I’m taking here a break from our Word of the Week, blackbird, because, after all, it’s Ash Wednesday, so our Poem of the Week is fit for the time. It’s a striking poem of short lines and clipped speech, by the master of English lyric poetry, George Herbert, whom we’ve featured here several times. But first a bit of reminiscence. When I was a boy in…

For today I’ll set aside our Word of the Week, blackbird, because after all it’s Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), and that brings my mind to New Orleans (pronounced NAW-lins by the natives), with its boisterous musical creativity, and this our Hymn of the Week, “When the Saints Go Marching In.” It’s one of those songs that we Americans seem always to have…

Time for a comedy for our Film of the Week, and one of my father’s favorites, too! The week’s touchstone, birthday, puts me in mind of the zaniness that families with little kids so often get used to, when if you’d told them beforehand that that’s what they’d have to deal with, they might have run away from the altar as fast as they could. Oh, I’m …

Our Word of the Week, birthday, has me thinking about childhood again, and all the more since a lot of old birthday pictures have been showing up on our screen. There’s one of old friends of ours, from almost thirty years ago, when Davey was invited to a party for a little boy who was his age, in a family where there were eight kids at the time, fo…

I have to admit that I asked Tony to choose “melancholy” for our Word of the Week because while we were watching an old film noir called “Johnny Eager” recently, I heard a very old tune in the soundtrack, a much-loved and oft-performed song called “My Melancholy Baby.” The melody has been haunting me all week, and haunting is the right word, becaus…

This week, as I’ve been considering melancholy, I’ve defended it as that sweet feeling of twilight, with the moon shining on the waters, and perhaps a loneliness that is not unpleasant, because you know that it is a temporary thing. Your loved ones are in the house on the hill, and the lights are shining. But there is another melancholy that in fac…

When I go through my many old hymnals from all kinds of places and traditions, I am struck by the sheer variety in the best of them, the range of human feelings, the meditation on not only what is light and pleasant, but on the sorrows of this life — a fitting thing for our Word of the Week, melancholy. So you may have supposed I would come up with…

Our Friday podcast is open to everyone in this week, in honor of Saint Valentine’s Day. Click on the image below for a special gift discount today. .When did young lads and lasses begin to give each other presents on February 14? All the way back in the French courts in the high Middle Ages, it seems – and those French courts included the ones in E…