Maura Casey's Blog

Sometimes the most memorable experiences are the quietest.

That happened to me one week when I was working as an editor in New London, Connecticut, around 20 years ago. Much of my job at The Day, the midsized daily newspaper where I worked, involved putting together a four-page section of different viewpoints that appeared every Sunday. During slow weeks the task was challenging. I was not above sifting through the mail to see if reader contributions too lengthy to publish as letters were worth running as columns instead.

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That was the case with one wordy letter, although my first, emotional impulse was to toss it in the trash. The letter went on a harangue against a fixture in the region: Cal Robertson.

Cal by then had stood for 20 years on the steps of a monument dedicated to soldiers and sailors while holding up signs. “Will Children Have a Future?” was one. Another: “No more war.” Six days a week, in brutal cold and shimmering heat, he would stand as a silent witness as cars and people passed by. Sometimes he would stand at other locations, such as the Naval Submarine Base several miles away. But he could almost always be seen near the monument dedicated to members of the military.

Cal’s quiet activism outraged the letter writer, who questioned, in a sneering way, why he didn’t find something more constructive to do.

I knew immediately that the paper should run the letter, but not without giving Cal equal time. So I walked the block or so to the monument to ask him to come to my office, when he was done with that day’s vigil, and dictate a rebuttal. It would take time. He had lingering brain damage from a blood clot and spoke very slowly.

When he came upstairs to my office, he read the letter from the irate reader, carefully set aside his signs, sat down and began, haltingly, to explain his life’s work.

Cal had been a medical corpsman in Vietnam during two deployments in the 1960s. The experiences haunted him and he regretted his youthful decision to join the military for the rest of his life. When he came home, he said, he drank for years and was hospitalized in the 1970s with the blood clot that would forever after keep him from speaking normally. After that, he got sober, and began his quiet demonstrations.

He had no animosity toward the letter writer and meant no disrespect to anyone. But his silent witness - his signs against war, against violence - was his job, he said. He lived with his parents. His disability benefits paid for his few needs. The vigils were his life’s work.

Screenshot of online story in The Day on the death of Cal Robertson

After we published both letters on the same page, there was an outpouring of support for Cal and no obvious support for the man who criticized him. People had the deepest respect for Cal, for his message and his dedication. Not everyone was a fan, of course. But whenever I saw him at his post, the thumbs-up signs and honks of support from drivers seemed to far outnumber those who didn’t like what he was doing.

Cal died Jan. 3 at the age of 80, and now there is another outpouring of support and memories from the public. One Navy veteran recalled that Cal was standing with his signs in the mid-1980s outside the submarine base when he joined the submarine force, and 26 years later when he retired, Cal was still at his post.

It has been a while since Cal was well enough to stand vigil six days a week, but he still attended the occasional demonstration for peace. At one, a woman recalled, police parked and approached the gathering. She became apprehensive. But the cops just wanted to say hello to him.

The power of example is the most underrated of all influences. Cal didn’t make moving speeches. He never ran for office. He wasn’t well known beyond a little corner of New England. But many years before “social influencer” was even a thing, he influenced others by his singular dedication to a better world. His vigils made people think. They were silent reminders that we could be better, do better. That matters. So did he.

For nearly 20 years I wrote opinions for a mid-sized newspaper, The Day of New London, Conn. Behind the newspaper, directly across the Thames River, was the manufacturing complex of General Dynamic’s Electric Boat, one of just two American submarine builders.

In the early 1990s when America’s Cold War battle with the Soviet Union was clearly over, many in the area credited - you guessed it - submarines. Submarines, bristling with nuclear weapons, stealthy and hard to detect, proved so formidable that the former USSR had no choice but to submit. I heard this from workers, journalists and Navy officers alike.

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My brilliant Jesuit friend, Bernard Bush, found this to be a too-convenient rationalization of a bloated military budget. What did he think ended the Cold War? “Prayer,” he said simply. If he was going to speculate on something nobody could prove, he preferred to believe that prayers for peace had a powerful role.

I, too, believe in the power of prayer, so I would like to think that Bernie was right. We could use prayer right about now.

This has been an awful week with a Minneapolis woman, Renee Good, gunned down by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who stepped out of the way as she turned her extremely slow-moving car away from him. He shot her three times, killing her instantly. That’s bad enough, but what followed was, in its way, just as brutal. Government officials, from the President on down, spouted personal attacks and lies, saying Good was running over agents and was a “domestic terrorist.” Their conclusion? The killing was HER fault. And the answer: To send hundreds MORE agents to swarm Minneapolis.

