the Resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me. though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whoever so lives and believes in me shall never die” — complementary, mirror-image phrases, like so many throughout the New Testament, that Charles Dickens uses to brilliant effect in the denouement of his French Revolutionary novel of dissipation and redemption, “A Tale of Two Cities.”
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