I broke my solitude this week comforted by old dear friends. Taran and Eilonwy sped away my fretful hours with wonderful tales of adventure and honour. When they at last sheathed their swords to take their leave the fire had burned to embers. Suddenly I felt the chill of a solemn night alone looming ahead. But before I could slip om my thick night socks to buffer the cold, some new friends rapped at my door to keep me company. White and Thurber brought with them New England honey to sweeten our tea as we sat recklessly engaged in thought by the fire. These commonplace gentlemen, having never brandished a blade in anger or righteousness, nevertheless knew to add alders to the hearth and gently stoked the blaze with wisdom and humor. When I finally closed my eyes, one sock on one off, my thoughts were lighter and I dreamed till dawn of other friends, far away in the land of Eire, as I lay warmed from tip to toe.

For reasons of filial piety, nurtured with a guilt-ladden phone call and the promise of pie, I ventured north. The drive is a pleasant one, especially when alone; marred only by a persistent fear that I would run out of gas (My carefully arranged budget for round trip costs was endangered by a Dairy Queen).
I approached the doorway causiously, acutely aware of both the icy steps and that this meal would not count towards my community service. I rang the bell. The first few moments with my parents are filled with ritualistic formalities and I was eager to dispense with them quickly. Slowly I backed my way to the kitchen, drawing them in, and just when I felt I could learn no more divine secrets of barometric pressure, I abrubtly asked about their recent holiday photos. In the moment it took to discuss where they were hidden I dashed for the refrigerator and grabbed two beers. I'd converted my father on an earlier visit to Ireland; so we enjoyed our Smithwicks while we waited for my mother to return with the photos. Men lack the genetic coding for lost item retrieval.
Her slow recovery from recent knee replacement surgery ensured us of ample time to finish our beers while she hobbled up and down three flights of stairs. With the football season over and the snow preventing golf, I was in need of a new topic to fill the void. when I popped the caps off the second round I asked about our hometown in the good old days. (This topic will never fail in a pinch, but allow yourself a way out before you leap; In my case the photos would pull us back to the present.) I sat back and prepared my mind for a sunny drive down winding dirt roads, passed the one stop sign around the Giddy-Up-N-Go and through the sprawling junk yard.
I was raised in a standard suburb south of Washington, D.C. known as Dale City. It is an archetype of the species, with small collections of psuedo-neighborhoods, denoted by alphabetical street names from A-Z (As far as T currently), all linked by the main thoroughfare, Dale Boulevard. We lived in the center of the K section on Koester Court. The name itself seemed to come straight from the factory and I always assumed it was a generic name like Townville or Springfield. But mid-way through the second round, with the faint gasp-n-thud of my mother making her slow descent as backdrop, I learned our towns identity.
Dale City was the brain-child of Cecil D. Hylton, the third of six children who grew up on a farm in Centerville, Va. He entered the sod business before the great war then joined the housing industry during the post-war boom. Dale City was his 30 year dream for a planned community to suit first time home buyers. Despite the millions he made from over 20,000 homes built, he lived to his dying day in his town in a house identical to my own, driving around in a beat-up Ford.
A tribute to his entrepreneurial spirit, perhaps, but the name of his legacy wouldn't bear his name at all. Instead Dale City is named after his eldest son, killed in action during the early stages of the Vietnam War. With only a Blizzard in my belly and two beers besides, I was felling more than a little sentimental for my old Burg, and the man who's dream it was to honour his son.
I thought all through dinner, (which my mother had to start once she landed on the ground floor, so I never got to see the holiday photos) about this man who's sense of civic pride had lead to a life time of giving. After the pie I looked him up on the all-seeing Internet Eye and discovered that his charity's donations helped build the local hospital, countless churches, and community centers while sponsoring education grants for the less fortunate. All my thoughts lead me to one conclusion as I pulled into the Wendys on my way home; praying a quarter of a tank can last 80 miles. With all that our town meant to the two of us, Do you think he'd help a brother out?

"...'criticism' has today become an ugly word.It conjures up pictures of insidious radicals hacking away at the very foundations of the American way of life. It suggests nonconformity and nonconformity suggests disloyalty and disloyalty suggests treason, and before we know where we are, this process has all but identified the critic with the saboteur and turned political criticism into an Un-American activity instead of democracy's greatest safeguard." --Adlai Stevenson (1956)

"the matter of 'faith' has been in the papers again lately....The Herald Tribune headed the story PRESIDENT SAYS PRAYER IS PART OF DEMOCRACY. The implication in such a pronouncement, emanating from the seat of government, is that religious faith is a condition, or even a precondition, of the democratic life. This is just wrong. A President should pray whenever and wherever he feels like it, but I don't think a President should advertise prayer....If there were only a half dozen unbelievers in America, their well-being would be a test of our democracy, their tranquility would be its proof." --E.B.White (1956)

"I value and trust those who love and praise my aspiration rather than my performance." --Sir Arthur Helps

"Metals unite from fluxility; birds and beasts from motives of convenience; fools from fear and stupidity; and just men at sight." --Sir Arthur Helps

"a free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps." --Robert Benchley

"Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; That his justice cannot sleep forever." --Thomas Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia

"Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong." --ibid

"Living moments do not come of committees" --Cardinal Newman

"Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up." --Henry David Thoreau