Photo by Jack Skinner on Unsplash

This came after a three-week period in which Trump ordered bombing raids in rural Nigeria, in Somalia, and captured the leader of Venezuela and his wife while declaring that the country is now ours, after which he threatened military action against Greenland, Columbia, Mexico, Iran and Cuba.

I am left with the overwhelming urge to hide under my bed.

I have never felt more sheltered, here on our farm, far from agents dressed in black searching any neighborhoods near us. I have felt the sweet peace in this rural corner, where nothing is heard when I walk the dogs before going to bed but owls hooting at one another in nocturnal dialogue.

However, reading multiple newspapers a day - a habit ever since my first reporting job more than 40 years ago - keeps me tethered to the outside world. My worry about the country’s direction abates temporarily during long walks.

“Solvitur Ambulando” says a sign above my desk; Latin for “it is solved by walking.”

During walks these are the few answers that come to me: Help your neighbors. Give to the right causes. Write letters in protest. Show up to marches. Do everything you can think of to throw sand in the gears of the churning machine of injustice currently operating out of the federal government.

Pundits say that real change may come in the midterm elections, but those are in November, 10 months away, and a lot of damage will be done in the meantime.

I can attend all the “No Kings” protests possible, but what really needs to happen is this: The 535 members of Congress need to stand up. The vast majority of Democratic members are making themselves heard; a tiny fraction of the Republicans who control Congress have as well. But most of these sidestep questions, duck reporters, equivocate, avoid, evade or loudly support the president and his minions. They need to find a conscience, if they have one.

If my friend Bernie was right and prayer is more powerful than humanity’s bristling weapons, if prayer can change the trajectory of history, then my prayer is this: May we all fight against injustice, but most of all, may the limpid majority in government find their spines.

Happy New Year and thank you for your patience while I took two weeks off!

I am told that if you live with two golden retrievers, this is probably your situation:

One dog will be an old soul. The other dog will act like a crack addict.

Seems about right.

We have two golden retrievers (my husband’s idea). Zoey is the old soul. She is calm, and has an instinctive obedience that her sister, alas, does not share. Not now. Not ever.

Her sister is Bella. She leans towards hysteria. If I go out to the mailbox, she will greet me when I walk back into the house as if I just returned from military service overseas. Zoey may open one eye as she naps.

It’s hard to believe they come from the same litter.

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If you inadvertently drop Bella’s leash, she will bolt, rejoicing in her freedom. Good luck in catching her and hauling her back. Yesterday, Zoey’s collar dropped off by accident, leaving her free as a bird. She tilted her head, confused, and sat down as if to say, “I will just sit here until you pull yourself together and reattach my collar.”

Bella will try to knock down anyone who comes into the house. Upon meeting someone new, Zoey will sit and gravely offer a paw - which we never taught her,

But what really sets Bella apart is the tendency that she has exhibited for years and yes, through the holidays. She. Eats. Everything.

Seriously.

Bella, left, relaxing. Zoey, right, dignified as usual.

The grandkids know if they want to run around without their shoes in my house it has to be in bare feet, because Bella will take the socks off their feet and eat them. Ask me how I know. Granddaughter Elle has learned to put her beloved stuffed elephant, Anya, up high where Bella can’t reach, lest it become a snack.

Bella has, in no particular order, eaten used teabags (can cause a stomach obstruction), a large flower from a rhododendron bush (poisonous to dogs), and, basically, anything she could think of. I haven’t had gum in years because it has ingredients poisonous to dogs. Ditto, raisins and grapes. All deadly, apparently. Anything to avoid another vet bill.

So Bella has a rap sheet. But in the days before Christmas, she outdid herself.

Pete decided that the pooches needed toys for Christmas. He got a long toy that the dogs could chew, and maybe use to play tug-of-war. What could go wrong? He gave the foot-long toy to Bella, who did a zoomie in triumph, and promptly ATE IT. The entire thing. Without so much as a burp. Zoey didn’t even have a chance to give the toy a lick. Doggie Dad raced Bella to our vet. Two hours and $500 later, Bella expelled the toy.

Bella’s toy before it became a meal. Can you imaging EATING this?

But she wasn’t done. The very next day, Christmas Eve, while Pete walked her, Bella spied a dead mouse, snapping it up and swallowing it before Pete could say, “I am tired of paying my vet’s mortgage.”

If we knew how the mouse died, we wouldn’t have worried. Say, if the mouse saw Bella and committed suicide, well then, fine. But we have traps outside the house, with poison. A poisoned mouse could hurt Bella, or even kill her, we thought. We made her drink a small amount of hydrogen peroxide, which normally makes dogs vomit within about 20 minutes. But Bella just smiled.

