I may have more than enough Irish melancholy in my personality, but there’s a flip side: The Irish can be stubbornly optimistic and many have a faith deeper than the Irish Sea.

Which is where my mother’s grandparents and great-grandparents came from: County Wicklow, on the Irish Sea.

That’s Mom with my big brother Bruce in 1948, and that’s Bruce, front row left, during his first year at Harloe, not long after we’d moved to Sunset Drive from Taft.

I just saw a Harloe mother walking down our street, bringing her towheaded little kindergarten boy home. She was wearing his backpack and had her towheaded daughter on her hip.

She was lovely. She reminded me of one of my favorite AGHS history students, Siena, here with her little girl. (Siena and Dylan now have a little boy, too.)

This young mother brought out the stubborn optimist and the deeply faithful in me. It’s a humid day, and she was starting to struggle just a little.

Her little boy was just behind her. He had to stop and touch EVERY PICKET in every picket fence. Sometimes he absently did small u-turns. I watched them go right at the corner when he—much like a Basset Hound—decided he’d had enough walking.

He sat in the shade on the curb.

If this young woman is a good mother, and I think she is, she’ll let drop that there are oreos and milk waiting for him at home.

I just enjoyed watching them. It did my heart good. In the last decade, we’ve been subjected to fear, cruelty, crudeness and supreme selfishness.

If just for five minutes, the sight of this good mother, like Siena, like Patricia Margaret Keefe Gregory, my mother, filled me with hope. The last decade, if just for five minutes, was a vague and unimportant blur.