The private-school league’s middle-school basketball playoffs were home games for Prep.  Prep is the town’s most expensive private school, and their gym is beautiful: spacious, air conditioned, the wall by the entrance made of plastic so the new, impressive weight room is visible on the other side of a hall.  We met them in the...

Spain is a country with strong regional identities.  The central government recognizes four official languages: Spanish, Galician, Basque, and Catalan.  The people in the “periphery” of Spain may refer to Spanish as Castilian, to distinguish it from their own language.  In the Basque country, Catalonia, and Galicia, signs in the regional language are omnipresent.  At...

Saturday afternoon, my sister-in-law, Carolina, called from Bogotá.  She asked me how we were doing—repeatedly, the way her mother does—then she asked to speak to my wife.  My wife wasn’t home, so Carolina asked me to have her call, since “we have a little problem.” Carolina sounded fine, so I didn’t understand why my wife...

The applicant for our research fellowship was a likeable physician who spoke with passion about the mind-brain problem.  My professional world is overrun by people who believe that, if we just do enough imaging studies, in which a subject works on some cognitive test while complex machinery detects which parts of the brain are activated,...

On the day my Brazilian student gave me the kind of reverent statements about Nelson Mandela that I would expect of such a fierce socialist, he also gave me an interesting history lesson.  He reminded me of the coup that had led to 21 years of military rule in Brazil and said that, since the...

I shouldn’t have been surprised; I’d heard similar stories from my wife.  But the more dramatic stories had always involved someone I didn’t know.  This was a seven-year-old girl giving an eyewitness account at the dinner table.   “The guerrillas came to Aunt Lucy’s house and told her to fix supper for thirty people,” my...

My father told me about his combat experience in World War II just once when I was a boy.  I must have been under ten, and we were in a car at night.  My clearest memory of what he told me is the story of the deer his unit killed with their carbines, and of...

I heard the latest twist in the story at the end of our two hours of teaching English at the Catholic mission.  We volunteers taught the Latin American students—six simultaneous classes at different levels—in one big, noisy room.  The noise of our lessons subsided when Sister clapped her hands to get everyone’s attention then started...

The steamy morning reminded the congregation that Baltimore is on the shore and was once considered part of the South. The heat and the elderly substitute for the vacationing rector made the service informal and cozy, but if I had known the small church didn’t have air conditioning, I might have chosen some other Sunday...

I’d forgotten that a Barnes and Noble bookstore had opened in the old department store building. As I walked back to my car in the Baltimore suburb of Towson, I remembered what I’d seen in the other bookstore closer to home, so I changed my path a little, pushed open the heavy door, and headed...

A recent article in the Baltimore Sun gave a wonderful example of how the media view traditional Christianity. Under the headline “Vatican Orders Activists’ Silence,” the Sun presented the latest installment in a local saga that is beginning to rival one of the national soap operas in its duration. In the 1970’s, a Catholic priest...

When I was ten, I fell into the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. With him, I fled the dinosaurs of Pellucidar in the center of the earth; in the company of the anthropoid apes, I sought the fabled jewels of Opar. I wondered at the hurtling moons of Barsoom, and gasped for oxygen in the...

The sun was low as the luxurious chartered bus labored up the steep dirt track to the wedding reception in the hills above Madrid. We walked up the last of the slope from the buses to the lawn in front of the hunting lodge, where we looked down on the distant city. Middle-aged men and...