Our regular vet had closed by this time, so we began to drive to the emergency animal hospital an hour away. When we called ahead, the vets told us to call a special animal poison control number first.

We pulled over, and after being on hold, talked to a vet (for a $100 donation to an animal shelter). She told us not to worry. The mouse wasn’t big enough to kill Bella, although it could give her a tummy ache.

We drove home. Bella, cheerful as ever, didn’t lift an eyebrow.

I could be annoyed. But I am resigned. We’ve had both dogs for four years now, and no matter what stupid thing Bella does, I cannot help but appreciate how she openly adores our granddaughters and manages to get a grip on her excitement to avoid jostling them.

And both pets become my therapy dogs whenever I turn on CNN to see what fresh hell President Donald Trump is inflicting on our country and the world. In those moments I have been known to bury my head in their fur.

Zoey lifts a paw and places it reassuringly on my arm. Bella leans into me and puts her head on my shoulder. During those few moments, I close my eyes, sigh and think, I guess I don’t mind the vet bills after all.

Golden retrievers are famously good with kids. Bella, above, openly adores granddaughter Ellie and Ellie, in return, is her biggest defender.

There are days that the world is too much with us.

I was going to write a Substack post a few days ago when I was engulfed by a tsunami of news. The violence of the world seemed to overshadow the season. Jews attacked and murdered on Bondi Beach, Rob Reiner and his wife stabbed to death, allegedly by their son, and a murderer, still at large after killing students at Brown University in Providence, R.I. Then a beloved Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor gunned down in his apartment entry.

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It’s been a really dark week.

Providence is an hour’s drive away from my house. An elderly retired couple I know has a house very close to campus. After the shooting they locked all their doors and ate their dinner in near-darkness, worried that the bay windows in their kitchen would give an assailant a clear shot.

It’s really hard to believe in the goodness of most of humanity when the evil few can create such chaos and terror.

My Christmas tree, which should have cheered me, seemed to be a mere gesture of light that amounted to little comfort as I absorbed the news.

Then I realized I had forgotten something.

Mom’s ornaments, including one of the angels.

My mother’s ornaments. Not all of them; the delicate, intricate gold balls and stars danced on the branches of the tree.

But her marble angels, the expensive ones, the ones for which she saved her pennies. I had somehow forgotten them.

I was 20 when my mother died, When her end came from congestive heart failure, the only money she had came from alimony and her precious veteran’s disability pension, which she earned due to her worsening health and her Army service during World War II. Her income did not amount to much. She died with $87 in the bank. Yet she also never spent money she didn’t have.

Every year, Mom saved a little bit of money to spend after Christmas.

There was a store in our neighborhood that sold beautiful ornaments. My mother could never afford to buy before Christmas. She would wait until after Christmas when they were half price.

That’s how she acquired marble angels to clip onto sturdy boughs of our Christmas tree, symbols of the cherubim welcoming the Christ child as his bewildered parents huddled together during that long-ago night. My mother’s eyes shone as she clipped them, one by one, into the tree.

Mom must have known when she bought them that she didn’t have long to live. I had to write my book, “Saving Ellen: A Memoir of Hope and Recovery,” to figure out exactly what Mom knew and when she knew it. Several Christmases before she died, doctors told her that her flagging heart would never allow her to live to see me or my sister Ellen graduate from college. She kept the news to herself and told only her best friend.

Yet knowing her time was short, Mom still bought the ornaments. She still delighted in their beauty. She still reveled in hope, in its mystery and eternal message.

So I went to the attic, found the box and put up the angels. Tucking the ornaments in our tree, I also thought of my mother. She had so little money. But she had assets that no money could buy: a relentless optimism and an insistence on believing in goodness despite everything, that better times would come someday. For me, these angels are symbols of those qualities.

Mom knew that she wouldn’t have these ornaments for long, but she bought them anyway. Now her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren admire them and think of the tiny but courageous woman whose hands caressed the angels that still rest on the boughs of a Christmas tree.

Some weeks, the news is just awful. We cannot deny reality. But we can leave room for a sliver of light, a sign that the world hasn’t been completely enveloped in darkness. We can believe in the message of the angels, and choose hope.

Happy holidays to all who celebrate.

Saturday night I filled a notebook page with the reasons I am grateful. For the smiles of my granddaughters and rewarding work; for my husband, who cooked dinner; for the first snowfall and hot cocoa; for a warm house. …

… and, thank the eternal God, for 40 years of sobriety. 

