Homecoming Day Quotes

Addiction" might be the best word to explain the lostness that so deeply permeates society. Our addiction make us cling to what the world proclaims as the keys to self-fulfillment: accumulation of wealth and power; attainment of status and admiration; lavish consumption of food and drink, and sexual gratification without distinguishing between lust and love. These addictions create expectations that cannot but fail to satisfy our deepest needs. As long as we live within the world's delusions, our addictions condemn us to futile quests in "the distant country," leaving us to face an endless series of disillusionments while our sense of self remains unfulfilled. In these days of increasing addictions, we have wandered far away from our Father's home. The addicted life can aptly be designated a life lived in "a distant country." It is from there that our cry for deliverance rises up.

And that's the way things have gone along from that day until this. Not staying the same, but always changing. And that's okay, because once one part of a thing changes, all the other pieces begin to shift, and pretty soon it's a whole new story.

All Julie has to do is explain to her friends that she's using it to individually seal each item that she throws out." "Then they'd think she was a geek," I said. "She will thank me later," Monk said. "Why would she thank you for being considered a geek?" "Don't you know anything about teenage life?" Monk said. "It's a badge of respect." "It is?" "I was one," he said. "You don't say." "A very special one. I was crowned King of the Geeks, not once, but every single year of high school," Monk said. "It's a record that remains unbroken in my school to this day." "Were there a lot of students who wanted to be King of the Geeks?" "It's like being homecoming king, only better. You don't have to go to any dances," Monk said. "You aren't even invited.

I look for you my curl of sleep my breathing wave on the night shore my star in the fog of morning I think you can always find me I call to you under my breath I whisper to you through the hours all your names my ear of shadow I think you can always hear me I wait for you my promised day my time again my homecoming my being where you wait for me I think always of you waiting

It was nearly winter. I had just seen a friend die, and was again beginning to take pleasure in my own existence. This friend, who thought of himself as the "first man to experience pain", had nevertheless tried up to the last moment to wish death away. I was thankful for all things and decreed: Enjoy yourself, take advantage of your days of good health.

You knew, from the first day in Miss Garber’s class that I was going to do the play, didn’t you. When you looked at me and smiled?” She nodded. “Yes.” “And when I asked you to the homecoming dance, you made me promise that I wouldn’t fall in love, but you knew that I was going to, didn’t you?” She had a mischievous gleam in her eye. “Yes.” “How did you know?” She shrugged without answering, and we sat together for a few moments, watching the rain as it blew against the windows. “When I told you that I prayed for you,” she finally said to me, “what did you think I was talking about?

Was he my home, then, my homecoming? You are my homecoming. When I’m with you and we’re well together, there is nothing more I want. You make me like who I am, who I become when you’re with me, Oliver. If there is any truth in the world, it lies when I’m with you, and if I find the courage to speak my truth to you one day, remind me to light a candle in thanksgiving at every altar in Rome.

There’s the faintest glow from the streetlight outside on her hair, and she smells like sawdust and strawberry lip balm and for a second, I really don’t care what happens next. I start to understand why I got so pissed when Dash asked her to homecoming, and why I was so upset when she didn’t ask for my help with our Regionals bot, and why I sprint out of practice every day just to stand next to her and poke around at wires. I get why I asked her to come to a kids’ soccer game with me and why I bought her that silly little drawer knob in the shape of a bird. I get why it matters to me that she’s hurting. Because I think about her all the time. Because she surprises me, because she makes me laugh, and because this, whatever it is with her, is the only thing I ever do that’s easy. Because wherever I am, I want her close by.

Esther had been the one to encourage his homecoming. She said it had something to do with forgiveness, but Yaw wasn’t certain that he believed in forgiveness. He heard the word most on the few days he went to the white man’s church with Edward and Mrs. Boahen and sometimes with Esther, and so it had begun to seem to him like a word the white men brought with them when they first came to Africa. A trick their Christians had learned and spoke loudly and freely about to the people of the Gold Coast. Forgiveness, they shouted, all the while committing their wrongs. When he was younger, Yaw wondered why they did not preach that the people should avoid wrongdoing altogether. But the older he got, the better he understood. Forgiveness was an act done after the fact, a piece of the bad deed’s future. And if you point the people’s eye to the future, they might not see what is being done to hurt them in the present.

But as soon as we grasp this—and I appreciate it takes quite a bit of latching onto for people who have spent their whole lives thinking the other way—we see that if salvation is that sort of thing, it can’t be confined to human beings. When human beings are saved, in the past as a single coming-to-faith event, in the present through acts of healing and rescue, including answers to the prayer “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” and in the future when they are finally raised from the dead, this is always so that they can be genuine human beings in a fuller sense than they otherwise would have been. And genuine human beings, from Genesis 1 onward, are given the mandate of looking after creation, of bringing order to God’s world, of establishing and maintaining communities. To suppose that we are saved, as it were, for our own private benefit, for the restoration of our own relationship with God (vital though that is!), and for our eventual homecoming and peace in heaven (misleading though that is!) is like a boy being given a baseball bat as a present and insisting that since it belongs to him, he must always and only play with it in private. But of course you can only do what you’re meant to do with a baseball bat when you’re playing with other people. And salvation only does what it’s meant to do when those who have been saved, are being saved, and will one day fully be saved realize that they are saved not as souls but as wholes and not for themselves alone but for what God now longs to do through them.

Where the veil broke, you could see silvery clouds on which tall angels might stand. Not cute little Christmas angels, but high, stern angels in white robes, whose faces were sad and serious from being near God all day and hearing His decisions about the world.

After his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he'd gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you're Haitian - La unica haitiana aqui eres tu, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, you should see the bateys, after he'd spent a day in Bani (the camp where La Inca had been raised) and he'd taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob - now that's entertainment, he wrote in his journal - after he'd gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica de Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth [...]

The deception of men as to the role they play is more easily achieved, therefore, by influencing public opinion. While every man knows that he himself is not exploiting anyone, and that he personally is not raping his wife, he can be made to suppose that perhaps other men do. Hearing it daily on radio and television, not to mention the papers, will convince him eventually. When the better educated men keep on explaining to the simpler folk that even normal sexual intercourse must be interpreted as a rape of the female partner, and that the monotonous chores in a fully automated household, the day-long company of children and women friends, the eternal waiting for the husband's homecoming in the evening, all add up to the subtlest form of human enslavement the world has ever seen, they will learn to see themselves also as the kind of brutes who prevent their women from 'realizing their identity'. A man's daily struggle for his adoptive family thus acquires a new, sinister look.

Miss me?" she asks with her usual wryness, tossing her backpack on the floor and dropping down on the bed beside me like she comes over all the time. "I feel like a rebel just knowing you. Everyone keeps asking me if you really lit Brooklyn on fire." I arch a brow. "On fire?" Catherine pumps up a pillow beneath her head. "The actual event has gotten a bit exaggerated." Her lips twitch. "Maybe I had something to do with that." "Nice. Thanks." "No problem." "So I guess I'm pretty much done for at school." For the first time, it matters to me. If I'm to stay here and make a go of it, it wouldn't hurt to have a few friends. To not be a social outcast. Especially since it seems pretty important for Tamra's success at school, too. "Are you kidding? You're a hero." Her lips twist with a smile. "I think you've got a shot at homecoming queen next fall." I give a short laugh, and then her words sink. Next fall. Might I be here then? With Will? It's almost too sweet to believe. "So," Catherine beings, picking at the loose paper edging my spiral. "Rutledge was absent today." "Yeah?" I try for nonchalance. "Yeah." She stretches the word, her blue-green eyes cutting meaningfully into mine. "And his cousins were around, so he's not off somewhere with them. I wonder..." She cocks her head, her long, choppy bangs, sliding low across her forehead. "Wherever could he have been?" I shrug and pick at the flaking tip of my pencil. She continues, "I know where Xander thinks he was." My gaze swings back to her face. "Xander talked to you?" "I know, right? Can my days as a pariah be coming to an end?" "Where does he think Will was?" "With you, of course.

