Brian Kirkpatrick

Latest by Brian Kirkpatrick in Chronicles

• Correspondence

  September 2009

  The Walk Up Cemetery Ridge

  The private-school league’s middle-school basketball playoffs were home games for Prep. Prep is the town’s most expensive private school, and their gym is beautiful: spacious, air conditioned, the wall by the entrance made of plastic so the new, impressive weight room is visible on the other side of a hall.

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• Correspondence

  February 2006

  The Mulberry Graveyard

  Spain is a country with strong regional identities. The central government recognizes four official languages: Spanish, Galician, Basque, and Catalan.

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• Correspondence

  November 2005

  FARC Meets the Junior League

  Saturday afternoon, my sister-in-law, Carolina, called from Bogotá. She asked me how we were doing—repeatedly, the way her mother does—then she asked to speak to my wife.

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• Correspondence

  June 2005

  The Machine in the Sacred Wood

  The applicant for our research fellowship was a likeable physician who spoke with passion about the mind-brain problem.

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• Correspondence

  February 2004

  Truth and Reconciliation

  On the day my Brazilian student gave me the kind of reverent statements about Nelson Mandela that I would expect of such a fierce socialist, he also gave me an interesting history lesson.

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• Correspondence

  August 2003

  The Town I’ve Never Seen

  I shouldn’t have been surprised; I’d heard similar stories from my wife. But the more dramatic stories had always involved someone I didn’t know. This was a seven-year-old girl giving an eyewitness account at the dinner table.

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• Correspondence

  October 2002

  The 99th’s Last Mission

  My father told me about his combat experience in World War II just once when I was a boy. I must have been under ten, and we were in a car at night.

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• Correspondence

  September 2002

  Catholic Charity

  I heard the latest twist in the story at the end of our two hours of teaching English at the Catholic mission. We volunteers taught the Latin American students—six simultaneous classes at different levels—in one big, noisy room.

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• Correspondence

  December 2001

  A Message for Boys

  The steamy morning reminded the congregation that Baltimore is on the shore and was once considered part of the South. The heat and the elderly substitute for the vacationing rector made the service informal and cozy, but if I had known the small church didn't have air conditioning, I might have chosen some other Sunday to visit.

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• Correspondence

  August 2001

  Condescension Slides South

  I'd forgotten that a Barnes and Noble bookstore had opened in the old department store building.

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• Vital Signs

  January 2001

  The Road to Brussels

  I should have been prepared. My Brazilian student had already expressed his admiration for Fidel Castro and the glories of the Cuban healthcare system. Still, his next comment nearly made me swerve off the road as we drove back from lunch.

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• Correspondence

  December 2000

  Letter From Maryland Liberty and License

  A recent article in the Baltimore Sun gave a wonderful example of how the media view traditional Christianity. Under the headline "Vatican Orders Activists' Silence," the Sun presented the latest installment in a local saga that is beginning to rival one of the national soap operas in its duration.

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• Correspondence

  May 2000

  Learning to Speak in Opar

  When I was ten, I fell into the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. With him, I fled the dinosaurs of Pellucidar in the center of the earth; in the company of the anthropoid apes, I sought the fabled jewels of Opar.

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• Correspondence

  November 1999

  The Tribe Above Madrid

  The sun was low as the luxurious chartered bus labored up the steep dirt track to the wedding reception in the hills above Madrid. We walked up the last of the slope from the buses to the lawn in front of the hunting lodge, where we looked down on the distant city.

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