Month: December 2025

ROSE-COLORED INTERLUDE

Gaudate (Rejoice)

We wait. The seed is planted. It waits the winter and the spring rains. (James 5:8)

In the doorway of EddieDubuc’s old sandwich shop, corner of Neponset Ave and Pope’s Hill Street, shuttered and sealed up in plywood beginning early in the Sixties. (Don’t know if Eddie ran out of money, just got tired of running the place, or what. ) Waiting in the shallow shelter of Eddie’s old doorway for the MBTA bus to carry me to the rapid transit station at Field’s Corner, after which I had to disembark at either Andrew Square or Broadway and catch the City Point bus to a final bus stop — then walk a block…all due to the drab obligation of high school of which there are only scattered happy memories, just the daily filing into the grim, dark halls of the brick school, some of that time in the first two years being bullied — and, at the outset of this daily journey, coming out the front door of 210 Neponset, walking up that long neighborhood block every morning to that bus stop in front of vacant, abandoned Eddie’s lunch place. Only now remembering the one freezing winter morning cloistered in the doorway with a couple of adults, all of us jokingly bemoaning the necessity of waiting bundled up but still cold and in severe discomfort. It was about then a bus passed by, sadly not our bus, emblazoned on its side with an advertisement for travel to Florida, a long, tanned female , sun-glassed body reclined on bright sand. Laughter, one adult joking, noting the longed-for escape. (Does he live, as I do now, in Florida? Did Florida, often warm to another level of discomfort, prove to be The Second Coming of our humanity? Humbug! We still wait, for this cannot be all there is. Are those adults who shared that doorway with me still on this earth, or gone to the Judgement and, having waiting and hoped for it, gone to the sunny sands of a happly timelessness we simply cannot imagine?)

I wait now on the morning of Gaudate Sunday, being urged to be patient, wating for the seed planted in me to receive the winter and spring rains.

This James of the Bible, is said to be one of the ancient pillars of the new Church in Palestine, one of the many New Testament personages named James. (Can I call him Jim? Was there a Jim standing in that doorway with me that cold morning? Was I laughing with a prophet?) This James (Jim) was, we’re told, an administrator, not the Apostle James. Some guy who knew a lot of good stuff and, all through the ages, is telling us to WAIT. BE PATIENT, while trying to be good, faithful, worthy, all that. Easy for him to say — or have said.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

T.S. Eliot, “The Journey of the Magi”

They will light a rose-colored advent candle today.

Hope. We wait….burning, like that little flame….

DECEMBER 12TH, 2025

This date is, incidentally, many things, sacred and mundane — the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Frank Sinatra’s birthday.

But it is, most especially, the birthdays of my twin brothers Ronald and Douglas. I must note that fact, for it is very much on my mind.

Ron is extremely ill and infirm with Parkinson’s Disease. He lives in Winthrop, Mass, near in to Boston, the airport and all things north of the heart of the city.

Doug has lived for decades in Denver. I’m happy to say he is healthy.

Happy birthday, Twinnies. (“Twinny is what Ron’s and Doug’s boyhood playmates and companions were given to calling them from time to time. They were identical.

They are a major part of my life. I pray Ron will gain enough health and strength to be able to get home from the rehab in Woburn, Ma. and enjoy life. I pray Doug remains healthy.

WHAT NOW IN UKRAINE?

Direct from today’s New York Times, December 8, 2025

When the war began, Ukraine’s Western allies wanted to figure out how to send money to Kyiv without seeing it vanish into the pockets of corrupt officials. To protect the money, they insisted that (President) Zelensky’s government allow groups of outside experts, known as supervisory boards, to work as watchdogs.

But ( a Times investigation has found) the Ukrainian government has sabotaged that oversight, allowing corruption to flourish.

Zelensky’s administration stacked the supervisory boards with loyalists, left seats empty or prevented boards from being set up at all. Leaders in Kyiv even rewrote various company charters to limit oversight, which allowed the government to spend hundreds of millions of dollars without outsiders asking questions about where that money was going.

Zelensky has blamed Energoatom’s supervisory board (Energoatom is Ukraine’s utility company) for failing to stop the corruption. But, according to documents and interviews with officials, it was the government itself that prevented the board from doing its job.

Zelensky’s role

Zelensky himself has not been directly implicated in the corruption.

But his policies may have enabled it. After Russia’s invasion, Zelensky relaxed anti-corruption rules in the name of boosting the war effort. He worked with political and business figures he had once called criminals and, this summer, he tried to curtail the independence of anticorruption investigators as they pursued the case that ultimately implicated his associates. (He reversed course after Ukrainians poured into the streets in the country’s first large antigovernment protests during the war, saying that Zelensky was threatening Ukraine’s fragile democracy.)

In the course of the investigation, Zelensky asked for the resignation of two ministers and his powerful chief of staff, Andriy Yermak.

Were we warned of this possibility?

Yes, mainly, in my memory, by certain American pundits and figures characterized as “right wing.”

But, left or right, it’s the only story: where there’s money – be it Ukrainian hyrvnia, Russian rubles, American dollars or, once upon a time, Roman denarius, there is greed to currupt us.