Dec. 6, 1985, is when I suffered my very last hangover and what a doozy it was. The night before I had dinner and drinks in a restaurant overlooking the harbor of Annapolis, Maryland.  I was attending a conference with journalists from all over the country. The conversation sparkled; the drinks flowed; and despite my vow that I would have only one or two, I didn’t stop drinking until 2 a.m.  Because when our group boarded a bus for the ride back to the hotel, someone hauled a case of champagne on board and began uncorking the bottles. Well. Leave no booze behind, right? 

When I awakened, I felt like that raccoon whose photo went viral last week after breaking into a Virginia liquor store and glugging down too much peanut butter whiskey. 

In my befogged state, though, one thing was clear: I was done. I had set a limit and blown right past it, a sign that I was developing my family’s disease of alcoholism. I swore I would never be like my father, whose drinking haunted my childhood, and here I was, lurching down the same well-worn path.

I told nobody about my decision. It became clear a few weeks later when I stopped by a watering hole in my old Buffalo neighborhood. It was owned by three Greek brothers, and I had been a very good customer indeed before I moved away to New England. As I walked in with friends and relatives, George, the bartender, instantly sent to our table a complimentary tray holding a dozen shots of ouzo, the anise liquor that I had tossed back with him on more than one occasion.

I freaked. Trying not to panic, I passed around the shots to others while I ordered a Diet Coke. My husband Pete, joking, said, “Are you planning on attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting now?”

“Maybe,” I replied.

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There are 10,000 ways to get sober. At first I white-knuckled the process of not drinking, not one day at a time - hell, I wasn’t strong enough to think in terms of days - but more like 10 minutes at a time. Not drinking felt as though I were covered in mosquito bites that I could not scratch. I just had to sit there, feeling the overpowering itch, feeling the temptation to scratch, and not daring to even lift one finger.

That lasted for a long time.

Making friends with sober people helped eventually. So did the first nonalcoholic beers which came out around then. Several months later, Pete and I scraped together money to buy our first house, which had not been painted in 30 years. We would work from ladders in the summer sun while we listened to baseball on the radio. I would paint and think about how much I wanted a cold beer. One day, Pete offered me a nonalcoholic beer. I looked at him with complete contempt — really? Fake beer? — but tried it. And, who knew? It tasted enough like the real stuff that I could pretend.

It helped take the itch away.

There are 10,000 ways to get sober. Nonalcoholic beer might tempt some people to start drinking the real stuff. But it never did with me. When it comes to staying alcohol free, after 40 years I don’t know what is the magic juju. I can only say with certainty what has worked for me. Sober friends, AA meetings, meditation and substitutes for drinking. Green tea. The occasional ice cream cone, and to heck with the calories. Home was always safe; Pete, who could care less about drinking, was the easiest person for anyone struggling with sobriety to live with. But journalism gatherings were another matter.

At conventions I learned to hang with nondrinkers. Joanna Wragg, an associate editor for the Miami Herald, showed me the neat trick of turning my wine glass upside down at dinners so no server would tempt me by saying, “White wine or red?” When conferences became too boozy I would turn to Richard Aregood, editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Daily News, “Richard,” I would say, “Take me away from all this.” We would make a beeline towards the nearest ice cream parlor where we would talk, eat sundaes and laugh for hours.

There were close calls, but angels always appeared in disguise. When I arrived at one conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, a bellhop carried my bag into a sumptuous hotel room and handed me a separate key to a cabinet. I opened it to reveal a bar with all of my former favorites, notably Labatt lager and Canadian Club whiskey. “I’ve been sober for two years,” I blurted out. “Let’s keep it that way,” the bellhop said. He immediately plucked the key from my hand, locked the cabinet, put the key in his vest pocket, and left.

There are 10,000 ways to get sober. Yet I know that if someone had told me in 1985 that I would not have a drink for four decades I might not have had the courage to start. It took years to know the difference between “I cannot drink” and the evolution it takes in behavior, thinking and maybe prayer to say, “I CAN not drink.”

Yet the smell of whiskey will, even now, make me salivate. It doesn’t matter how many years have passed since I had my last dark drink while watching the lights twinkle in that beautiful harbor. I was blissfully unaware of the journey I was about to start. And after all this time, I know it will never end, which is one more reason for me to be grateful.

This is an Alcoholics Anonymous “chip,” given to mark years of sobriety. “XL” of course, are the Roman numerals for the number 40. Like numbering a Super Bowl, no? Fitting, because staying sober is my Super Bowl!

In one of my more obnoxious moments as a journalist, I once asked a spokesman how many people our state’s governor wanted to die before he made it easier for people to obtain Narcan, a nasal spray that reverses opioid overdoses.

