Count down to 2000. How different from 1950! How differently we think about almost every issue.

Movies and novels are the repositories of earlier ethnic neighborhoods. Alice McDermott captures the mid-century experience of Irish-American New Yorkers. She brilliantly describes her grandmother and her parents in the novel, Charming Billy.

The storyteller says her grandmother "(a)s I knew her,...was a Geiger counter for insincerity, phoniness, half-truths. She could dismantle a pose with a glance and deflate the most romantic notion with a single word. She had no patience for poetry, Broadway musicals, presidential politics, or the pomp of her religion - although my father, his father's son, loved these things in direct proportion to her disdain - and she sought truth so single-mindedly that under her steady gaze exaggeration, self-delusion, bravado simply dried up and blew away, as did hope, nonsense, and any ungrounded giddiness.

Her philosophy of life seemed to be to get to the bottom of things, the plain, unadorned, mostly concrete and colorless bottom of things, and from there to seek to swat away any passing fancy that might cloud the hard-won clarity of her vision. Because she was also intelligent and witty, and because all her cynicism was bolstered by a keen logic, she gained in her later years a reputation as a sage, but one whose advice friends and family would seek only at the tail end of some experience when they were ready to be either reconciled to their disappointment or disabused of any vestige of hope for some unexpected change (p.39-40)."

She says her parents "had a marriage that ran the typical course from early infatuation to serious love to affection occasionally diminished by impatience and disagreement, bolstered by interdependence, fanned now and then by fondness, by humor. That they loved each other is a given, I suppose, although I suppose, too, that there were months, maybe years, when their love for one another might have disappeared altogether and their lives proceeded only out of habit or the failure to imagine any other alternative.

A good-enough, a typical kind of mid-twentieth-century marriage that suddenly blossomed into something else in the year she was dying. I hesitate to use the word about a time that was filled with so much pain, that was for me only awful, but I think it was during my mother's illness that my parents became passionate about one another. Their meeting, their courtship, their years raising children, every ordinary day they had spent together until then all became merely the running start they had taken to vault this moment. To sail, gracefully and in tandem, across the abyss (p.45)."

Each of us remembers the influence of significant people who helped and harmed us. We give thanks for the former and we forgive the latter. We continue the Advent journey and we approach the new millennium with courage and with hope.

John J. O'Brien, C.P.