These Books Are Not For Burning by Josh Stallings

Q: The building’s on fire, what books do you save?

A: Easy, the books that matter are my signed editions. This year Thomas Pluck gifted me with signed first editions of most of James Crumley’s oeuvre. Tom knows how important Crumley is to me. The Moses McGuire trilogy is a love letter to Crumley’s tarnished drunken knights. Three books were missing, Dancing Bear, luckily my friend Steven Hertzog gave me a signed first edition years ago. That leaves only A Right Madness and The Wrong Case, (weirdly these are his first and last detective novels,) I will find them sooner or later.

So after I make sure Erika, our sons, and the four legged beasties are safe, I will run back in for the Crumleys and that’s it.

Charlie signed this to our son Jared after seeing his punk band play.

Ok that and the books Charlie Huston signed to me and my family. He has been a friend and supporter since I first stumbled onto the crime scene. That’s six Crumleys and seven Hustons. Nothing else.

Except for November Road, a brilliant book, and Lou Berney signed it with a wonderful note to Erika and I. 

Looking on my shelf Bad Boy Boogie screams, “Yo gonna let me fry?” How could I leave signed Thomas Pluck books behind? 

I have signed copies from my oldest best mate, fantasy writer Tad Williams. Young Americans is dedicated to him for good reason. We lived through so much, and more to go.

It’s been said that book are old friends. These are old friends written and signed by dear friends. Picking up Monday’s Lie, I remember Jamie Mason signing it at Bouchercon San Diego. I moderated a panel she was on. I had no idea we would remain good friends over the years. 

Every book here has memories attached of the book and the writer. When Erika couldn't make a conference, Catriona McPherson signed a copy of Scot Free to her.

The first time we met Terry Shames was at Noir Bar Los Angeles, she signed a copy of her first book to Erika. She remains one of my favorite writers and people. So yeah, her books are coming.  

What about Eric Beetner or Gary Phillips’ books? Johnny Shaw? Todd Robinson? Sara J. Henry? Hillary Davidson? All great writers and old friends. Yeah, their books are coming along. 

Stuart Neville added a drawing to his signature. As did Scott Phillips when he signed Ice Harvest. Got to keep those.

I have a copy of Chandler’s “Farewell My Lovely” published in Russia and signed to me from actor Victor Wong. He was in a movie I wrote and edited that was shot in Russia. This book has personal value and the back where it explains english idioms to Russian readers is priceless.

And the books of Ian Ayris, my brother from another world. Ian signed April Skies to me  praising my memoir, “It helped me more than you will ever know.” I feel the same way about his work.  

Ok, tally up time. I count thirty six heavy books that must be saved. Maybe I can drag those out of a fire in one trip… maybe… until Erika chimes in, “What about the children's books we read to the boys?” I look at the covers and remember reading to Dylan and Jared. I read Where the Wild Things Are so many times I could read it with my eyes closed, and I did some nights. 

I just asked Jared if he remembers any particular books he was read. “Yeah, Where the Wild Things Are, Everyone Poops, and Goodnight Moon.” The children's books survived the move to the mountains and the downsizing of our life, they will not burn. Not even hypothetically.

Erika’s beautifully bound with original art work Folio editions? Yep. Those are simply too beautiful to let burn.

Books have been a part of my life since before I was me. They are attached to memories, they are gossamer threads that help me drift back. Winnie the Pooh is a very little me lying on my father playing with a Steiff bear and hearing the words rumble up deep and rich from his chest. 

Peter Pan is my mother reading to us from the very book she was read to as a child. It was faded and magical. My mother was Wendy and we were her wild children.

What books would I save? 

All of them, clearly. Wouldn’t you?

Who knew? (I knew.) by Catriona

 Reading: The building's on fire - what books do you save?

As Susan said on Monday, this is not a theoretical exercise for those of us who live in northern California. In the summer of 2020, the wildfire evacuation line got within three miles of my house (the fire itself was five miles off, but clearly visible day and night). I put all paperwork from birth certificate to tax receipts in one suitcase and a selection of clothes for the two of us in another. That's what Case 1 and Case 2 stand for on this evacuation plan, which I wrote then and still have on my desk.

Two things: first, Rachel coming third isn't an indication of her not being at the top of "save me" list - honest! - it's more that I didn't think of her as a thing to be packed, rather as a member of the household to be included. Also, would you look at that? No books.

