Mark Knows It All

My mother loved catalogues. In fact, she was addicted to them. Beginning in August, she would get stacks of catalogues delivered daily much to the chagrin of the post office. On a light day, she would get ten in the mail. I won’t tell you how many on a heavy day. And she would buy something from almost all of them, which in turn resulted in more catalogues sent to her. As she got older, I would stop to visit her and literally move the catalogues from her mail box to my car to my trash can at home. It was a little scary. I am not a catalogue shopper except for food. I love food. But what is delivered never matches what is pictured and very expensive. So I threw what few catalogues I got out…except for one. Tucked midst the naked, writhing bodies of Abercrombie and Fitch and the glitz of the Neiman Marcus Christmas was an innocuous little catalogue with a different print and paper quality. Sometimes it would even be in black and white. It came from the Vermont Country Store and rapidly b...

So I was having lunch with a friend of mine the other day who is a non-Catholic. Stories abounded on television about the beatification of John Paul II, one of the most popular popes in my lifetime, if not for hundreds of years. My friend asked me: “Why would people pray to a dead pope?” I was taken aback. I am a lapsed Catholic who considers himself to be an Episcopalian while currently attending a Lutheran church…don’t ask. I just assumed everybody knew why people would pray to a dead pope…or any of the saints for that matter. “What is it that you expect him to do?” he queried further. Being raised Catholic, I never questioned the saints. I explained to my friend that we don’t pray to the saints for a direct act. We pray to the saints to intercede on our behalf with God. “Can’t you do that directly yourself?” he further inquired. He got me there. The Lutheran in me began to come out. A few days later, I talked to another Catholic friend about the conversation. My friend said that I n...

Every now and then I come across a magazine article that is just too good to pass up. George Will wrote an editorial in last week’s edition of Newsweek giving us a snapshot of America in 2010. Here are some of the interesting facts contained in the article, but tweaked with my sparkling commentary. 1) Democrats compared Republicans to Neanderthals, which was probably close to the truth. In 2010 we learned that 4% of the human genome of modern non-Africans comes from the extinct Neanderthals who mated with our migrating forefathers in Europe. Quick, find me a woman to drag by the hair. 2) 52% of American adults are married in 2010 compared to 72% in 1960. And you wonder whatever happened to family values!!!! 3) The government owns General Motors. General Motors is building the electric Volt to quell government global warmers. The government is giving a $7500.00 tax credit to anyone who buys a $42,000.00 Volt. The government has to borrow the money from China in order to give the tax cre...

It could have happened to anyone. It was an ordinary day. My wife and I had a major celebratory event occur in our lives and I wanted to commemorate it with a piece of jewelry. I had picked something out a month ago. I even put it in layaway and had been making weekly payments on it getting it down to a balance that I could afford to pay off. I owed $x,xxx.00 on the balance of the bauble, and this weekend marked the event. Would she be surprised! Being the pseudo computer geek that I am, I paid the balance owed to my credit card company on line the day before I went to pick up the little sparkly so I wouldn’t have to write a check. On Friday, off to the jewelers to get my shiny gift out of hock. It was soooo pretty, all laid out in the leather bound folder. “Do you want it gift wrapped?” asked the lady. “Of course I do!” I responded. The owner of the store is a friend of mine. We belong to the same club. He runs a hell of a business. The store, as usual, was filled with customers. Bill...