TWENTY SOMETHING The old farmers used to say you should leave a field better than you found it. Sometimes that called for heavy lifting. Other times it just meant picking up a rock as you crossed and placing it at the field’s edge. That counsel stuck with Amy Hereford, who grew up on a 10-acre […]

TWENTY SOMETHING Spend a day in a surgery waiting room and you’ll witness a hundred quiet acts of mercy. Strangers gather for a host of reasons with a common cause: to sit beneath the slowest clock and wait it out. They make calls, utter prayers and flip through magazines, and in their anxiety, they extend […]

TWENTY SOMETHING It’s almost as if November’s Mass readings were written for election-weary Catholics, with their foreboding tones and calls for “perseverance” and “endurance” amid distress. “They will seize you and persecute you,” St. Luke warns. “Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light,” St. Paul exhorts. […]

TWENTY SOMETHING When two 20-somethings slung a wire across rooftops in Boston, they were hoping to hear each other’s voices transmitted across that line. It worked, and they did, but in the process, they also picked up a far more exotic sound: powerful radio waves emitted from the sun. Alexander Graham Bell was 26 and […]

TWENTY SOMETHING The phone call came when I was boiling sweet corn — suppertime on a hum-drum Sunday whose excitement peaked with a trip to the grocery store. It had been months since I’d spoken with my college friend Wendy, but she skipped right over the small talk: She’s moving to St. Croix. When I […]