The sentimental items that got a mention here are my two most cherished paintings - one a portrait of my late grandfather and one a commissioned landscape of our old house in Scotland - and then, in hopeful but realistic brackets, all the other paintings, drawings and numbered prints, since they are genuinely irreplacable.

Today - well, Monday when I read Susan's post - is the first time I've ever considered saving books from a fire. The interesting thing that came out of the pondering was that it reconfirmed something I've always believed: I'm a reader first and a writer second. 

Whenever people say they can't read while they're writing, it makes me more sure that, if that was true for me, I wouldn't be a writer. (Like when one year of English literature at university made me dislike Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh and I promptly switched degrees.)

This mental exercise confirmed my hunch. Read on . . . First, I thought about saving the five books that made me a writer. I'm looking at them in a wee pile on the other side of my study right now:

Pride and Prej, Catch-22, I Capture the Castle (and in such a lovely edition, right?), The Water-Method Man and Gone With The Wind. These are five books that I read at a sitting - yes, even the doorstop - and that left me excited and inspired, with a transformed idea about what a novel could be. 

But I wouldn't save them. For a start, it's one thing to be honest about the fact that GWtW blew seventeen-year-old me away that weekend in the 1980s. It's quite another to save five books out of thousands, at the age of fifty-seven, and let one of them be actual Margaret literally Mitchell. Um, no. (Plus I could get a nice Capture ...)

And what of those thousands of other books? Lots of them are lovely editions, many of them are signed, some of them are treasures from childhood. Through the Bible, by Theodora Wilson Wilson exerts quite a pull, because of the inscription written at Christmastime 1942, when my grandad gave it to my mum (way to pick a present, Mack!), Or the fragile copy of Wee Magreegor, which was the first book an adult ever loaned me. My best friend's dad - Ralph Beer - handed it to me with great solemnity and I carried it over the road to my house like a sleeping baby. I was touched when Catherine gave it to me for keeps, many years later, after Ralph died.

But if I opened that glass-fronted bookcase where Wee MacGreegor lives along with all the other beautiful vintage books I've collected - everything from O.Douglas to Erle Stanley Gardner - in all their kitsch glory, I'd be a goner.

Nah, there would only be one choice, really. The TBR shelves. If the flames were licking at the door, I would scoop all the books I haven't read yet into a wheebarrow and trundle them out to the truck, where Neil would have the engine running and Rachel would have started sharing her heartfelt opinion about the how her day was going.

See, I know what I've read and I could replace it (or not, you know, if it was a slog at the time) but I've got no firm grasp on what I've bought but haven't got to. I'd like to be able to pick up where I was before I was interrupted by the disaster, and keep reading.

I'm a reader. And here's the final proof. I was halfway through writing this post before it even occurred to me that a second wheelbarrow trip could get me every edition of everything I've ever published. They're on a set of shelves in my study, nice and handy. But I surprised myself. There's only one thing in this last picture that would definitely be in the truck that dreaded day.

Cx

 

No hard choices here... by Cathy Ace

Reading: The building’s on fire, what books do you save?

NOTE: I shall assume every life is saved, and there’s no danger involved with rescuing “things”, because I’m sure we all agree that things don’t matter at all if anyone’s health or wellbeing is in jeopardy.

First of all: 

NOT BOOKS – sorry! – but all the albums containing photos I haven’t yet saved digitally. Yes – not words at all, but images that are irreplaceable. Why? I recently spent weeks sorting through ALL my family’s 70+ photo albums, and have digitally saved hundreds of photos for myself, recording the history of my family, and my life. Thus, the power of such records is front and centre of my mind. (A couple of examples of photos I saved appear below.)

My great-great-great aunt who was Postmistress in Hay-on-Wye
(yes, the family connections to the places I set my WISE Enquiries
Agency Mysteries go back that far)

Then:

Books signed by authors who are no longer living.

My laptop and separate hard drive, because I also have a lot of books stored there, including all the working documents of all my own books!

My Kindle (so a couple of thousand books right there!)

I drag my arm along a shelf of books and hope they all land in a suitcase…not because I can’t buy these books again, but because these specific volumes have been with me for DECADES, and have my soul imprinted on their pages alongside the words of the authors.

The early-nineties, with my maternal grandmother

After that? There are books the (still living) author has signed, or has even signed specifically for me: I’d like to say these were higher on my list of priorities, but if I lost them, I could make it my mission to repurchase the books and get new signatures – so that’s almost a win.

For me? Books are replaceable, the memories associated with specific volumes aren’t.

