By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Popular Christmas carols, and a well-known poem by Clement Moore, paint a happy symbiotic relationship between Santa Claus—Saint Nicholas—and his local deer herd at the North…
Posts published by “Mike O'Brien”
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– My boyhood record player turntable often blared out a song, recorded on a little red 45 vinyl rpm, in which a flower lamented, “I’m a lonely…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– My father-in-law Robert Comeau, a man I had never seen weep, teared up one day as he watched me riding bikes outside with my young son…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– One of my favorite Notre Dame memories involves college football, of course, but not gridiron success. Instead, this happy memory involves rather painful failure, and the…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– The new Tom Hanks movie A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is giving me some rather intense flashbacks. My mind is awash with memories of that one morning…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Much of the new millennium’s chatter is about innovative and cutting edge ideas, such as sustainability. Many of these “new” concepts, however, long have been part…
By Gary Topping– Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon last summer featured a table of books labelled “Must Reads,” or some such thing. My wife bit, and purchased Rebecca…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– During our 2011 trip to Ireland, my three young children often had an odd reaction to the many lovely monuments to Irish historical events and figures that we…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Sometimes I worry that my ora and labora are out of whack. Although the two words sound somewhat orthopedic, I am not thinking about the aging…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– The photo is like an impressionistic painting, where blurred images somehow manage to depict clear reality. Or, in this case, reality transcended, for it is my…