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Happy November

It’s a great day for Catholics to remember and revere their preferred holy souls. It’s great for everybody, I say. All Saints Day (once called “All Hallows” day), was the original churchly stimulus for the dark and tricksy slant to the “All Hallows E(v)en(ing)” preceding it, which has grown into the tooth-rotting cuteness of the North American Hallowe’en. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, except when high schoolers exulting in their sexuality and maturity also want to swipe the free candy that should go to small children. And to me.)

Coincidentally, it also was a day for me to repair a rather ragged piece that I had (prematurely) posted to the right in the It’s All About Sports! section. I had never suitably commemorated a passing that I’d been anticipating for years: the death of John Wooden last June. Coach Wooden was the closest thing to a saint that we’re likely to see in the world of sports, a coaching genius and an old-fashioned Christian gentleman and a great and enduring hero of mine since I was 16.

And did you know that National Novel Writing Month started today? It began as a lark by a few friends in San Francisco, California, and now a few hundred thousand people worldwide are going to try to write a 50,000-word novel this month. Tens of thousands will use the month as a carefree, quantity-not-quality way to be able to say: “I wrote a novel!”