So there we have it - people, photos, special books, digital books, irreplaceable books, books. 

Want to find out how I use my family's history as an inspiration? Well, that's woven throughout my work, so you could start anywhere - but on the 24th July, the 8th WISE Enquiries Agency Mystery will be published...just saying!

https://www.cathyace.com/

Of Fire and Forgiveness by Gabriel Valjan

The building’s on fire, what books do you save?

 

In loco parentis. The Latin phrase means ‘in place of a parent.’ Today, I am the writer asked to rescue someone else’s child, and anyone who knows me knows I’m a driven person, an impatient person, especially with myself, and I dislike (intensely) talking about myself.

 

Like the mother asked who is her favorite child, my answer speaks volumes (couldn’t resist the pun). What a person reads may betray their moral values (or lack thereof); their fantasy life, or how they see the world and people around them. Except for the last point, the same could be said about a peek inside a refrigerator, into a person’s closet, and their DVD collection. All of this, of course, presumes evidence in plain sight, books in physical form. Now that there are Kindles, we can hide gigabytes of evidence

 

My library is where I write. Writing is monastic, lonely, and daunting because there are no guarantees that what you write will be read. My library is private, personal, and communal in that I can turn to authors on the shelf.

 

To answer the question, I need to provide context. I write crime fiction. Unlike writers who research crime, use their imagination and say, what if? I have known criminals and I’ve known victims. When it comes to this duality, the hardest lesson to learn is Forgiveness of self and others; for this reason, the author’s whose book I would save is Elie Wiesel’s Night.

 

I first read his Night in French after I had taught myself the language so I could read my favorite short story: Flaubert’s “The Legend of Saint-Julian the Hospitaller.” The story contains one of the most stunning sentences I’ve ever read. If you’ve read Flaubert in the original, you know he’ll send you to the dictionary often. After Flaubert, I explored French literature. I read Elie’s Night, first in French. The language is simple, stark, and the volume, slim, though the subject matter defies language and speech. I told Elie as much and it prompted Elie to disclose something that had embarrassed him and caused him shame.

 

The precursor to Night was written in Yiddish and massive, at over 800-pages. The French and subsequent English translation are anorexic by comparison, at a devastating 200-pages. Night, the first in a trilogy, documents life in Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Elie Wiesel had survived both rooms in Hell.

 

If there was ever an example of ruthless editing, Night is it. Elie admitted that he owed his publication in French to the novelist (and already a Nobel Laureate) François Mauriac who relentlessly shopped La Nuit among French publishers. Note: Elie was a polyglot, and he wrote in French. Initial sales were flat, but momentum did pick up with reviews and interviews. The rest is literary history.

 

Elie’s crime, by his own admission, was how he had treated Mauriac. Horribly.

 

When the two men had met, Mauriac was 70 and Elie, 27. Mauriac helped shape the French text, made suggestions, but honored Elie’s final decisions. Elie was emphatic about Mauriac’s support. Mauriac called publishers and showed up at offices, copy in hand. Elie was not forthcoming about what he had said to Mauriac, but he told me the old man remained resolute, stoic and steadfast. Elie said he had acted disrespectful to a man who had no reason to help him, a man who risked his reputation on his behalf. Elie called his behavior shameful displays of youthful arrogance and a profound lack of gratitude.

 

I suppose it’s conjecture on my part, but I think the younger Elie was responding to French antisemitism and Catholic indifference to Nazism—and for those who don’t know Mauriac is one of France’s great Catholic writers, considered the greatest novelist after Proust, and the only writer within the French Academy to publish essays against the Nazis. He would later become an outspoken critic of Franco in Spain. When the two writers met, however, Mauriac had not known about systematic extermination within the concentration camps. Elie’s writing cured him of that ignorance. I suspect Elie’s anger circled around these facts and, at a subliminal level, Mauriac had become the father Elie had lost [among other family members].

 

Elie said he learned forgiveness from a Catholic, by example.

 

Mauriac never harbored any recriminations. He wrote the Foreword to La Nuit.

 

François Mauriac died in 1970. Elie Wiesel died in 2016.

 

I admire the love, respect and friendship between these two writers. My copy is a personal connection to both men. I remember Elie Wiesel as a rumpled version of François Truffaut as Detective Columbo. He carried the sadness of the world with him. He learned to smile, yet he always had a tear in his eyes when he spoke about Mauriac. His capacity for self-awareness, his choice to extend compassion to himself, and forgive himself, has endeared him to me.

 

His memory has been a blessing.