My question wasn’t worded fairly and I knew it. But I had gotten tired of the blah-blah-blah answers concerning rising deaths from opioid overdoses. I had watched as surrounding states made Narcan easily available as an over-the-counter drug. Connecticut still expected addicted people or their families to fight through bureaucracy and see a doctor before getting access to a life-saving medication with little or no side effects.

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The spokesman was outraged and asked me to repeat my question, which I did, slowly, word for word. (Months later, the policy finally changed). He was angry, but let the record show that he never called me, “piggy,” “third rate,” “ugly, inside and out,” or a “stupid person,” all invectives that President Trump has lobbed at female reporters in the last few weeks.

“My, how he fears strong women,” as my friend and fellow journalist Connie Schultz wrote on her Facebook page after Trump berated ABC news reporter Mary Bruce.

As a narcissist who can never soak up enough praise, getting pushback from a woman is apparently more than he can stand.

‘You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?’ - Joseph Welch

My husband has a theory that this reaction goes beyond Trump’s customary sexism. Pete, bless him, thinks that female reporters are the only ones who refuse to back down, who routinely ask the toughest questions.

I sent an email to my friend Linda Feldmann asking what she thought. She is Washington bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor, one of the nation’s great newspapers. Linda has covered the White House for years.

As befits a good, cautious journalist, Linda replied in an email, “It would be very difficult to prove,” but wrote that, “…there are many fearless women in the press corps - including Kaitlan Collins (CNN), Jacqui Heinrich (Fox), Annie Linskey (Wall Street Journal), Maggie Haberman (New York Times), and of course Catherine Lucey (Bloomberg) and Mary Bruce.”

Linda is too modest to include herself among them, but for a great sample of her own courageous reporting on this administration, read her recent article, titled, “As Trump’s power has risen, so has his wealth - all in plain sight.”

My guess is that Trump’s contempt for women will only motivate female reporters to double down, to work harder at making plain the Trump administration’s incompetence, corruption and abuse of power that is becoming more obvious by the hour.

When I worked as a journalist full time I didn’t really give a damn when people objected to my opinion writing and I’m pretty sure these women don’t either. I had a wall of honor in my office where I taped the subscription cancellation sent to me from a candidate for office whom the paper did not endorse, a letter telling me to stick to writing about “misunderstood bimbos” and one calling me a queen bitch.

All part of the job.

Yet I continue to be gobsmacked about the unwillingness of Trump supporters at all levels to speak out at his obvious abuses and thuggery, and for Republicans in public life to be cowed by him, afraid of triggering the torchlight parades on the internet and elsewhere that might come of speaking out.

There has yet to be a Joseph N. Welch moment that turns the tide.

Welch was chief counsel for the Army when the notorious, brow-beating lout and red-baiter, Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy began to investigate the armed forces for harboring communists. Called before McCarthy’s committee in 1954, listening as McCarthy smeared a young lawyer at his own law firm, Welch famously stood up to McCarthy when he said, “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

The audience in the room, citizens and reporters, burst into wild applause. Welch’s response exposed McCarthy for the abusive bully he was. In effect, it finished McCarthy’s career. Yet not before McCarthy had done enormous damage in four years of committee hearings that slandered famous and ordinary people alike with accusations and invectives. He ruined hundreds, maybe thousands of lives.

Why it took so long for prominent people to speak out then, and is taking so long now, is a mystery.

Meantime, my sister journalists, keep writing, reporting and always remember who the real piggy is. Hint: It isn’t you.

Sometimes, writing is all about managing the tempo. This was simple for me while I worked for a daily newspaper, but when I wrote my debut book, “Saving Ellen: A Memoir of Hope and Recovery,” (Skyhorse Publishing, 2025) it became a a fraught task, considerably more complicated. That’s when I had to figure out when to vary the tone from one chapter to the next - sort of like composing music, I suppose, although my musical talent is nonexistent.

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At one point in the middle of the writing I realized that the tone of my book was getting a little heavy. I wasn’t writing a comedy, although you can’t survive growing up in an alcoholic household without plenty of dark humor. But I thought it was time to give the readers a break.

So I wrote a brief chapter about the late summer day when millions of monarch butterflies descended on the small island in Lake Ontario where we had a cottage and stayed for a few days. They covered every surface. The beautiful orange (and sometimes yellow) butterflies covered so many trees that overnight, the entire island looked as though autumn had come in an instant. They transformed our world, however briefly, and 13-year-old-me took their arrival as an encouraging sign that my sister, struggling with kidney disease, would get the transplant that was then considered a medical miracle. And she soon did.

That short chapter, which I wrote as an afterthought, became the beautiful cover of my book.