Oh, I’m fine! People booby-trap DHDs that I’m working on every day!” Rodney paused. “Actually, that’s truer than I’d like.

faithful followers of Christ aren’t on earth to assign blame; we’re here to free the trapped, bandage the wounded, help the hurting, and celebrate homecomings.

Scarlet, before you go through this, I want to remind you of September 7th, 1988. It was the first time that I saw you. You were reading Less Than Zero, and you were wearing a Guns 'n' Roses t-shirt. I'd never seen anything so perfect. I remember thinking that I had to have you or I'd die... then you whispered that you loved me at the homecoming dance, and I felt so peaceful... and safe... because I knew that no matter what happened, from that day on, nothing can ever be that bad... because I had you. And then I, uh... I grew up and I lost my way. And I blamed you for my failures. And I know that you think you have to do this today... but I don't want you to. But I guess... if I love you, I should let you move on.

There are always people making decisions you can’t control. But you decide what you’re willing to do. What you can live with. At the end of the day, that’s the only thing you can control.

To be real on this path you must be humble -- If you look down at others you'll get pushed down the stairs. If your heart goes around on high, you fly far from this path. There's no use hiding it -- What's inside always leaks outside. Even the one with the long white beard, the one who looks so wise -- If he breaks a single heart, why bother going to Mecca? If he has no compassion, what's the point? My heart is the throne of the Beloved, the Beloved the heart's destiny: Whoever breaks another's heart will find no homecoming in this world or any other. The ones who know say very little while the beasts are always speaking volumes; One word is enough for one who knows. If there is any meaning in the holy books, it is this: Whatever is good for you, grant it to others too -- Whoever comes to this earth migrates back; Whoever drinks the wine of love understands what I say -- Yunus, don't look down at the world in scorn -- Keep your eyes fixed on your Beloved's face, then you will not see the bridge on Judgment Day.

Huh!” said Olivia, with the contempt she reserved for alcohol, those who sold it and those who had a weakness for it. “The day your daddy spends Christmas Eve with two old lady bootleggers is the day I walk out of this house.

I want to celebrate my homecoming, not my funeral. I still have so much I want to say and do. Life is too short not to live it right … from this day forward I will embrace everything good and desecrate all that is evil. I’ve seen enough evil to last a lifetime now. I want the good in life without worrying. To be with people who are caring, smiles that last for miles, and love that’s forever lasting, a home that I call my own, not a prison. I may be defeated and beaten down, only to get back up again, to stand tall with head held high and my pride not shaken. Only to survive this horrible nightmare with my heart still attached and my soul not stolen and walk away without a scar on me.

There’s our homecoming picture. Last Halloween, when I dressed up as Mulan and Peter wore a dragon costume. There’s a receipt from Tart and Tangy. One of his notes to me, from before. If you make Josh’s dumb white-chocolate cranberry cookies and not my fruitcake ones, it’s over. Pictures of us from Senior Week. Prom. Dried rose petals from my corsage. The Sixteen Candles picture. There are some things I didn’t include, like the ticket stub from our first real date, the note he wrote me that said, I like you in blue. Those things are tucked away in my hatbox. I’ll never let those go. But the really special thing I’ve included is my letter, the one I wrote to him so long ago, the one that brought us together. I wanted to keep it, but something felt right about Peter having it. One day all of this will be proof, proof that we were here, proof that we loved each other. It’s the guarantee that no matter what happens to us in the future, this time was ours. When he gets to that page, Peter stops. “I thought you wanted to keep this,” he said. “I wanted to, but then I felt like you should have it. Just promise you’ll keep it forever.” He turns the page. It’s a picture from when we took my grandma to karaoke. I sang “You’re So Vain” and dedicated it to Peter. Peter got up and sang “Style” by Taylor Swift. Then he dueted “Unchained Melody” with my grandma, and after, she made us both promise to take a Korean language class at UVA. She and Peter took a ton of selfies together that night. She made one her home screen on her phone. Her friends at her apartment complex said he looked like a movie star. I made the mistake of telling Peter, and he crowed about it for days after. He stays on that page for a while. When he doesn’t say anything, I say, helpfully, “It’s something to remember us by.” He snaps the book shut. “Thanks,” he says, flashing me a quick smile. “This is awesome.

But for every one of the liberated prisoners, the day comes when, looking back on his camp experiences, he can no longer understand how he endured it all. As the day of his liberation eventually came, when everything seemed to him like a beautiful dream, so also the day comes when all his camp experiences seem to him nothing but a nightmare. The crowning experience of all, for the homecoming man, is the wonderful feeling that, after all he has suffered, there is nothing he need fear any more—except his God.

My grandmother was a girl when they planted those trees. None of the adults there that day lived to see them grow to full height. People were wiser back then, and less selfish. The understood that they were part of a line, not the beginning, middle, and end of it.

Now, she made a brief note of an experience all too familiar from previous flights back to Australia: the befuddlement of long-haul travel; how it felt to lose a day from the calendar; the dizziness and sea legs on arrival and the irresistible pull towards sleep when one was least expecting it.

Anger, resentment, jealousy, desire for revenge, lust, greed, antagonisms, and rivalries are the obvious signs that I have left home. And that happens quite easily. When I pay careful attention to what goes on in my mind from moment to moment, I come to the disconcerting discovery that there are very few moments during the day when I am really free from these dark emotions, passions and feelings. Constantly falling back into an old trap, before I am even fully aware of it, I find myself wondering why someone hurt me, rejected me, or didn't pay attention to me. Without realizing it, I find myself brooding about someone else's success, my own loneliness, and the way the world abuses me. Despite my conscious intentions, I often catch myself daydreaming about becoming rich, powerful, and very famous. All of these mental games reveal to me the fragility of my faith that I am the Beloved One on whom God's favor rests. I am so afraid of being disliked, blamed, put aside, passed over, ignored, persecuted, and killed, that I am constantly developing strategies to defend myself and thereby assure myself of the love I think I need and deserve. And in so doing I move far away from my father's home and choose to dwell in a "distant country.

Jess stayed very still, waiting, hoping, trying to fall back into slumber. Just an hour or two more, and she could get up and start the day. But sleep was elusive. Lying in the dark, she felt divided, dissolvable, displaced. She pictured her bed in London and it seemed like make-believe. But this place was not right or real either.

You are my homecoming. When I’m with you and we’re well together, there is nothing more I want. You make me like who I am, who I become when you’re with me, Oliver. If there is any truth in the world, it lies when I’m with you, and if I find the courage to speak my truth to you one day, remind me to light a candle in thanksgiving at every altar in Rome.

