My father called me the other day from the Assisted Living Center where he lives in Corpus Christi. He says he wants to die. This coming Tuesday, he will be 90 years old. My father is lonely, he's almost deaf, halfway blind, and he has a white manx cat, Blanca. He left us when my brothers were little, and there was so much crying. My parents divorced when I was in graduate school, so I wasn't at home when it happened. In the years despues, I tried to set a good example for my brothers, but it wasn't enough. My father went to live way out in the country after the divorce, the land he loved, and he never came to visit. Not for graduations, not for weddings, nothing. Still, my brothers made pilgrimages to visit him, and it made him happy. His anger at my mother was such that when my brother Charlie died suddenly at age 30, he refused to give her the Pesame at the funeral. It was like he pretended she didn't matter, even when I know he could barely walk from the gr...

Maria C. is a journalist, who just returned from El Salvador on a fellowship. Here is her post (with my edits) from an email she sent me: I live in a country, el salvador (remember) where 10 corpses turn up every day and they're not just gangbangers, (we all know that loss weighs less on the soul)400 women are killed every year by men that promised to love them and yet I was woken up this morning to some lady with a megaphone asking God to forgive us, el pueblo,for murdering a man nearly 2000 years ago. What?! Last Friday I wound up by mistake downtown in front of the cathedral where they stuck Monsenor Oscar Romero's remains in the basement. A bunch of ladies wearing ridiculously frilly lacy veils, white,prayed as some pig faced evangelical preacher told them that the King and Queen of Spain are in town...but you know what...he intoned...all the powerful people (men, he said) could come here and it wouldn't make a difference. it won't change the ...