 

Fire! Fire!

 Q: The building’s on fire, what books do you save?

-from Susan

 

Not entirely hypothetical here in CA, alas. Not that I’d add a book to my go-bag with computer, two cat carriers, and box of documents, but if I could load the car with a small box of books, let’s see…

 

Honesty demands I admit the first books would be my own 6 novels in their various print and audio formats. With that out of the way, I’d be looking at my long shelf of signed and personalized books by writers I admire, among them several Minds colleagues, plus Sara Paretsky, Deborah Crombie, Rhys Bowen, Ann Cleeves, Sue Grafton…uh oh, I’ve filled the hypothetical banker’s box and I’m only partway through that shelf. Maybe to make my list, the books would have to be first editions?

 

I’d reel off some classic fiction, but there’s nothing that isn’t available easily in replacement hard copies. But, wait, I have the 1948 edition of Dante’s The Divine Comedy with the stunning Gustave Doré illustrations that was in my parents’ library and that terrified me when I was ten. 

And an illustrated Canterbury Tales, circa 1946, with Arthur Szyk’s extraordinarily personable illustrations. Again, I sought out an old copy because I remembered it so vividly from childhood. 

Sadly, I don’t have any of the seminal books I cherished as a child, and some of those editions aren’t available even from rare book dealers, so that category is represented only by the few I searched out (and probably paid ten or twenty times their original retail prices to collect for my own nostalgic reasons).  

 

If this were a desert island challenge, I know precisely: Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, Ulysses, the Chaucer, The Forsythe Saga, anything by David Sederis.

 

Pivot: Are there non-fiction books I have to rescue, and why? But how to sweep into the small space left in the banker’s box? Maybe something by David Engleman, partly because his books are short, and tickle the brain. Maybe The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert because if I were fleeing a climate-caused fire, some serious thinking about where our planet is going would be a sobering reminder of why I was in exile. Two art catalogs for sure, one of Richard Diebenkorn’s work, and one from a recent, stunning exhibition of their work that shows beautifully how thoroughly he was inspired by Henri Matisse. I probably couldn’t resist cramming in the exhibition catalog of the Impressionists in Winter that burned itself into my soul years ago.

And now, the box is full, too heavy to lift, and I’m staggering to the car, where the cats sit in their carriers, meowing nervously, and the sane part of me wonders why I felt I needed to curate a box of books as the smoke rises? But, of course, books are life, they feed our souls, challenge our intellect and emotions, teach us everything (including how to write). 

 

One last thing. I’d take my Kindle!

 

Ignorance is Strength

 by Abir

If you could take a literary pilgrimage vacation, where would it be? What writer or work would you celebrate?

 

Take a journey. That’s what the missive said. A literary pilgrimage. 

 

I should have realised at the time that it was not real. A false memory. Still, for reasons I now cannot fathom, I did what was asked. It was not far after all. A journey of forty minutes into London. Forty minutes and almost forty years in time.

 

I remember the walk to the station as though it was a dream…which I suppose it was…the whole thing just a preposterous hallucination… summer colours, vivid, brighter than life…a golden country, with no war, no screens and no…but I should not be thinking of that.

 

It was upon the train that things began to change. Where exactly I don’t remember. Esher? Surbiton? Certainly by Wimbledon. A shimmer passing through the compartment. Clothes altering, faces hardening. Outside too, the rows of Victorian housing changed, the three-up, two downs morphing, sagging, cratering; suddenly stained like a row of rotten teeth. 

 

The light changed too. Darker. Soot-ridden. 

 

I recall the prickle of fear. The sweat breaking at my neck. I knew this place of course. It was my home, though at the time it felt like a different world, something out a novel.

 

London grew around us. Decaying suburbs of battered buildings, broken windows, bomb craters. Feral children playing amongst the weeds and the dirt and the rubble, and in the distance, those four pyramid-like structures punching into the sky, gleaming white. The slogans written on their faces.

 

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH,

 

Shock spasmed across my shoulders. Those buildings – the Ministries – they were the physical manifestation of the power of the Party. Indestructible. Everlasting. They would rule over London now and for ever. And not just London, but the whole of this place. 

 

For a moment I struggled to remember what the country was called. England? Britain? No, that was not right. That was history; from the time of the capitalists with their top hats and their king and their jus primae noctis. 

