January 17, 2023 The “Nest” is a singles bar for senior citizens here in Indian Wells in Southern California. And there are plenty of us around here, mostly widowed or divorced. “The hot spot in the hot desert” has a reputation all around SoCal for people of a certain age…

This is the University Club on Summit Avenue in St Paul, Minn. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived nearby and was a regular there before and after his sudden acclaaim in the early 1920s. (I grew up a mile away, 30 years later. …

~Thomas Mahon~ On the return from Bethlehem to Nazareth, Mary’s infant Jesus was identified by the town fathers as just another in a long line of illegitimate children who landed there, stretching back through history. His mother would not divulge the father, and who would believe her if she had? But the town leaders knew how to treat such scum. There had been plenty of bastards before him. He would not be allowed in the synagogue. As he grew, the other boys would not play with him. Girls shunned him when he came of age, knowing his offspring for generations would share his shame. All this for a sin he had not committed.

God loves Donald Trump. Does that mean I have to? A god who does not love god’s own creation is a false god. A people who worship such a false god wander false paths. Eleven years ago this week, in August 2011, I came out of a 50-day coma, and…

When I was six, my grandmother, a first-generation Irish-American, told me that grass was green because the wee folk came around every night and painted it thus in honor of blessed St. Patrick. I’d stay awake nights to catch sight of the wee ones, but never did. Yet every summer…

So much of our human history has been based on the notion that my gain comes at your loss. The law of the jungle. But occasionally it happened that a few people got some free time; to explore, to tinker, to muse. · Explorers sought to know the truth of…

I had a buddy in grade school, his name was Roger and he lived across the street. Roger’s father and his uncles had started an electronics company in St. Paul, Minnesota just after World War II, though being a high-tech start-up then was something very different from today. One Saturday…

Deserted, the mansion was a haunted house. Occupied, it was a home for hoods. There was an enormous, deserted house in our neighborhood, on the northwest corner of Laurel and Oxford in St. Paul, Minn. We kids assumed that being deserted it was haunted. One boy, two years older than…

Thomas Mahon — When I left my home and my family, I was no more than a boy, In the company of strangers, in the quiet of the railway station, Running scared… — Paul Simon, The Boxer I escaped my hometown St Paul at age 23 in the spring of 1967. It was a pleasant place then if you never went there. But it had become a prison and asylum for me. Mostly because I had problems in school. I managed to maintain a gentlemanly B- all right, but it was seeing connections or disconnections that I was not supposed to see that got me in trouble.