Jess and Polly stood without speaking, letting the sounds of the garden resettle. A flock of tiny fairy wrens darted busily in and around the base of a nearby plum tree, crickets ticked in the long grass, and a sense of timelessness, of nature, older and more pervasive than anything human beings and their histories could generate, grew thick and warm around them. "Shall we take a walk down together?" said Polly. Jess noticed a new note of self-possession in her mother's voice. Summery air threaded across the back of her neck, and she felt a pull, suddenly, deep inside her. She didn't know whether it was being here, in this place, or the beautiful weather that evoked long childhood days in which the hours stretched away to be filled only with pleasure, or the fact that it was Christmas Eve, or that her mother was standing here with her, solid and present in a way she hadn't been before, so that Jess was seeing her as if for the first time. But she felt a sensation in her chest that was quite the opposite of loneliness. "Are you with me?" Polly was searching Jess's face, waiting for an answer. Jess gave a nod and smiled. "I am.

Was he my home, then, my homecoming? You are my homecoming. When I’m with you and we’re well together, there is nothing more I want. You make me like who I am, who I become when you’re with me. If there is any truth in the world, it lies when I’m with you, and if I find the courage to speak my truth to you one day, remind me to light a candle in thanksgiving at every altar in Rome.

I remembered the scene in the Bible when Jacob asks Rachel for water and on hearing her speak the words that were prophesied for him, throws up his hands to heaven and kisses the ground by the well. Me Jewish, Celan Jewish, Oliver Jewish—we were in a half ghetto, half oasis, in an otherwise cruel and unflinching world where fuddling around strangers suddenly stops, where we misread no one and no one misjudges us, where one person simply knows the other and knows him so thoroughly that to be taken away from such intimacy is galut,Hebrew word for exile and dispersal. Was he my home, then, my homecoming? You are my homecoming. When I’m with you and we’re well together, there is nothing more I want. You make me like who I am, who I become when you’re with me, Oliver. If there is any truth in the world, it lies when I’m with you, and if I find the courage to speak my truth to you one day, remind me to light a candle in thanksgiving at every altar in Rome. It never occurred to me that if one word word from him could make me so happy, another could just as easily crush me, that if I didn’t want to be unhappy, I should learn to beware of such small joys as well.

After his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he'd gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you're Haitian - La unica haitiana aqui eres tu, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, you should see the bateys, after he'd spent a day in Bani (the camp where La Inca had been raised) and he'd taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob - now that's entertainment, he wrote in his journal - after he'd gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica de Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth,

I was just trying to demonstrate to the students of Rowland University that Rowland University was not infinite. It had taken me a long time to figure out what the problem was, but one day I realized that the students at Rowland University thought that Rowland University was infinite. Infinite bookstore. Infinite fraternities and sororities. Infinite sports teams. Infinite snack shop. Infinite Homecoming. Infinite graduation. Infinite prospects.

It was seven o'clock but still light, a drowsy early evening on a warm summer's day, the sky starting to soften into the pink, purple, and gold folds of dusk, and the lower reaches of the garden just beginning to darken and cool. The colors and smells, the quality of the light, were visceral. Jess could feel them in the rhythm of her heartbeat, deep in her lungs, in the cells of her skin. She knew them as one can't help but know the cadence of their mother tongue.

Since they'd met five years before, Esther had been the one to encourage his homecoming. She said it had something to do with forgiveness, but Yaw wasn't certain that he believed in forgiveness. He heard the word most on the few days he went to the white man's church with Edward and Mrs. Boahen and sometimes with Esther, so it had begun to seem to him like a word the white men brought with them when they first came to Africa. A trick their Christians had learned and spoke loudly and freely about to the people of the Gold Coast. Forgiveness, they shouted, all the while committing their wrongs. When he was younger, Yaw wondered why they did not preach that the people should avoid wrongdoing altogether. But the older he got the better he understood. Forgiveness was an act done after the fact, a piece of the bad deed's future. And if you point the people's eye to the future, they might not see what is being done to hurt them in the present.

The parable that Rembrandt painted might well be called “The Parable of the Lost Sons.” Not only did the younger son, who left home to look for freedom and happiness in a distant country, get lost, but the one who stayed home also became a lost man. Exteriorly he did all the things a good son is supposed to do, but, interiorly, he wandered away from his father. He did his duty, worked hard every day, and fulfilled all his obligations but became increasingly unhappy and unfree.

The much-discussed estimate of twenty-two vets a day committing suicide in the United States is deceptive: it was only in 2008 that - for the first time in decades- the suicide rate among veterans surpassed the civilian rate in America, and though each death is enormously tragic, the majority of those veterans were over the age of fifty. Many were Vietnam vets and, generally speaking, the more time that passes after a trauma, the less likely a suicide is to have anything to do with it.

At the sound of her uncle’s voice coming from the back door, Jay threw Violet off his lap. Violet giggled as she hit the cushions on the back of the couch. “What are you doing?” she complained. “It’s just Uncle Stephen.” Jay sat up. “I know, but ever since the Homecoming Dance, I feel like he’s always watching us. I just don’t want him to think we’re doing anything we shouldn’t be.” The Homecoming Dance. It had been almost three months since that night, but the memories still made Violet shudder. Not a day went by that she wasn’t grateful Jay was still alive. Grateful the bullet from the killer’s gun had only grazed his shoulder, despite the fact that the man-one of her uncle’s own officers-had been aiming directly for Jay’s heart. If her uncle hadn’t shown up at the dance when he did, firing the fatal shot that took the killer down, neither she nor Jay would have made it out of there alive. Jay had always liked her uncle before then, but now it was something closer to worship.

Polly had a sound. It came from the necklace she always wore: a long silver chain, from which she'd hung two pendants---one fine and shaped like a jacaranda tree, the other a sterling silver cat. The jacaranda tree had been a gift, and the cat had come from a secondhand shop; it had once been the top of a baby's rattle, Polly said, back in the olden days, a "hey diddle diddle" cat with a ball inside that made a soft tinkle whenever she walked. Jess loved that sound. It always made her feel safe and warm and happy.

The man, Muse—tell me about that resourceful man, who wandered far and wide, when he’d sacked Troy’s sacred citadel: many men’s townships he saw, and learned their ways of thinking, many the griefs he suffered at heart on the open sea, battling for his own life and his comrades’ homecoming. Yet no way could he save his comrades, much though he longed to— it was through their own blind recklessness that they perished, the fools, for they slaughtered the cattle of Hēlios the sun god and ate them: for that he took from them their day of returning. Tell us this tale, goddess, child of Zeus; start anywhere in it!

The man, Muse — tell me about that resourceful man, who wandered far and wide, when he’d sacked Troy’s sacred citadel: many men’s townships he saw, and learned their ways of thinking, many the griefs he suffered at heart on the open sea, battling for his own life and his comrades’ homecoming. Yet no way could he save his comrades, much though he longed to — it was through their own blind recklessness that they perished, the fools, for they slaughtered the cattle of Hēlios the sun god and ate them: for that he took from them their day of returning. Tell us this tale, goddess, child of Zeus; start anywhere in it!

I was not able to sleep that night. To be honest, I didn’t even try. I stood in front of my living room window, staring out at the bright lights of New York City. I don’t know how long I stood there; in fact, I didn’t see the millions of multicolored lights or the never-ending streams of headlights and taillights on the busy streets below. Instead, I saw, in my mind’s eye, the crowded high school classrooms and halls where my friends and I had shared triumphs and tragedies, where the ghosts of our past still reside. Images flickered in my mind. I saw the faces of teachers and fellow students I hadn’t seen in years. I heard snatches of songs I had rehearsed in third period chorus. I saw the library where I had spent long hours studying after school. Most of all, I saw Marty. Marty as a shy sophomore, auditioning for Mrs. Quincy, the school choir director. Marty singing her first solo at the 1981 Christmas concert. Marty at the 1982 Homecoming Dance, looking radiant after being selected as Junior Princess. Marty sitting alone in the chorus practice room on the last day of our senior year. I stared long and hard at those sepia-colored memories. And as my mind carried me back to the place I had sworn I’d never return to, I remembered.

