Heart of Whimsy !

  Camp Tom Welch We met at the Boys Club, luggage in hand, city boys bound for that promised land. Ten years of summers, seven weeks long— each one beginning with a bus ride and song. The ride was a racket of chatter and kicks, til the city gave way to trees and sticks. Then roll call barked out through the warm, dusty air, as counselors herded us here and there. Steel bunks awaited with spring nets wide, thin mattresses curling just slightly on the sides. We claimed our spots, made beds in a heap, and learned which guys talked loud in their sleep. The pool was blue and the water cold— first swim in June never got old. Lunch meant hot dogs, always with beans, on plastic plates that stayed mostly clean. Rest hour meant comics, quiet and still— though some cracked jokes and never could chill. Canteen followed, a rush to the stand— sweet treats and sodas in sweaty hands. We raised the flag as the bugle blew, then lowered it later in twilight’s hue. Swim le...

Today I’m a cowboy, sitting tall on my mount, or maybe I’ll gaze at the endless night sky ’neath a blanket of stars— too many to count. Tomorrow, a spaceman, ready to climb, or perhaps a wild man who swings on a vine. I’m often a hero with a cape who can fly, or a soldier who battles for truth with a cry, or a policeman who rides with lights flashing bright. So many jobs that had to be done— when I was a boy, just having fun.

for the sons and daughters of mill towns who carried the dream forward We were raised among steeples and smokestacks, between the salt of the bay and the whisper of looms long fallen silent. We were French Canadian, Portuguese, Polish, Italian, Jewish— white in name, but each with our own story, our own music of vowels and prayer. We belonged to neighborhoods stitched from lace and labor, where last names told you what parish you came from, what holy day you kept. The schools we entered were not palaces, but they were cathedrals of hope. Built by hands that scrubbed, lifted, stitched, who gave us their trust and the little they had. They believed learning was light, and they lit it in us. We studied trades and theories, wires and words, not out of brilliance but out of belief— the belief that knowledge was a door, and someone before us had turned the key. We rose, not alone, but side by side— in classrooms, in shop floors, at kitchen tables late into the night. Some of us went to colle...

For Algebretta and Soeur Françoise Thérèse Algebretta, mouse-sized sage, with sawdust dreams and algebraic grace, once ruled a cardboard kingdom in the corner of our class— her whiskers twitching like antennas for divine mischief. She came home with me the week I bested doctrine in a small imposing office with Father Pat and, flushed with pride, challenged a teacher who is best left to memory— not Soeur Françoise Thérèse, who understood far more than I did. Soeur Françoise Thérèse, in habit soft as candle smoke, taught mercy like it was a shape you could trace with a finger— a cross, a circle, the small spiral that marks the difference between knowing the rules and knowing love. She never scolded me for the questions I asked too early or the ones I never dared to speak. She only smiled, as if God might be found even in the peanut shells of a hamster’s dinner tray. That weekend, Algebretta ran circles like a mystic in motion, and I—half theologian, half wild thing— watched her spin, thi...