Join Jen and the other Quicktakers over at the Conversion Diary.

1. I was thinking ahead to fall and to All Saints Day coming up and then I remembered how much different it was going to be this year than in the past couple of years. My inner city neighborhood has never done trick or treating. I don’t know if it’s just not an African American cultural thing, or if the neighborhood is too iffy or what, but it just has never happened on our street. Our parish doesn’t always celebrate it either (we have mass but not a party for the kids) so my kids were kind of out luck until grandma moved into her retirement home. For the last couple of years we have trick or treated in the home visiting all of the residents. It was safe, and inside and the kids had a good time. But now with mom’s death we can’t participate in that this year. Probably not for the Easter Egg hunt in the spring either. I guess we will need to travel through the entire year to really assess all the tangible and intangible things that were lost with mom’s passing.

2. I took a walk yesterday with Sam for exercise. We just walked the city streets and let me just say, it feels weird to know that all (most) of the city’s children are willingly institutionalized during the daylight hours. The streets just seemed sad and empty without them.

3. The ordeal of that young woman found in California has my full attention. I’ve had two occasions this week when I could not find my girls because they went from where they told me they were going, to somewhere else without telling me! And my imagination goes to worse case scenario and I see them dead in a shallow grave somewhere or worse. So since Izzy is 10 I told her, as age appropriately as I could, what happened to that littler girl in California and why I worry about her and her sister so much. From the thoughtful look on her face I think she is considering my words.

4. Julieunplugged has the context of a speech Robert Kennedy made after Martin Luther’ King’s death. It is quite powerful. It occurs to me that all good people, whether on the right or the left, really want the same things for the benefit of the poor and less fortunate – we just disagree on how to achieve that.

5. I find it interesting that Senator Kennedy, his ex-wife, his son and his daughter all had some kind of cancer and I wonder why? Was it something environmental or just coincidence? I haven’t heard anyone in the news point it out. I also note that when I look at all of my mother’s friends that taught with her in the same building for years, most of them have died from cancer too. I just can’t believe that is all coincidental.

6. The coverage of Kennedy’s death has been interesting as well. The cable all-Kennedy-all the time stations have tanked in the ratings. Putting this in perspective a bit, he was the brother of a president that died almost 50 years ago, he was the senator from the state of Massachusetts. Younger people aren’t aware of who he was, and many people outside of his state might not be too clear on it either. It’s sad. But I don’t think it warrants the attention it’s getting nationally and apparently the ratings bare that out.

7. The pope apparently agrees.

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