I look out of the window; – beyond the picture of the sunlit street appears a range of hills, distant and light; it changes to a clear day in autumn, and I sit by the fire with Kat and Albert and eat potatoes baked in their skins. But I do not want to think of that, I sweep it away. The room shall speak, it must catch me up and hold me, I want to feel that I belong here, I want to hearken and know when I go back to the front that the war will sink down, be drowned utterly in the great home-coming tide, know that it will then be past for ever, and not gnaw us continually, that it will have none but an outward power over us.

First agriculture, and then industry, changed two fundamental things about the human experience. The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good. And as society modernized, people found themselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day—or an entire life—mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone. The evidence that this is hard on us is overwhelming. Although happiness is notoriously subjective and difficult to measure, mental illness is not. Numerous cross-cultural studies have shown that modern society—despite its nearly miraculous advances in medicine, science, and technology—is afflicted with some of the highest rates of depression, schizophrenia, poor health, anxiety, and chronic loneliness in human history. As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down. Rather than buffering people from clinical depression, increased wealth in a society seems to foster it.

It was an irony---and perhaps, even, a foreshadowing---that she had been struck especially by the majesty of the house that long-ago day. It had looked to ten-year-old Jess like something from a fairy tale, standing tall with its gleaming weatherboards and elaborate tangle of wisteria branches. The longest boughs of the tallest trees arched together to form a proscenium around the house at center stage, the sweep of green leaves fell away on all sides, and the round pond was just visible on the western slope, with its glossy lily pads and graceful stone statue. The effect was of a place set apart from the rest of the big wide world.

In all cultures, ceremonies are designed to communicate the experience of one group of people to the wider community. When people bury loved ones, when they wed, when they graduate from college, the respective ceremonies communicate something essential to the people who are watching... if contemporary America doesn’t develop ways to publicly confront the emotional consequences of war those consequences will continue to burn a hole through the vets themselves... ...Offer veterans all over the country the use of their town hall every Veteran’s Day to speak freely about their experience at war... A community ceremony like that would finally return the experience of war to our entire nation, rather than just leaving it to the people who fought. The bland phrase “I support the troops” would then mean showing up at the town hall once a year to hear these people out.

Nostalgia is an excessive sentimentality for the past, for home. It is associated with a yearning to return to a happy and safe period in your life. The word comes from nóstos, meaning “homecoming”, and álgos, meaning “pain” or “ache”. It’s all about the “good old days”, and “the good times”. Conservatism revolves around nostalgia. All right wingers are nostalgic, and suffer from future shock and future fear. Science is about extreme nostalgia for the material atoms of the ancient Greeks. Materialism is entirely dead in the era of quantum mechanics, yet scientists go on believing in matter anyway. They are highly conservative individuals unwilling to contemplate leaving the home materialism has provided for them. The last thing they want is to end up in the Unknown Land of Mind, where thought, not matter, is core reality. That would ruin everything for the scientific materialists and empiricists.

The cuisine of Northern Iran, overlooked and underrated, is unlike most Persian food in that it's unfussy and lighthearted as the people from that region. The fertile seaside villages of Mazandaran and Rasht, where Soli grew up before moving to the congested capital, were lush with orchards and rice fields. His father had cultivated citrus trees and the family was raised on the fruits and grains they harvested. Alone in the kitchen, without Zod's supervision, he found himself turning to the wholesome food of his childhood, not only for the comfort the simple compositions offered, but because it was what he knew so well as he set about preparing a homecoming feast for Zod's only son. He pulled two kilos of fava beans from the freezer. Gathered last May, shucked and peeled on a quiet afternoon, they defrosted in a colander for a layered frittata his mother used to make with fistfuls of dill and sprinkled with sea salt. One flat of pale green figs and a bushel of new harvest walnuts were tied to the back of his scooter, along with two crates of pomegranates- half to squeeze for fresh morning juice and the other to split and seed for rice-and-meatball soup. Three fat chickens pecked in the yard, unaware of their destiny as he sharpened his cleaver. Tomorrow they would braise in a rich, tangy stew with sour red plums, their hearts and livers skewered and grilled, then wrapped in sheets of lavash with bouquets of tarragon and mint. Basmati rice soaked in salted water to be steamed with green garlic and mounds of finely chopped parsley and cilantro, then served with a whole roasted, eight kilo white fish stuffed with barberries, pistachios, and lime. On the farthest burner, whole bitter oranges bobbed in blossom syrup, to accompany rice pudding, next to a simmering pot of figs studded with cardamom pods for preserves.

I remembered the scene in the Bible when Jacob asks Rachel for water and on hearing her speak the words that were prophesied for him, throws up his hands to heaven and kisses the ground by the well. Me Jewish, Celan Jewish, Oliver Jewish—we were in a half ghetto, half oasis, in an otherwise cruel and unflinching world where fuddling around strangers suddenly stops, where we misread no one and no one misjudges us, where one person simply knows the other and knows him so thoroughly that to be taken away from such intimacy is galut, the Hebrew word for exile and dispersal. Was he my home, then, my homecoming? You are my homecoming. When I’m with you and we’re well together, there is nothing more I want. You make me like who I am, who I become when you’re with me, Oliver. If there is any truth in the world, it lies when I’m with you, and if I find the courage to speak my truth to you one day, remind me to light a candle in thanksgiving at every altar in Rome.

From somewhere in the garden came the sound of a magpie singing, and a thousand days of childhood arrived with it. Jess glanced to her right and spotted the black-and-white bird perched atop the statue in the middle of the pond. There were magpies in England, too--- Jess had seen them often on the Heath--- but although they shared a name, they were different from their antipodean cousins: smaller, neater, prettier, and without the eerily sublime song. This magpie was looking directly at her. Jess tilted her head, watching the bird as he watched her. Suddenly, he spread his wings and flew away. She crossed the turning circle toward the lawn. The grass was still damp with dew, even though the sun was rising fast, and cool shadows stretched toward the harbor. Jess reached the edge of the pond and followed the line of its curved rim until the elegant stone lady was directly before her, kneeling as she always had, arms folded above her head, face bowed to gaze at the goldfish and lilies.