It proves once again that brilliant graphic designers can express with one work of art what it would take ink-stained wretches like me thousands of words to convey.

When delicate swarms of monarchs graced us with their presence in 1970s, little was understood about their migration patterns. Now we know that these beautiful creatures travel from north to south every year, from Canada and the northern United States to colonies in Mexico and even South America, covering thousands of miles.

A butterfly on our farm in August.

A very cool study (gift article here) has revealed even more about these elegant creatures. Though the wonder of teeny-tiny tracking devices weighing 60 milligrams, attached to 400 monarchs this year, scientists can now dish out more details. Such as how they navigate (via the sun and, amazingly, internal compasses that detect the angle of the Earth’s magnetic field). And how far they can roam (one monarch began in Ontario and was last detected in Guatemala). And how perilous is the journey; as few as one in four may make it to arrive in places where their ancestors spent the winter months. Scientists still don’t understand how the butterflies know how to find the same areas where great-grandma sunned herself years ago, and so far, the monarchs aren’t giving away that secret. That’s OK. I’m just grateful to them for making the weeks-long migration.

For we need them. As pollinators, they are crucial and yet threatened. Human influence, in using insecticides, causing climate change and all the casual and cruel ways we manage to damage the natural world have reduced the monarch population significantly. I have seen butterflies all over the small farm on which we live, helped along because my husband almost never sprays and when he does he uses an organic substance such as neem oil that is not toxic to bees, birds, other animals and plants. I smile when I think that people hike for hours in obscure corners of Mexico to see what I experienced as a teenager, but I worry that the odds are against the butterflies.

And yet, every time I have brought my book to libraries or signed them for people at conferences or in bookstores, the lovely cover - butterflies against blue - has reminded me of that long-ago day when my world transformed overnight and I felt the hope of which these beautiful creatures are a symbol. The chapter that I once considered an afterthought inspired the cover of my book and has provided me with an ongoing reminder of hope.

It has been, and continues to be, a gift.

In the United States, we will celebrate Thanksgiving on Thursday - happy Thanksgiving to all my readers, whether or not you celebrate, and know that I am always grateful for you.

Two weeks ago, I received more compliments from men sidling up to me than I have gotten since I last possessed a beach body during the Farrah Fawcett era 45 years ago. But alas, it was not my glorious silver hair, my rapier wit or my Irish good looks that attracted swarms of male attention.

Nope. It was my jacket. Specifically, my father’s 40-plus-year-old University of Notre Dame jacket, which I wore to the UND-Boston College game Nov. 1 in Boston. The experience taught me that sometimes sports has far less to do with competition, and more to do with memories.

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I wasn’t supposed to be there. With my encouragement, my husband Pete had purchased tickets to the game so he and our son Tim could attend. I often don’t enjoy live sporting events — I’m too small, and I often have to fight to see the action, particularly when the crowd leaps to its feet — so I wished the two of them well.

But over several days, Pete had second thoughts.

“You go,” he said. “Your father went to Notre Dame. He played football there.”

“Yes, but he always said he was mostly, ‘cannon fodder for the varsity squad,’” I said.

“But you’ve always said you wanted to see a Notre Dame game,” Pete said.

Tim in sun, me in shadow, but both of us happy.

That much was true. In the 1980s, my dad invited me several times to join him on organized bus trips from Buffalo to South Bend to see a football game — a nearly 12-hour jaunt one way — but, killjoy that I am, I could never bring myself to attend a bus trip in which every single bus passenger would get a Bloody Mary at 7 a.m. to kick off the journey. To my Dad, that was part of the fun. But his drinking made me fearful as a child, irritated as an adult, and in my early years of trying to stay sober, I could not imagine attending. After he died in 1987, I wondered, despite our complicated relationship, if I should have gone after all.

Pete insisted I go to the game in his place.

I finally relented.

I dug out my dad’s Notre Dame jacket, which my brother Seamus had given my son when he was a teenager. “Tim, do you want to wear your grandfather’s jacket?” I said.

He looked at me in disbelief. “Mom, that jacket hasn’t fit me since I was 15,” he said.

True. My son is 6 feet, 2 inches tall. My father was a head shorter.

I tried it on. It was loose, but fit fine over my layered clothing.

After Tim and I drove 90 miles, we parked, caught the “T” (Boston’s nickname for its mass transit), disembarked and began to walk the mile or so to the stadium.

Then the compliments began.

“Hey, great jacket,” men would say. Every time, I would reply that I wore my dad’s jacket, that he played football for Notre Dame, but usually warmed the bench, and that he had passed away in 1987. My explanation would open the floodgates. Their eyes would go wide, and their own stories would begin. They would explain their own ties to the university or what inspired them. Sometimes, it was just being Irish. Sometimes, it was the remembrance of watching a game with their own fathers, alive only in memory. The ties went deep.

