December marks the end of the year, until we get to the last day and we celebrate the start of a new year. Once Thanksgiving is over, everyone starts the big push toward Christmas which is one of the few bright spots in the month. The days get shorter. It’s dark at 4:30 leading to the shortest day of the year on the 21st. It gets colder. It doesn’t have a good image in music and literature. Simon and Garfunkel sing about, “A winter’s day, in deep and dark December, I am alone.” Mr. Sunshine himself, Edgar Allen Poe wrote, “Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.” It’s unfortunately a time to look back on the year.

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When you’re retired you have time to do things you would never think of doing while you were working. One of the guys in our weekly golfing group had the idea to take a tour of the Citizens Bank Park. We were set up for a 10:30am tour on Friday. Our natural instinct is to avoid weekends when the rest of the world does stuff. Five of us piled into one car and headed down to the ballpark. We parked right outside the entrance to the Majestic Store, where they sell all the Phillies gear. It was strange to be there in the middle of thousands of empty parking spots. We went in, and paid our seven dollars. We were joined by a couple from Los Angeles who were big Dodger fans. George our guide met us right on time, and we were off for a behind the scenes look at an American institution.

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Thomas Jefferson said, “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” There has always been an adversarial relationship between the press and the government. The most recent example of this was the confrontation between CNN White House Correspondent Jim Acosta and President Trump at a bizarre and troubling news conference this past week. Acosta has been aggressive in questioning and challenging the president, and his Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the daily White House briefings. Trump has repeatedly criticized CNN for its reporting on his administration calling it “fake news” when it report things he doesn’t like, or it calls him out for making obvious false statements and telling lies. But, the dramatic exchange on live TV between Acosta and Trump was something we’ve never seen before.

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Elie Wiesel is a man who could have lived a life filled with anger and hatred because he was a victim of the worst kind of anger and hatred. Wiesel is probably the most famous of the Holocaust survivors. Wiesel was born in Romania in 1928. He was 15 years old when he and his father, mother, and three sisters were rounded up with his town’s other Jews and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Ninety percent of the people sent there were exterminated on arrival. Wiesel’s mother and younger sister were murdered immediately. Wiesel and his father were picked to perform manual labor as long as they could before they too would be killed. Months later they were transferred to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. In the book he later wrote, “Night”, Wiesel recalls seeing his father beaten and being unable to help him. One night he went to sleep on an upper bunk with his father sleeping below. When he awoke the next morning, there was another man in his father’s bunk. He never saw his father again.

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 I met this young girl on a recent trip to the James Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, PA. It was quite by accident. I was looking for something to do recently. I had been by the museum many times. So, I decided to spend a couple of hours educating myself. I’ve always been interested in art and photography. Michener, one of the great authors of the 2oth Century, was a patron of the arts and a collector. I was immediately taken in by the work of Daniel Garber. Garber was an American Impressionist known for his landscapes in and around New Hope and Bucks County Pennsylvania. Most of his work did not include images of people. Obviously, one caught my eye.

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It’s the most notorious crime scene in modern American history. It reaches from the window of a non-descript warehouse building to the street below, and what happened there changed our country and all of our lives forever. It came without warning and lasted just a few seconds. But its impact horrified us, brought us to tears, and took away our innocence. The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, Texas preserves the place and tries to explain what happened on that sunny day in November when a young, vibrant president was gunned down on a street in the middle of an American city as cheering crowds watched.

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They were intelligent, athletic, attractive, and fully engaged in life. They didn’t know each other. Two lived in rural middle America, one in Washington DC. They were doing what was an important part of their lives. Two were out for a run. One was on a golf course. They had no reason to suspect they would never make it home. They had their whole lives ahead of them. It seems likely they would have had successful lives and careers and made the world a better place. But the dark hand of fate would place them in the wrong place, at the wrong time. What happened to them was eerily similar. It could have happened to any of us, and we should all mourn their loss.

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It’s a box usually buried at the bottom of the sports pages called “This Date in Baseball.” It’s something only real sports nerds or historians would take the time to read. In tiny print, it lists what happened in baseball on that day in history. This weekend I glanced  down the list of things that happened on September 9th. Something suddenly jumped out at me as I read down the list. There were four no-hitters thrown on this date. One of them was a perfect game. Now, no-hitters don’t happen everyday. Since the modern era of baseball started in 1901, there have been 256. There have only been 23 official perfect games going back 140 years , including years before the modern era. I don’t know what the odds are that four of them would be thrown on the same date, but the sports historian in me, and the need to know what many might feel is useless information, I had to find out more.

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I wonder what if it had been me? I was an altar boy from 1959 to 1964. I attended a large Catholic elementary school in one of the largest parishes in Brooklyn, New York. It was so big, we had a bishop as our pastor with about five priests working under him. You felt special being an altar boy. This was before the changes of Vatican II. We would have weekly meetings in the church before school to learn the Latin responses for mass. We could carrying our cassocks and surpluses to school if we had an early weekday mass, or had to leave class to serve a funeral mass. We sometimes got tips from the families for those. I remember a couple of bus trips to the old Madison Square Garden to see a New York Ranger hockey game. We had a big, young athletic priest who as in charge of the altar boys. I heard he was a pretty good basketball player. We all thought it was an innocent time. We now know evil was lurking then, and for decades before and after, when some of the very men we held above all reproach, were committing unspeakable crimes against children like me, and their superiors were covering it up. I often think was I just lucky it didn’t happen to me.

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I’ve spent my life reading. When I started out in school, I wasn’t a good speller. I used to get nervous before spelling tests. But, my spelling got better as I learned to read. It’s such an important part of everyday life. No one can remember when they couldn’t read. Being a journalist, I spent my career reading and writing everyday. Reading is the foundation of all knowledge. It helps us write better, explore and understand the world around us. It takes us to places we’d never get a chance to visit and introduces us to people we would never have the opportunity to meet. It expands our minds to new ideas and opinions and makes us crave more. You can find a book on just about every subject you can imagine.

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