Dear Lucas, I never met a boy with manners as good as yours. You ought to have a British accent. At homecoming, you wore a cravat and it suited you so well I think you could wear one all the time and get away with it. Oh, Lucas! I wish I knew what kind of girls you liked. As far as I can tell, you haven’t dated anyone…unless you have a girlfriend at another school. You’re just so mysterious. I hardly know a thing about you. The things I know are so unsubstanial, so unsatisfying, like that you eat a chicken sandwich every day at lunch, and you’re on the golf team. I guess the one remotely real thing I know about you is you’re a good writer, which must mean you have deep reserves of emotion. Like that short story you wrote in creative writing about the poisoned well, and it was from a six-year-old boy’s perspective. It was so sensitive, so keen! That story made me feel like I knew you at least a little bit. But I don’t know you, and I wish I did. I think you’re very special. I think you are probably one of the most special people at our school, and I wish more people knew that about you. Or maybe I don’t, because sometimes it’s nice to be the only one who knows something. Love, Lara Jean

All at once the anger ran out of John Harkless; he was a hard man for anger to tarry with. And in place of it a strong sense of home-coming began to take possession of him. He was going home. “Back to Plattville, where I belong,” he had said; and he said it again without bitterness, for it was the truth. “Every man cometh to his own place in the end.” Yes, as one leaves a gay acquaintance of the playhouse lobby for some hard-handed, tried old friend, so he would wave the outer world God-speed and come back to the old ways of Carlow. What though the years were dusty, he had his friends and his memories and his old black brier pipe. He had a girl’s picture that he should carry in his heart till his last day; and if his life was sadder, it was infinitely richer for it. His winter fireside should be not so lonely for her sake; and losing her, he lost not everything, for he had the rare blessing of having known her. And what man could wish to be healed of such a hurt? Far better to have had it than to trot a smug pace unscathed. He had been a dullard; he had lain prostrate in the wretchedness of his loss. “A girl you could put in your hat — and there you have a strong man prone.” He had been a sluggard, weary of himself, unfit to fight, a failure in life and a failure in love. That was ended; he was tired of failing, and it was time to succeed for a while. To accept the worst that Fate can deal, and to wring courage from it instead of despair, that is success; and it was the success that he would have. He would take Fate by the neck. But had it done him unkindness? He looked out over the beautiful, “monotonous” landscape, and he answered heartily, “No!” There was ignorance in man, but no unkindness; were man utterly wise he were utterly kind.

There are two parts to growing as a person—well, no, there aren’t, there’s more, but you can simplify it down—the first is pinpointing problematic areas, the toxic parts, as you said, and cutting them out. You are immensely good at this,” he said, and it sounded a quite genuine compliment, “but it is only one half of the equation. The other part, once you have hollowed out all the offensive parts, is to replace them with healthy, constructive parts. New behaviours; new patterns of thought. Something to nurture those empty spaces back to whole. Because otherwise those holes stay open, and they beg to be filled, and they will collapse on themselves and cause even bigger problems than the things that once lived inside of them. And you, Ronoah? You are singularly lacking in imagination in this respect. You take half the bricks out of a veritable castle of behavioural instinct and you expect it to hold—you never put new ones back in. And I shall tell you why. “There is a difference between action and character. One you change on purpose, but the other, it changes clandestine, without your noticing, until one day you have to run to catch up with where it’s got to. There is a difference between making a mistake, and being a mistake,” he said, tapping Ronoah’s shoulder with one, and then two fingers. “Your problem, Ronoah, quite possibly one of the only problems I can offer that you have not already thought of, is that you are constantly conflating the two. To the everyday eye, character is immovable, immutable—how do you solve a problem when the problem is you? You cannot improve a broken system when the only tool you have with which to do the fixing-up is the system itself. You need new parts, better data—and it just so happens you are discarding a rather sizeable portion of the available data on yourself while you’re at it, which makes your calculations even more erroneous. Because, and get ready for this, it might come as a bit of a shock—because you are not actually broken.

John Bradshaw, in his best-seller Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child, details several of his imaginative techniques: asking forgiveness of your inner child, divorcing your parent and finding a new one, like Jesus, stroking your inner child, writing your childhood history. These techniques go by the name catharsis, that is, emotional engagement in past trauma-laden events. Catharsis is magnificent to experience and impressive to behold. Weeping, raging at parents long dead, hugging the wounded little boy who was once you, are all stirring. You have to be made of stone not to be moved to tears. For hours afterward, you may feel cleansed and at peace—perhaps for the first time in years. Awakening, beginning again, and new departures all beckon. Catharsis, as a therapeutic technique, has been around for more than a hundred years. It used to be a mainstay of psychoanalytic treatment, but no longer. Its main appeal is its afterglow. Its main drawback is that there is no evidence that it works. When you measure how much people like doing it, you hear high praise. When you measure whether anything changes, catharsis fares badly. Done well, it brings about short-term relief—like the afterglow of vigorous exercise. But once the glow dissipates, as it does in a few days, the real problems are still there: an alcoholic spouse, a hateful job, early-morning blues, panic attacks, a cocaine habit. There is no documentation that the catharsis techniques of the recovery movement help in any lasting way with chronic emotional problems. There is no evidence that they alter adult personality. And, strangely, catharsis about fictitious memories does about as well as catharsis about real memories. The inner-child advocates, having treated tens of thousands of suffering adults for years, have not seen fit to do any follow-ups. Because catharsis techniques are so superficially appealing, because they are so dependent on the charisma of the therapist, and because they have no known lasting value, my advice is “Let the buyer beware.

Since my visit to the Hermitage, I had become more aware of the four figures, two women and two men, who stood around the luminous space where the father welcomed his returning son. Their way of looking leaves you wondering how they think or feel about what they are watching. These bystanders, or observers, allow for all sorts of interpretations. As I reflect on my own journey, I become more and more aware of how long I have played the role of observer. For years I had instructed students on the different aspects of the spiritual life, trying to help them see the importance of living it. But had I, myself, really ever dared to step into the center, kneel down, and let myself be held by a forgiving God? The simple fact of being able to express an opinion, to set up an argument, to defend a position, and to clarify a vision has given me, and gives me still, a sense of control. And, generally, I feel much safer in experiencing a sense of control over an undefinable situation than in taking the risk of letting that situation control me. Certainly there were many hours of prayer, many days and months of retreat, and countless conversations with spiritual directors, but I had never fully given up the role of bystander. Even though there has been in me a lifelong desire to be an insider looking out, I nevertheless kept choosing over and over again the position of the outsider looking in. Sometimes this looking-in was a curious looking-in, sometimes a jealous looking-in, sometimes an anxious looking-in, and, once in a while, even a loving looking-in. But giving up the somewhat safe position of the critical observer seemed like a great leap into totally unknown territory. I so much wanted to keep some control over my spiritual journey, to be able to predict at least a part of the outcome, that relinquishing the security of the observer for the vulnerability of the returning son seemed close to impossible. Teaching students, passing on the many explanations given over the centuries to the words and actions of Jesus, and showing them the many spiritual journeys that people have chosen in the past seemed very much like taking the position of one of the four figures surrounding the divine embrace. The two women standing behind the father at different distances the seated man staring into space and looking at no one in particular, and the tall man standing erect and looking critically at the event on the platform in front of him--they all represent different ways of not getting involved. There is indifference, curiosity, daydreaming, and attentive observation; there is staring, gazing, watching, and looking; there is standing in the background, leaning against an arch, sitting with arms crossed, and standing with hands gripping each other. Every one of these inner and outward postures are all too familiar with me. Some are more comfortable than others, but all of them are ways of not getting directly involved," (pp. 12-13).

First agriculture, and then industry, changed two fundamental things about the human experience. The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good. And as society modernized, people found themselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day—or an entire life—mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone.

Alone in the kitchen, without Zod's supervision, he found himself turning to the wholesome food of his childhood, not only for the comfort the simple compositions offered, but because it was what he knew so well as he set about preparing a homecoming feast for Zod's only son. He pulled two kilos of java beans from the freezer. Gathered last May, shucked and peeled on a quiet afternoon, they defrosted in a colander for a layered frittata his mother used to make with fistfuls of dill and sprinkled with sea salt. One flat of pale green figs and a bushel of new harvest walnuts were tied to the back of his scooter, along with two crates of pomegranates- half to squeeze for fresh morning juice and the other to split and seed for rice-and-meatball soup. Three fat chickens pecked in the yard, unaware of their destiny as he sharpened his cleaver. Tomorrow they would braise in a rich, tangy stew with sour red plums, their hearts and livers skewered and grilled, then wrapped in sheets of lavash with bouquets of tarragon and mint. Basmati rice soaked in salted water to be steamed with green garlic and mounds of finely chopped parsley and cilantro, then served with a whole roasted, eight kilo white fish stuffed with barberries, pistachios, and lime. On the farthest burner, whole bitter oranges bobbed in blossom syrup, to accompany rice pudding, next to a simmering pot of figs studded with cardamom pods for preserves.