My Dad never stopped talking about his college years.

One man told me his favorite uncle was a Catholic priest who had been on staff at the university. “I go to South Bend every year to lay flowers on his grave…and to see a game, of course,” he said with a wink. Then he turned serious. “You should go there, you know, for your dad,” he said.

“Maybe,” I said.

My father never stopped talking about his college years. My sister Claudia said once, with the pointed sarcasm of an adolescent, that she was pretty sure his life stopped on graduation day in 1944. The rest of us agreed. His stories reflected, to me, his longing for the carefree days before he had a family and six kids to support.

But maybe it was that the school became his second family, a celebration of his Irish heritage, his beloved Catholic faith, and all the endless possibilities of his life before worry, financial struggle and disappointment intervened. The school had been a place where everyone knew his name. No wonder that, in his 60s, he took that long bus trip.

In the stadium, hearing story after story in between plays, I couldn’t help but notice how many people had a personal reason for attending that went well beyond competition, often entangled with emotions, memories of someone they loved, or pride in someone still with them.

One young spectator in his teens waved a poster with a big, color picture of his sister, a Notre Dame cheerleader, on a squad nearly as athletic as the players themselves (they were utterly amazing).

“See that?,” he yelled as the cheerleaders did one gravity-defying flip in midair after another. “That’s MY SISTER down there!” We all cheered for him and for her, although I couldn’t help but reflect that when I was his age, Notre Dame barred women from attending. But times do change, I thought, cheering a touchdown and appreciating the good seats my husband bought. The day had turned blustery. The game was hard-fought. In the end, Notre Dame won, but not by as much as had been predicted.

Throughout, my Dad’s jacket kept me warm. As did my memories of him.

When my kids were in school, they and their friends thought my journalism job at a daily newspaper was the coolest ever (I had to agree). I would regularly invite their classes to the newspaper for a tour, pizza and a conversation about news. But besides the pizza, the highlight of the visits may have been the stack of photographs I gave them from the Associated Press wire, discards that the newspaper didn’t need. I would cull the photos and set the best ones aside for weeks before the visits.

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The boys would get pictures of sports heroes.

The girls? I would always give them pictures of female presidents and prime ministers. Alas, they were always from other countries – Panama, Ireland, Great Britain.

The girls would ask me why America had never elected a female president. My answer was always the same: You will see it within your lifetimes, and maybe mine. But because most other countries have a parliamentary system of government, I would explain, the equivalent of a prime minister would be our Speaker of the House of Representatives, the leader of the majority party in the most representative body of Congress.

Reuters/Downing

That hadn’t happened, either, but someday it might, I would say.

Then Nancy Pelosi came to power; she ultimately wielded the speaker’s gavel for eight years. She had the confidence, before she took her oath of office, to invite all children present to come join her at the podium. They came running, surrounding her in that ornate room, with its marbled pillars and aura of history, to share even more history with a woman leader not afraid of showing her love of kids.

Pelosi, who stepped down from party leadership in 2022 and announced this week she would not run for re-election next year, had standards and morals that she applied to government policy. Obamacare never would have been signed into law without her. Despite its flaws it has given millions of Americans the closest we have ever come to government health care for the masses. This became personal when my son went to graduate school; with his small income, he went on Obamacare and paid exactly $3.87 a month for insurance coverage.

When President Donald Trump came to office, he tried to bully and belittle Pelosi, showing for her the contempt and misogyny he shows most women. She wasn’t having it. She consistently refused to back down. When Trump stormed out of a meeting with Democrats during his first term, she said to reporters, “I am the mother of five, the grandmother of nine. I know a tantrum when I see one.” Pelosi led two impeachment attempts against Trump, which passed in the House but failed because of political cowardice in the Senate.

Pelosi on Trump: ‘The worst thing on the face of the Earth.’

No surprise, then, that there is no love lost between the two. Recently Pelosi described Trump during a CNN interview as, “The worst thing on the face of the Earth.” Trump, upon her announcement this week that she would retire next year, described her as, “an evil woman.”

Part of Pelosi’s public appeal goes well beyond policy making. Pelosi stood up to Trump in a way that he could do little about but fume. Yet he is enraging to me and millions of other women not merely because of his abundant character flaws, but also because we know his type. Most of us have worked with someone like Trump – someone who is ignorant, supremely confident withno apparent justification, sexist and yet too often has the upper hand.

