"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
Tuesday, April 01, 2003 Encouraging Signs in Sherborn
I have regularly tweaked the Peace Abbey, which this week was holding calling hours for its late vegan spokes-animal, Emily the Cow:
Yesterday, mourners trickled into the Peace Abbey barn, where the black-and-white cow lay motionless, her 1,300-pound frame shrouded in a colorful, embroidered blanket, a floral necklace around her bowed head.
Including the sizable corpse, signs of Emily's death were ubiquitous. A despondent recording on the Peace Abbey answering machine, and a sandwich board in its driveway, reported Emily's demise. A tractor and forklift for moving the body were parked next to the barn. And bright orange cones were arranged in the grassy yard, marking a cemetery plot in the shadow of a Mahatma Gandhi statue.
They're a thoroughly cloying and off-putting aggregation of anti-American twit pacifists, though, in their defense, it should be said they only wave their "War Equals Terrorism" and "No War on Iraq" signs at motorists passing their suburban ashram at Routes 16 and 27 in Sherborn, rather than lying in the street to block traffic.
But in recent days on my drive past the abbey, guess what I've noticed?
The house directly across the street now is flying the first Navy Jack with the message "Don't Tread on Me."
A little ways down the road, an American flag has been attached to a set of residential mailboxes at the railroad crossing, and another home has the Stars and Stripes flying from a makeshift pole that has been planted in the middle of the front yard.
At the Sherborn Fire Station, a few hundred yards from the Peace Abbey, members of a profession that lost hundreds in New York on 9.11 protect the safety of anti-American radicals a block away who equate defense against terrorism with terrorism. The firefighters have added a black MIA flag to the American flag on display.
And the historic Sherborn Inn now has a flag hanging from its front porch, in addition to the one flying from its pole.
Kind of restores one's faith in the common sense of the average person in Sherborn. (True, you have to have million to think about moving into one of the old farmhouses in town -- but that makes the show of the colors in the heart of brie country even more impressive, no?)
UPDATE: The real people have surfaced, too, in Bedford, taking back the town green from the UUs.