By Michael Patrick O’Brien– One day many years ago, when I was much younger and visiting the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, I watched two monks in an unusual animated…
Posts published in “Uncategorized”
By Gary Topping– This week our blogger-in-chief Mike O’Brien enumerated some of the ways his unique style of parenting developed, given the absence during his formative years of his father’s…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Should I mark—or even acknowledge—the golden anniversary of a marriage ending? This is the difficult question racing through my mind this month as the 50th anniversary…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– A great advantage we fathers have when dispensing advice to our young daughters about dating and men is that we often have been, in a past…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– I may be the biggest fan of Northern Utah’s Ogden Valley who never lived there. As a result, during a recent COVID-19 sheltering-at-home-and-catching-up-on-my-reading phase, I cracked…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Almost 50 years ago, on October 19, 1972, Mother Teresa of Calcutta (now Saint Teresa of Kolkata) visited the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville. Fortunately, I…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Almost 50 years ago, on October 19, 1972, Mother Teresa of Calcutta (aka Saint Teresa of Kolkata) visited the now-closed Trappist monastery in Huntsville. She was…
By Gary Topping– For most couples, their wedding night is one of the happiest events of their life, but it rarely makes the newspaper. My parents’ wedded bliss lasted less…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– For our 50th birthday gifts, my wife Vicki and I each chose a dream destination trip. For my golden birth anniversary we flew over the Atlantic…
By Gary Topping– Keith Topping, my brother, was three years younger than I, but a generation older. We never got along well as kids, and when the cultural revolution of…