I remember the compositor in charge of pasting up my editorial pages who would ignore corrections and deliberately send them to press with glaring errors; the abusive newsroom troll whose stated goal was to make female reporters cry. They were and are the weeds of the workplace. Pelosi has been not only the anti-Trump, but the anti-bully as well, a woman who knows how to smack down the office thug.

Pushback is sweet, even if it never comes often enough.

When I worked as an alcoholism counselor in Buffalo in the years before I became a journalist, a very high-level New York state official came one day to lecture employees of a local public detox center - people with the toughest and most thankless jobs, in the front lines of providing care to the poorest people. The official was arrogant and condescending. When he stopped talking, the room was silent.

Then one woman on staff raised her hand. Rose Creehan was a recovering alcoholic with decades of sobriety, a veteran of helping street people get sober. “Can I ask a question?” she said. The high-level bureaucrat nodded curtly. Rose had been smoking (we all did then). She stubbed out her cigarette, looked directly at the official, and without raising her voice, said. “What are you, some kind of an asshole?”

Rose instantly became my hero. Decades later, Pelosi did, too. Standing up to bullies is an act and an example that never dies.

Americans have always had a love affair with Halloween, but in the last few years true lunacy has taken over. This became apparent to me a few days ago as I was driving to a meeting in a location I was unfamiliar with. The gathering was being held in a country church. As I drove down a serpentine road in pitch darkness, I suddenly came upon 12-foot-high goblins, skeletons and various monsters looming over the lawn of an otherwise nondescript house. I veered, nearly drove into a tree, parked and stared. The blow-up ghouls did provide needed light on a street as dark as a coal mine, but, really?

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Decorations go on sale during summer, so no wonder that a similarly elaborate display stands before a house about a half-mile from my own. This one is replete with skeletons, but with one unique difference. The skeletons scream every few minutes, completely freaking out my dogs if I happen to walk past during their timed, blood-curdling shrieks. It makes me wonder: If someone on the street screamed for help, would anyone react? The nearby residents are becoming accustomed to continually hearing the sound effects of a horror movie. But at least a few residents are elderly, and maybe they just turn off their hearing aids.

I’m not really the Grinch who Stole Halloween. I like it still, and loved it when I was a child, even without dancing skeletons around the house. In my day, the holiday was preceded by Beggars Night, a sort of Halloween lite, an excuse for the bravest among us to dress up and go door to door to collect candy for two nights, not just one.

Photo by S L on Unsplash. Not my neighborhood, but close!

Mind you, the success of the holiday depended on good weather. We all feared a single thing: snow. In Buffalo, the city in which I grew up, it wasn’t an unusual sight to see snowflakes drifting down in October. If the weather was cold, we would have to put winter coats over our witch, ghost, or scarecrow costumes, opening our coats like flashers after screaming “Trick or Treat!” at every door to prove we were really in costume.

And who doesn’t enjoy dressing up? Even as an adult, I dressed as a vampire when my son, Tim, was in eighth grade, and we gathered his friends to celebrate. That delighted them, but to surprise me, three of them dressed as me, complete with gray-haired wigs. (Love those boys.) It was the ultimate compliment.

Twenty years later, my daughter, Anna, now has two daughters of her own, Riley, 2, and Ellie, 6, and she assures me that Halloween is not just one or two nights. It feels like a month, she told me, a note of exasperation in her voice. The school celebrates it. Little Riley’s daycare celebrates it. There is something called, “Trunk or Treat,” where parents give out candy from the open trunks of their cars. By the time the actual day rolled around yesterday, the kids had been on a sugar high, if not a diabetic coma, for days.

And costumes? I’ll have you know that my granddaughters were both princesses. Not just Halloween, either. The Cult of Disney has taken over; the girls run around the house singing “Let it Go,” from the Disney movie, “Frozen.” They wear long gowns and tiaras. Ellie told her mother recently that she needed gloves that reached to her elbows. Who knew?

It doesn’t surprise me. I took Ellie to the play, “Frozen,” in the past year and she was ready; with her gown and glittering shoes, she fit right in. When we arrived at the theater, the entire audience was crowded with hundreds of Elsas and Annas, Elsa being the crown princess of Arendelle with uncontrollable magical ice powers that haunt her, and her younger sister, Anna, who is brave and determined to help Elsa, and at the same time, renew their relationship as sisters.

I enjoyed being in the audience looking at these dressed-up girls more than I did the play. It was February, and not autumn, but it felt like Halloween. Who needs the last day of October?

After all, here it is November and the holiday continues in my neighborhood. I just walked the dogs, and the decorations are still up. For all I know, the shrieking skeletons will stay vocal until New Year’s Day. Maybe by then my dogs will be used to them.