 

The train slowed. Opposite my window was a gable-end. Sagging, buttressed by wooden staves, its entire face was covered by a poster. One giant image that calmed and cowed in equal measure. That fatherly face with its eyes that bored into you, and suddenly the name of this country came back to me. This was Airstrip One, itself just one of the many provinces of the state of Oceania.

 

The shock must have registered on my face, for when I turned, a woman was staring at me. Not a prole, but a party member, the outer party at least, in blue overalls. The same colour as the ones I’m wearing. I reset my expression and a moment later it is as unreadable all the others in the carriage – the party members that is - not the proles though. They laugh and chat and argue as though the laws don’t apply to them. Which I suppose they don’t. Only animals and proles are free.

 

The train pulls into Waterloo. For the longest of moments I sit there, unsure what to do and where to go. In my head I recall I am a tourist, on a literary pilgrimage, but as they told me later, that was madness. There are no tourists in Oceania. Only spies.

 

I rise in a panic, descend onto the platform on the heels of the others: proles and party members. All around are telescreens and black shirted, rifle-toting guards, but they don’t matter, because there are no laws anymore, because there is only one crime. Thought Crime.

 

I shuffle forward to the barriers, unsure if I even have a ticket. Desperately I search the pockets of my overalls. My fingers pull out a half-stub of grey card. The second half of a return ticket. I hand it to the inspector and realise too late that my hand is shaking. He notices, and stares at me. Cold sweat drips down my back.

 

‘Where are you coming from, comrade?’

 

I struggle to recall. 

 

‘Woking.’

 

‘And what business did you have in Woking, comrade?’

 

What am I supposed to tell him? That I’m not from here? That I’m on a literary pilgrimage? He’ll think I’m mad…or worse…a spy for Eurasia or Eastasia or…Goldstein.

 

‘Inspecting preparations for Hate Week,’ I tell him, hoping he might believe the lie. ‘Woking’s done a bang up job.’

 

A nod of appraisal and I dare to hope he might leave it at that.

 

‘May I see your papers please.’

 

My fear rises. I search my pockets.

 

‘Papers, comrade.’ There is steel in his voice now.

 

I continue to search but find nothing. At the corners of my vision I see men approaching. Big men. Hard, like tombstones.

 

I remember the blow to the head and then the black of night. When I came to, it was in that place where there is no darkness. A man in black overalls standing over me. A bespectacled face. Calm but powerful. 

 

That was the start. The start of my rehabilitation. Where the false memories were exposed. Where the idea that I had a life in a different time and place were purged and burned. 

 

Room 101…I don’t want to think about it. The pain, the torture. The re-education. But I am thankful to them. Oh yes. They saved me. They purified me; broke my body and reassembled it in HIS image. 

 

And now I sit here, in this café. The Chestnut Tree it is called, where the waiters, unbidden, bring me clove-flavoured gin in steady supply. I’ve been staring at the pages of the Times for what seems an age, but I can’t concentrate. 

It does not matter. 

All that matters is that face watching me, watching over me from the poster on that wall. What radiance. What omniscience. What supreme power

 

I love Big Brother. 

A Journey to the Past from James W. Ziskin

If you could take a literary pilgrimage vacation, where would it be? What writer or work would you celebrate?

Indulge me today as my literary pilgrimage is to my own past and my very first published story. “The Priest and the Monsignor” appeared in 1984 in The Ball State University Forum. At the time, I was a graduate student living in Philadelphia and was constantly moving from one rotten apartment to another. I submitted my story but changed addresses and never received an answer from the editor of The Ball State University Forum. It wasn’t until thirty years later that I discovered “The Priest and the Monsignor” had been published.

 

I reprint it here without revision. You’ll see all its warts—passive voice, flabby sentences, loose editing—but I’m giving myself a pass since I was only a fresh-faced twenty-three-year-old when I wrote it. 

This story represents for me a lesson in perseverance. My first novel was published twenty-nine years after I “sold” my first story. (In truth there was no payment, but you know what I mean.) You can only succeed for the first time after your very last failure. Never give up.

 

And now, after thirty-nine years, I give you my once lost, cheekily profane, epistolary story, “The Priest and the Monsignor.”

 

 

THE PRIEST AND THE MONSIGNOR

JAMES ZISKIN

 

2/14/83 Anno Domini

Father Hennessey,

It has been brought to my attention by Father Quigly that there is a problem with your catechism classes. Be assured that we are not questioning your knowledge of the Scriptures, nor your teaching ability. Rather, the problem is somewhat more specific. Father Quigly's concern stems from your last three lessons, all of which dealt with the "Song of Songs." Although both Father Quigly and myself consider the Old Testament to be a very suitable text for catechism, we wonder if more attention might be paid to the New Testament. I am sure that this was an oversight on your part and that you will quickly remedy the situation.

