Posts in Chronological Order

Dave Loomis, one of my fellow editors, selected which letters to the editor would appear in the paper. At the time, I didn’t think to ask to see the unedited letters, nor did I think to ask to see the letters he did not select for publication.  So I cannot know if the letters that…

Bub At one point, Shirley MacLaine had told us to contact our soulmate. I had always thought of soulmates as romantic connections, but to my surprise the soulmate who showed up was my cousin Charlie Reilly, known to his family as Bub. He was seven years older than me, and to me he seemed a…

Remembering Bub Newspaper reports talked about a heroic death in an unsuccessful attempt to save a seven-year-old from a fire. His viewing filled the funeral hall with people; the funeral Mass was con-celebrated by nearly a dozen priests; attendance at the funeral was among the largest in years. I can imagine Charlie Reilly looking on…

On the Friday after the seminar, before my article appeared, I called my brother Paul in California, and told him that I had had a dream in which Bub said, “The first 40 years were mine. These are yours.” I was 40 years old at the time. So far, he’s right on target. But what…

Six cousins. On the left: Margaret, John, and Frank. On the right, Anne Marie, Francis and Charles Reilly. We need to look back to my childhood, which was dominated by asthma, and by the woods behind the house and across the street, and, after age 11, by books and by a good deal of daydreaming,…

And then there was the long shadow of John F. Kennedy. I’ve never known anything like it. Not before, and certainly not since. Hero-worship is one thing. It wasn’t that. By age 13, I had already had heroes, not only fictional heroes but real ones, like Abraham Lincoln. What is a hero, anyway, but maybe…

[Sitting in eighth-period study hall on that ghastly Friday afternoon, writing  on the back of half-used three-hole punched lined paper, which is what I had available:] [First page] The President is dead. Kennedy killed. His wife and children. He’s dead. Lyndon Johnson is the President of the United States. [Segueing to the unknown assassin:] Death…

Phew! I find it hard to read all that white-hot emotion even now, all these years later. You can see the boy’s attempt to be honest, filtered through so many illusions about the world and about himself. He reaches naturally for the pen to relieve the intolerable pressure, and he has to fight to not…

It seems clear that it was never in the cards for me to lead a normal life, whatever “normal” means. When external circumstances were normal, my own peculiarities assured that my experience would be different. When external circumstances were unusual, what I took from them would be even more unusual. Many decades later, I would…

I find it hard to explain how completely isolated I was. I had no friends, and didn’t know how to go about making friends. My community had always been my family: my brothers and sisters, really. But John was in the Air Force – had been for six years – and in 1960 Margaret had…