I choose to be happy, and happiness is indeed a choice. Every day I can rise from my Reverie and gnash my teeth at what I do not have. Or I can smile contentedly in appreciation of what I do possess.

There’s no use arguing that modern society isn’t a kind of paradise. The vast majority of us don’t, personally, have to grow or kill our own food, build our own dwellings, or defend ourselves from wild animals and enemies. In one day we can travel a thousand miles by pushing our foot down on a gas pedal or around the world by booking a seat on an airplane. When we are in pain we have narcotics that dull it out of existence, and when we are depressed we have pills that change the chemistry of our brains. We understand an enormous amount about the universe, from subatomic particles to our own bodies to galaxy clusters, and we use that knowledge to make life even better and easier for ourselves. The poorest people in modern society enjoy a level of physical comfort that was unimaginable a thousand years ago, and the wealthiest people literally live the way gods were imagined to have. And yet. There are many costs to modern society, starting with its toll on the global ecosystem and working one’s way down to its toll on the human psyche, but the most dangerous loss may be to community. If the human race is under threat in some way that we don’t yet understand, it will probably be at a community level that we either solve the problem or fail to. If the future of the planet depends on, say, rationing water, communities of neighbors will be able to enforce new rules far more effectively than even local government. It’s how we evolved to exist, and it obviously works.

she wouldn’t have seen the booklet, considering everything going on at the time. The photo that grabbed her attention first was the one front and center. There were four people—Dani, Matthew, Becca, and Todd. She and Matthew used to hang out with Becca and her husband, Todd. The four of them had joined a bowling league and used to get together every few weeks to play mah-jongg. A twinge of sadness swept over her. Dani and Becca used to talk every day, but since Tinsley’s disappearance, they had talked only a handful of times. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Dani had only one thing on her mind after Tinsley was gone. Conversation became awkward. They both had moved on, gracefully and without guilt. There were truly no words to express what it felt like to lose a child. Dani still held on to hope that Tinsley was alive. She often imagined the homecoming, a surreal moment when she would see her daughter again. She imagined Tinsley would appear as an apparition right up until

One day,” he says softly to me, “I hope I can begin to expect your return rather than merely hope for it.

Thus ages pass, and men after men. Mourning voices of women weeping. So the world passes; day follows day, and the dust gathers, his tomb crumbles, as time gnaws it, and his kith and kindred out of ken dwindle. So men flicker and in the mirk go out. The world withers and wind rises; the candles are quenched. Cold falls the night. It's dark! It's dark, and doom is coming! Is no light left us?

One of the most meaningful things the Lord has shown me, especially since the war began, is the value and importance of living for Him one day at a time. To awaken each day aware of our complete dependence on Him, then very quickly, before our minds begin to fret and try to take charge, we need to yield our hearts and turn our thoughts toward Him. If we don’t, we wind up living like orphans fending for ourselves, as if everything is dependent on us. Our lives become full of anxiety and fear. Because deep inside, we know we’re not really in control. Think about it…how much of your life—even this week—went just the way you planned?

Instead,” he said, “We need to awaken each day as a disciple—as it says in Isaiah 50—to listen as one being taught. Our most important task is to surrender our will, our plans, our agenda for each day to the One who loved us and gave Himself for us on the cross.

Another homecoming party, bringing me full circle in this living hell—a reminder of the day it started. The day I locked eyes with the woman who’s forever altered me for better and worse.

Jewish communities, however small, had maintained a constant presence in the Holy Land since the days of antiquity, and the immigrant pioneers saw their endeavors not as colonization but as a homecoming. But a clash was inevitable, with the national aspirations of one party awakening the nationalism of the other. Deadly Arab riots broke out in 1929, sparked by a dispute over access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

Young women wore colorful new dresses with high heels and false eyelashes. They clashed against the parking lot backdrop, dust whirling around them. There were babies too young to have ever met their fathers, parents holding each other in anticipation as they waited for their sons and daughters to arrive home from war. Cleve's unit--Third Battalion, Eighth Marines--had been gone seven months. Though everyone was excited to see those who'd survived, we also anticipated the sadness that would inevitably wash over us when the buses emptied too soon.

younger son said to his father, “Father, let me have the share of the estate that will come to me.” So the father divided the property between them. A few days later, the younger son got together everything he had and left for a distant country where he squandered his money on a life of debauchery. When he had spent it all, that country experienced a severe famine, and now he began to feel the pinch so he hired himself out to one of the local inhabitants who put him on his farm to feed the pigs. And he would willingly have filled himself with the husks the pigs were eating but no one would let him have them. Then he came to his senses and said, “How many of my father’s hired men have all the food they want and more, and here am I dying of hunger! I will leave this place and go to my father and say: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you; I no longer deserve to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired men.” So he left the place and went back to his father.

when they could talk and unwind together, was the best part of her day.

Whatever it was, Calla's imagination had waked up from a long sleep, and these days she had the feeling that magic and miracles might be hovering in the air all around, waiting to happen. She wasn't a great believer in such things, but she didn't push the thought away.

And that’s the way things have gone along from that day until this. Not staying the same, but always changing. And that’s okay, because once one part of a thing changes, all the other pieces begin to shift, and pretty soon it’s a whole new story.

Just as in the parable of the prodigal son, Jesus expresses here the great desire of his Father to offer his children a banquet and his eagerness to get it going even when those who are invited refuse to come. This invitation to a meal is an invitation to intimacy with God. This is especially clear at the Last Supper, shortly before Jesus’ death. There he says to his disciples: “From now on, I tell you, I shall never again drink wine until the day I drink the new wine with you in the kingdom of my Father.” And at the close of the New Testament, God’s ultimate victory is described as a splendid wedding feast: “The reign of the Lord our God Almighty has begun; let us be glad and joyful and give glory to God, because this is the time for the marriage of the Lamb.… blessed are those who are invited to the wedding feast of the Lamb

You don't go around questioning the Bible, not if you want to go to Heaven one of these days. Besides, once you start picking holes in things, it's hard to figure out which parts to throw away and which parts to keep.

West had never decided what the hell it wanted to be: avenger or liberator. It had proved to be both, and in being both had become neither. Finally, the IEDs, rogue Afghans and the indifference of a war-sickened people had driven the military to a strategy of drones and men like me. The bitter bounty of our righteous war? Dead little girls and two-day heroes with blackened minds and stumps for limbs that the politicians could jerk off about for as long as the homecoming parade lasted. Wrap yourself in a flag that meant jack shit, drop some dollars into a bucket, close your door, and thank the Lord it wasn’t your son or daughter. That was the truth, as I saw it now. Just don’t say it out loud: if there was one thing the people back home hated more than terrorists, it was some asshole holding up a mirror to them. I kept walking, past the grunts, who had seen crazier shit than this and knew

To awaken each day aware of my complete dependence on him, then very quickly, before my mind begins to fret and try to take over, I begin to yield my heart and turn my thoughts toward him. If we don't, we wind up living like orphans fending for ourselves. Our lives become full of anxiety and fear, because deep inside, we know we're not really in control. Think about it ... how much of your life-even this week-went just the way you planned?