 

With Christ our Lord,

Monsignor Comisky

 

➕ ➕ ➕

 

Monsignor,

Trust that your letter of 2/14 was received and its suggestions, although unnecessary, have been well heeded. Despite Father Quigly's questionable intentions, I must point out that I was merely using the "Song of Songs" as an example of sinful love and that I had every intention of getting around to the New Testament. I would like to add that Father Quigly has been acting very hostile towards me ever since his Crusaders of Our Lady of Mercy were clobbered by my Cardinals of Saint Louis in the Church League basketball finals. As you will recall, Father Quigly claimed that our 113 to 19 victory margin was excessively high.

 

With praises on high,

Father Hennessey

 

➕ ➕ ➕

 

2/19/83 Anno Domini

Father Hennessey,

Wouldn't your correspondence be easier to file if you put the date at the top?

 

As for Father Quigly's ire over the shellacking your Cardinals gave the Crusaders, perhaps he should have turned the other cheek. On the other hand, need I remind you that I am an alumnus of Our Lady of Mercy? 

 

Concerning your catechism class; although I am pleased to hear that you have moved on to the New Testament, I fail to see the relevance of describing in detail Mary Magdalene's sinful ways, prior to her knowing Jesus Christ our Lord. Suffice it to say that she was an adultress! Might you not spend more time teaching the Gospel? What about the Virgin Mary?

 

Holier than thou,

Monsignor Comisky

 

➕ ➕ ➕

 

2/21/83 A very good year

 

Monsignor,

I am troubled by Father Quigly's gross misinterpretation of my catechism lessons. If he were to pay closer attention he would realize that the detailed description of Mary Magdalene's carnal sins was intended to better illustrate the miracle of her conversion by Jesus Christ our Lord. The fact that she was a woman of ill repute, who fornicated and performed unnatural acts with men for money, is proof of the power of Christ! As for the Virgin Mary, please be assured that my very next lesson will deal with the Mother of God.

 

With beads in hand,

Father Hennessey

 

 

➕ ➕ ➕

 

2/24/83 Anno Domini

Father Hennessey,

I was glad to learn that your last lesson on the Virgin Mary was very well done. However, given past problems with your curriculum, I would like you to send me a copy of your syllabus.

 

With Christ on Calvary,

Monsignor Comisky

 

 

 

➕ ➕ ➕

 

2/27/83 Ano Domini

 

Monsignor,

 

I truly regret that you have so little faith in my pedagogical methods, especially since it is Father Quigly's myopic evaluations that dissuade you from my side. Did you know, Monsignor, that Father Quigly has frequently been seen snacking on Eucharistic hosts behind the altar? Be that as it may, here is the syllabus you requested of me.

 

Father Francis Hennessey

Instructor

 

CATECHISM I

WEEK 1: Baptism (i.e., introduction)

WEEK 2: Creation and Fall

WEEK 3: "Song of Songs"

WEEK 4: Ash Wednesday, first week of Lent (We gave up class)

WEEK 5: "Song of Songs"

WEEK 6: Pope's birthday (no class)

WEEK 7: Mary Magdalene: "Puta Dei"

WEEK 8: Virgin Mary

WEEK 9: The Apostles: "God's Dirty Dozen"

WEEK 10: Holy Week (no class)

WEEK 11: Spring Break (no class)

WEEK 12: Church League basketball finals (no class)

WEEK 13: Field trip to Times Square

WEEK 14: Field trip to Notre Dame vs Fordham basketball game

WEEK 15: Ascension (no class)

WEEK 16: Week after Ascension (no class)

WEEK 17: Final exam

 

Blessed art thou among women,

Father Hennessey

 

 

➕ ➕ ➕

 

3/2/83 Anno Domini

Father Hennessey,

 

Could you spare an extra ticket for the Notre Dame-Fordham game? Also, how about brushing up on your Latin?

 

Vale,

Monsignor Comisky

 

 

➕ ➕ ➕

 

3/5/83 Ano Domini  A.D.

 

Monsignor,

I can let you have Father Quigly's ticket: fifth row, center court.

 

Genuflecting,

Father Hennessey

 

 

➕ ➕ ➕

 

 

3/7/83 Anno Domini

Father Hennessey,

 

Bless you,

Monsignor Comisky