Category Archives: youth

Beneath General Sherman’s Horse

March 1, 2025 – 10:00 am

Anger. At Anger Management the councilors have claimed that we possess three-second trigger defenses before we pull the trigger. I have always begged to differ. My anger trigger is ‘now’. This afternoon I was on a pleasant walk through lower Central Park from my hospital. Exiting from the zoo I strolled to 60th Street listening […]

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The Vanishing of Belief

January 30, 2025 – 2:14 pm

My Aunt Gloria loved to tell the story about my baptism. The christening was on a hot June day in 1952. Her husband was my godfather. He wore Marine officer whites and a smile. Uncle Jack was glad to be back from Korea. He was lucky to have survived the Chosin Reservoir. The priest recited […]

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BLESS ME FATHER by Peter Nolan Smith

January 30, 2025 – 8:38 am

Written February 10, 2022 My First Holy Communion and Confirmation of Faith to the Catholic Church took place at a church in Maine in 1960. My mother dressed me in white to symbolize the purity of my soul, although she had me wear a red jacket with a black velvet lapel. I had a fight […]

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HEAVY METAL ACCORDION by Peter Nolan Smith

January 30, 2025 – 1:35 am

Every boy has a best friend in his youth. In 1959 I was lucky enough to have two; my older brother Frunk and a neighbor. Chaney and I attended the same kindergarten class at Pinewood Elementary in Falmouth Maine and we did almost everything together boys were supposed to do that far north. In the […]

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All Souls Day

November 3, 2024 – 2:24 pm

My older brother and I were altar boys in the early 1960s Pre-Vatican II. We were taught to say the Mass in Latin by the diocesan priest assigned to the local church on the edge of the Blue Hills south of Boston. We understood nothing other mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa or ‘forgive […]

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