I’m alone,” she wrote, “and I want to share something with somebody.”4 Loneliness. It’s a cry. A moan, a wail. It’s a gasp whose origin is the recesses of our souls. Can you hear it? The abandoned child. The divorcée. The quiet home. The empty mailbox. The long days. The longer nights. A one-night stand. A forgotten birthday. A silent phone. Cries of loneliness. Listen again. Tune out the traffic and turn down the TV. The cry is there. Our cities are full of Judy Bucknells. You can hear their cries. You can hear them in the convalescent home among the sighs and the shuffling feet. You can hear them in the prisons among the moans of shame and the calls for mercy. You can hear them if you walk the manicured streets of suburban America, among the aborted ambitions and aging homecoming queens. Listen for it in the halls of our high schools where peer pressure weeds out the “have-nots” from the “haves.” This moan in a minor key knows all spectrums of society. From the top to the bottom. From the failures to the famous. From the poor to the rich. From the married to the single. Judy Bucknell was not alone.

One of the more useful things I learned as a midshipman at Maine Maritime Academy were the names of the seven masts of a seven masted schooner. When I mentioned to the 600 people in attendance at a Homecoming event that my degree was a BS in Marlinspike Seamanship no one laughed, leaving me in the embarrassing position of having to explain that actually I had a Bachelor of Marine Science degree. Later looking into a mirror I convinced myself that I really didn’t look old enough to have lived in an era when wooden ships were sailed by iron men. What I remembered was that we were wooden men sailing on iron ships that were actually made of steel, however I can remember schooners sailing along the coast of New England and I do remember the seven names of a seven masted schooner. In actual fact only one seven masted schooner was ever built and she was the she a 475 foot, steel hulled wind driven collier/tanker named the Thomas W. Lawson, named after a Boston millionaire, stock-broker, book author, and President of the Boston Bay State Gas Co. Launched in 1902 she held the distinction of being the largest pure sail ship ever built. Originally the names of the masts were the foremast, mainmast, mizzenmast, spanker, jigger, driver, and pusher. Later the spanker became the kicker and the spanker moved to next to last place, with the pusher becoming the after mast. Depending on whom you talked to, the names and their order drifted around and a lot of different naming systems were formed. Some systems used numbers and others the days of the week, however there are very few, if any of the iron men left to dispute what the masts were called. The Thomas W. Lawson had two steam winches and smaller electrically driven winches, to raise and lower her huge sails. The electricity was provided by a generator, driven by what was termed a donkey engine. On November 20, 1907 the large 475 foot schooner sailed for England. Experiencing stormy weather she passed inside of the Bishop Rock lighthouse and attempted to anchor. That night both anchor chains broke, causing the ship to smash against Shag Rock near Annet. The schooner, pounded by heavy seas capsized and sank. Of the 19 souls aboard Captain George W. Dow and the ships engineer Edward L. Rowe were the only survivors. Everyone else, including the pilot, drown and were buried in a mass grave in St Agnes cemetery.

Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema noted that "through the entire war, one dream never left us, not for single day : our homecoming to Holland as we remembered it. We did come home, but the memory was crushed by reality and the dream exploded. Our country lay before us unrecognizable, emaciated like a wretch from a concentration camp. We couldn't cope....

The needful sacrifice. These serious, excellent, upright, deeply sensitive people who are still Christians from the very heart: they owe it to themselves to try for once the experiment of living for some length of time without Christianity, they owe it to their faith in this way for once to sojourn 'in the wilderness' if only to win for themselves the right to a voice on the question whether Christianity is necessary. For the present they cleave to their native soil and thence revile the world beyond it: indeed, they are provoked and grow angry if anyone gives them to understand that what lies beyond their native soil is the whole wide world! that Christianity is, after all, only a little corner! No, your evidence will be of no weight until you have lived for years on end without Christianity, with an honest, fervent zeal to endure life in the antithesis of Christianity: until you have wandered far, far away from it. Only if you are driven back, not by homesickness but by judgment on the basis of a rigorous comparison, will your homecoming possess any significance! The men of the future will one day deal in this way with all evaluations of the past; one has voluntarily to live through them once again, and likewise their antithesis if one is at last to possess the right to pass them through the sieve.

Death is before me today like health to the sick like leaving the bedroom after sickness. Death is before me today like the odor of myrrh like sitting under a cloth on a day of wind. Death is before me today like the odor of lotus like sitting down on the shore of drunkenness. Death is before me today like the end of the rain like a man's home-coming after the wars abroad. Death is before me today like the sky when it clears like a man's wish to see home after numberless years of captivity.

she saw the store through new eyes: a place where you could find cocktail dresses from the sixties for Homecoming, surgical scrubs for lounging on sleepy days, a wide assortment of old concert tees, and, if you were lucky, bells, real bell-bottoms, not the back-again retro ones from the Delia’s catalog but the actual thing, with wide flares, the denim tissue-thin at the knees from decades of wear.

The rains were over, the skies shone, and Khasak readied itself for Onam, the festival of thanksgiving. Children went up into the hills at sunrise to gather flowers. For ten days they would arrange colourful designs in their yards with flower petals to welcome the deities of the festival. Ravi heard the children sing on the hillsides, and for a fleeting moment they touched him with the joy of a hundred home-comings. The moment passed, and once again he was the fugitive. A fugitive had no home, and a sarai no festival. Ravi sought to share his fears with Madhavan Nair—the Onam recess would last a fortnight. Would the children come back to dreary routine after that spell of freedom? ‘If I were their age, I wouldn’t !’ Ravi said. ‘You lost your childhood somewhere along the way, Maash. I hope the children find it for you.

And as society modernized, people found themselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day—or an entire life—mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone.

By lunchtime, the cafeteria was buzzing with homecoming news. Ava had decided to join my friends and me at lunch, much to their dismay. “We don’t have any time to waste,” she announced, dropping her salad and water bottle onto the table. She was right. It was Wednesday and the votes for homecoming court were going to take place the following Monday. That left me with two days to get votes. “I don’t know, Ava. I’m not going to be baking cupcakes and putting up a million posters. If people want to vote for me, they will.” Ava shook her head. “No way. We won’t be doing any of that basic stuff. Leave it to me. I have a plan.” Before she could tell me what her plan was, Lucas joined us. He gave me a quick peck on the cheek. “Guess who got nominated for prince.” I had already heard, and I wasn’t surprised. Everyone loved Lucas. What was there not to love? He was cute and had an awesome personality. There wasn’t a mean bone in his body. “Congratulations,

each and every day, reach for something just a little bit more

Some days, the supply of curse words available is insufficient to meet my demands.

It wasn’t until she arrived in New York that she experienced the sense of homecoming she hadn’t known she was missing. The first time she saw the city, it was as if something exploded in her chest—it was that visceral, that immediate a falling in love. New York didn’t feel like a city to her; it felt like a country. The nation-state of New York, where the world’s restless and ambitious gathered, where the misfits and the misunderstood arrived—and the city didn’t so much welcome them as shift just a tiny bit to accommodate them, to test them, to see if they had the right stuff. And if you passed the test, then all of it was there for the taking—the joyful riot of color and smells of Jackson Heights, the eclectic streets of Greenwich Village, the elusive tranquility of Prospect Park, the benches at the Battery, where one could sit undisturbed and stare at the “lady of the harbor.” Smita remembered what Shannon had once said: “This city is like some giant social experiment conducted every single day. This place should be a fucking powder keg—but somehow, it’s not.

