Margaret C. Laureys's Blog (7)

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.   ~~ Dalai Lama

What a glorious thing it is to experience the essential kindness of human beings -- especially strangers, and especially young ones. Last night I was rescued by two such kind, young strangers when I…

I thought there was nothing more I could know about Bruce Springsteen especially since his world is already evoked in his songs. Listen to a Springsteen song and you see a hardscrabble, working class Jersey boy kicking it around in garage bands; sitting on the hood of the Chevy with a long haired, barefoot girl wearing bell-bottoms and a lost, moony gaze on her face; beers with the boys after a shift at their dead end job at the tire factory, all of them griping about the boss…

My friend and fellow Netcong native, Christopher Warnash, recently posted something on Facebook about Netcong which got me thinking about how much I love our hometown.  Christopher had said something which particularly struck me and gave me so many thoughts about our town that I want to share them with all of my other fellow Netcong natives. 

Christopher said that he and his boyfriend were passing through Netcong when his boyfriend…

Willy Wonka: Stop, don’t, come back

It’s a slight, seemingly empty bit of dialogue, isn’t it?  Yet imbued with Gene Wilder’s sarcastic intonation the dialogue expresses that he actually couldn’t care less if the kid to whom he’s speaking comes back or not.  He speaks the ostensibly dull sentence in an unflappable, flat tone such that it becomes richly, perversely, funny.  It is is also, oh, just a teensy bit mean. As…

We began with a prayer.   But we were not at church.  We were at Newark’s Juvenile Detention Center for a meeting of new volunteers.  I thought the praying odd since the meeting’s intent distinctly civic.   I thought it odder still that we referred to a municipal employee like Miss Weathers, the Director of Volunteer Services, as Sister Weathers.  By time Sister Weathers asked us to introduce ourselves, saying, “Keep it brief and try not to preach” I caught on.

Virtually…

I stood in line at a convenience store watching two adorable boys of about seven run back and forth from the candy aisle to the woman in front of me pleading, to no avail, “What about this? Can we have this?” Apparently, one boy was the son and the other his friend. They wore Catholic School uniforms which, in my eyes, added to their charm. As I looked on, I noted them fervently -- and rather furtively -- discussing a pack of Bubble Gum. I couldn’t help but chuckle when I realized that one…

A lot of people came and went through our kitchen but Mom almost never left it.   My father, whose own headquarters were at the bar, called Mom “The General” and the kitchen was her command center.  She cooked, sewed, did laundry and helped us with our homework all in the kitchen.  Every major appliance – fridge, stove, washer, and dryer – was lined against the same wall, along which she moved up and down for two decades, raising ten children and wearing a groove into the linoleum so deep…