Tennis, a swim, cocktails, dinner and dancing. Or your place: I bring the food, you provide the drinks and dessert. Or go to mass together, then panhandle or ride public transportation to view condemned housing or make threatening phone calls to strangers or sit in a laundromat drinking beer, reading the papers, smoking and playing a boombox.

That love is rare, difficult, wonderful and hard work; nonsexual intimacy is harder to succeed at than sexual intimacy. That the female is the superior of the species and thus the female should cut the male some slack when he is tiresome, boorish, tedious and hopeless.

Everything. I will go to my grave a Catholic.

Being happily married and continuing to be fit as a goat and my old charming, witty, kind, congenial, impulsive, impatient, tactful, contrarian, skeptical, demanding self. Still playing tons of tennis and still working, since I am not temperamentally suited to retirement.

Prodigal son, since it relates to God's mercy and the sacrament of penance.

*Bush had the moral high ground, strategic clarity and imperative for victory but it may be decades before a consensus says he was right or wrong *Canadian pro football is the most exciting football in the world *Get RID of the designated hitter * Home runs are mostly ho hum *John Paul was a great pope *If you try to hold my hand during the Our Father, you will be executed * If you nudge my elbow before trying to hold my hand you will be tortured first * I hate air conditioning * Eat corn on the cob horizontally so the butter doesn't drip, not in the "around" fashion, when it WILL drip * The martini is one of civilization's great inventions * The Crusades were mostly good * The Inquisition never was what it was cracked up to be * A man never shakes hands with a woman unless she offers her hand first * A man always rises when a woman leaves a and returns to a restaurant table or enters a room for the first time *Bacon must be crisp *Wendy's beats Burger King, but not by much * Florence King's essays are terrific *I will attend an Anglo Catholic mass (but not take communion) before I will attend a circus of a trashed up New Order mass * Cheney was an excellent VP and JC Watts would have been a good one too * Willful despair is a serious sin, since life is good by the very fact God gives it to us * Don Imus is ignorant and foolish, funny and a softie * Nothing goes up before 12/24 not even the creche * The scandals in the church reflect a spiritual crisis dating 40+ years *Don't smoke, but you endanger yourself if you try to keep me from an occasional cigar *It is a great male prerogative to sit at a bar, with or without a babe, with the paper and a meal and a cocktail and occasionally peep at the TV news * Mother Angelica is wonderful * So was Rosemary Clooney * Telemarketing is a good thing *Dress down Fridays are stupid *Females with whiney valley girl accents whose sentences rise at the end are not to be taken seriously *Neither are 30+ men who dress as if they are teen-agers *At least one thing must be plain: the suit, the shirt or the tie *Am proud of having twice read Windows XP for Dummies and understanding about half of it *There are a mere handful of truly Catholic collleges *Don't tell me I can't get into an event. This ex-newspaperman can always get in * Only a gentleman can insult a gentleman * I am a lapsed ecumenist * Lapsed Catholics are sad enough, but far worse are collapsed Catholics *Guilt is good and natural and in some ways far more important than a physical complaint * To test if someone is paying attention when he asks How are you? say Fine, but that's just my opinion *Except for things like vaccines, computers and expressways there is no such thing as progress. We are the same as the folks in the Greek dramas. To think otherwise mocks Calvary. *If you've read this far with approval then perhaps we should meet for crisp bacon, cabbage and tomato sandwiches on rye not toasted, fries, apple pie with coffee ice cream on top; or dry gin martinis (olive) or rob roys (two cherries).