The Roommate

Thomas J. Rice

My college roommate drowned the day we first met.

He was just 18, tall and blonde, with a shy smile, bright blue eyes,

and a bone-crushing handshake. “I’m Bjorn Karlsson, Sioux City, Iowa,” he blurted. “Gotta run; swim test.”

We were both freshmen, assigned to the same big double on the first floor of the ivy-covered dorm, taking the requisite test before classes started. “I don’t really know how to swim,” he tossed over his shoulder, laughing. “Just want to get the damned thing over with.” Then he bolted.

He promised to meet up afterwards at the student union.

But he never showed. Back at the dorm, I found out why.

He dove in the deep end and never came up.

Seems no one noticed. But how could that be?

Oddly, I still dream of his fierce handshake and shy smile.

And I’ve always wondered how they broke the news to his parents.

Havel on Hope

HOPE

Either we have hope within us or we do not.

It is a dimension of the soul and is not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world.

HOPE is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.

HOPE in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy that things are going well or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not because it stands a chance to succeed.

HOPE is definitely not the same thing as optimism.

It is not the conviction that some thing will turn out well, but certainty that something makes sense

regardless of how it turns out.

It is HOPE, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually try new things.

Vaclav Havel

Rites of Passage(an excerpt from novella)

Six hours on a cramped red-eye from Boston had Donovan in a foul mood—jumpy and irritable. He’d resisted this journey for 18 years; never thought he’d find himself back in Ireland with this mission. Still, he reasoned, if things worked out, this would be the first and last time he’d have to make the dreadful trek. For a man who hated to travel, once was plenty. All the more reason to make this one count.

He’d been jerked from a semi slumber by the screech of the landing gear on the Aer Lingus jumbo jet, slicing through the dense fog over Shannon airport. His wristwatch—which he’d set five hours ahead—showed “5:45 A.M., February 3, 2005,” as he vaguely tuned in the faux-British accent of the young stewardess prepping the passengers for landing.

For The Common Good

A review by Thomas J. Rice

For The Common Good; Redefining Civic Leadership, by David Chrislip and Ed O’Malley, is a singular contribution to the leadership literature, a genre that churns out over 2000 volumes a year and shows no sign of waning. With that kind of volume cascading off the press, I’m aware that it stretches credulity to claim singularity for such a slim volume. Still, I’m not alone in seeing something special here: For The Common Good has already won three highly coveted awards in this crowded field.

Why is this book so special? For openers, it is a direct challenge to an orthodoxy that has dominated a field that was first established as such in the late 60s and 70s. Even a casual review of this daunting body of work cannot fail to notice that, for all its variety, there is one dominant carrying beam, a mostly-unspoken premise, at the center of this literature: Leadership resides in the individual in a position of authority with a followership dependent on the leader for vision, strategy, and inspiration. Sometimes charismatic, often not, the leader is always at the center of the action. His character and intellect—and it is typically a man —is the main determinant of the fate of his followers, be they organizations, cities, regions, or nation states.

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The Author’s Show

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Thomas J. Rice, author of "Rites of Passage: Five Irish Stories"

Conducted in 2017 by Linda Thompson, host of “The Authors Show” since 2005; the show is a podcast made available on multiple online channels across the US, each featuring one individual author for a full 24 hours, Monday through Thursday. For more details, google “The Authors Show.”

Told with sympathy and humor, the five Irish stories in Thomas Rices' Rites of Passage are of homeland lost and recovered, of fierce loyalties, of dashed and regained hopes, of betrayals and humiliations, of boys making their perilous journeys to manhood, of single mothers eking an existence out of stony soil, of the foibles and follies of small town communities, of grown men escaping the long shadow of childhood trauma.