Today’s veterans often come home to find that, although they’re willing to die for their country, they’re not sure how to live for it. It’s hard to know how to live for a country that regularly tears itself apart along every possible ethnic and demographic boundary. The income gap between rich and poor continues to widen, many people live in racially segregated communities, the elderly are mostly sequestered from public life, and rampage shootings happen so regularly that they only remain in the news cycle for a day or two. To make matters worse, politicians occasionally accuse rivals of deliberately trying to harm their own country—a charge so destructive to group unity that most past societies would probably have just punished it as a form of treason. It’s complete madness, and the veterans know this. In combat, soldiers all but ignore differences of race, religion, and politics within their platoon. It’s no wonder many of them get so depressed when they come home.

On that momentous day of my first return to my grandfather’s place in Ojoto after many years of my sojourn in America, I was lost in my thought until a light wind blew across the pedestrian path in a wooded area where I stood, caressing the trees’ leaves and small branches. The stubborn leaves swerved in all directions like untrained dancers learning to strut after consuming palm-wine from large calabash jugs. Looking up, I watched weakened leaves snapped off and gained their freedom from primordial trees. A liberation dance followed in the dense air above me before the leaves set down. Listening to beautiful sounds made by birds converging around me, as if they were singing for the newly liberated leaves, I found myself lost in the wonderment of nature. What I experienced had drawn me back to that exhilarating place for mental respite each time I returned home.

One day, Elva visited, as she often did from Brooklyn. Lily and Normon were chasing one another, tripping over their younger brother and all falling into a heap onto the floor. Chun grabbed the two by the arms and gave both a swift rap to the head with a sharp knuckle. Lily swiftly burst into tears. Normon bit his lip, nostrils flaring, refusing to cry. Chun flew into a rage—the eldest needed to model good behavior for the youngest children, and here was the toddler Johnny on the floor, bawling. If Normon was going to be so hard-necked obstinate, then both Lily and Normon, as the oldest children in the pecking order, needed to be punished. With a harder rap to the head, they were soon both crying—Normon’s face breaking open like a floodgate. Before she knew it, at the sight of them, Chun was herself in tears. It’s unclear if Elva put her hand on Chun’s shoulder or cleared her throat and said, Okay, enough, but once she’d ushered the children into their bedroom, she returned to find Chun sitting on a chair. They hate me, Chun said. They love you—they’re just being children. Not them, Chun said. The women—in this building. Why? They know that I am different, Chun said, attempting to explain, but knowing it was no use. For Elva, they were all Chinese at 37 Mott, but Chun was distinctly aware of the divisions. It was embarrassing to talk about such things to her aunt, her only true friend aside from Doshim, and a lofan. Elva was truly puzzled. “Shouldn’t that no longer matter here? You’re in a new country! This is America, after all.” Chun’s natural inclination to try to please Elva, to pretend that things were fine even when things were so bad that mo’ paa, mo’ waa—you can’t crawl, can’t scratch—made Elva’s misunderstanding feel like an anvil pressing down on her chest. “Don’t give up,” Elva finally said, her hand on Chun’s small shoulders, so bony like a little bird, now shaking as the tears began to flow. “I know it seems impossible, but there is always a way.” • • •

Shim could not tell if the woozy light-headedness of nascent love that made his breath catch every time he saw Chun was partially a function of his own interrupted sleep as his hours began matching that of Nethersole’s most in-demand midwife, or the warmth of Chun’s strong, elegant hands when she switched from holding on to the bar under her seat to clutching his waist on a day when they hit a bump and she had to prevent herself from flying off the bike.

My cell service didn’t return all night and all through the next day. It was like living in ancient times, with mead and beheadings and blacksmiths.

It’s hard to know how to live for a country that regularly tears itself apart along every possible ethnic and demographic boundary. The income gap between rich and poor continues to widen, many people live in racially segregated communities, the elderly are mostly sequestered from public life, and rampage shootings happen so regularly that they only remain in the news cycle for a day or two. To make matters worse, politicians occasionally accuse rivals of deliberately trying to harm their own country—a charge so destructive to group unity that most past societies would probably have just punished it as a form of treason.

As the child grows, lots of verbal encouragement needs to be added to stroking. This is a form of protection. Since children can’t live without strokes, they get them by hook or by crook. If they can’t get good strokes, they’ll go for bad ones. You will drink polluted water if there is no other water available. Your wounded inner child probably settled for lots of polluted water. That’s why the affirmations we used for each developmental stage are so important. You need to keep using them. They are the emotional strokes your child needs for nourishment. Go back now and look at the affirmations for each stage. Recall which affirmations were the most powerful for you. Use these for your special strokes. Your inner child needs to hear them every day when you are first learning to champion him. Mine are as follows:

David could never come back to Damerosehay, Ben knew, without that shadow of a fear that something might have been changed and the old rapture of homecoming not be quite the same. Been understood. That was the worst of going away, like David had to. If you stayed at home, as he did, you knew that everything you loved was safe; day by day you watched over it, and if something had to change a little it changed so gradually that it did not hurt.

Today’s veterans often come home to find that, although they’re willing to die for their country, they’re not sure how to live for it. It’s hard to know how to live for a country that regularly tears itself apart along every possible ethnic and demographic boundary. The income gap between rich and poor continues to widen, many people live in racially segregated communities, the elderly are mostly sequestered from public life, and rampage shootings happen so regularly that they only remain in the news cycle for a day or two.

John Deco became the basis of our marketing campaign. We decided to throw John Deco a homecoming party as our launch event. We invited a lot of brokers for food and drinks, and gave out fancy gifts from Tiffany & Co. and Hermès, making sure everyone knew that both of those stores were located right in the area. See what a great neighborhood this is!? Now people were talking about the building. Suddenly, instead of calling the building 99 John, brokers started referring to it as “the John Deco building.” It was no longer just a bunch of units being converted into condos—now everyone knew about the building’s rich history because we had created a story to showcase it to potential buyers. We got our first three offers the next day.

Each time I read that parable in which the landowner gives as much to the workers who worked only one hour as to those who did “a heavy day’s work in all the heat,” a feeling of irritation still wells up inside of me. Why didn’t the landowner pay those who worked many long hours first and then surprise the latecomers with his generosity? Why, instead, does he pay the workers of the eleventh hour first, raising false expectations in the others and creating unnecessary bitterness and jealousy? These questions, I now realize, come from a perspective that is all too willing to impose the economy of the temporal on the unique order of the divine. It hadn’t previously occurred to me that the landowner might have wanted the workers of the early hours to rejoice in his generosity to the latecomers. It never crossed my mind that he might have acted on the supposition that those who had worked in the vineyard the whole day would be deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to do work for their boss, and even more grateful to see what a generous man he is. It requires an interior about-face to accept such a non-comparing way of thinking.

At the foot of the mountain he found another hemlock, almost as pretty as the first. He chopped it down and lifted it on his shoulder. Just at that moment, unwarmed by any sunset light, the gray day darkened into night. He walked in darkness now, for the resin torch had burnt out. He did not mind. The lights of home were within his sight.

I don’t know that either,” replied Olivia. “I’m feelen reckless. Liven each day as it comes. Let tomorrow take care of itself.” Olivia tried to make her voice sound convincingly free of care, but she didn’t succeed. She and Clay-Boy both knew that the money Clay had left with her last week for food had dwindled to less than three dollars.