A neighborhood walking tour took us, on a hot late August morning, to the three Cambridge homes of William Dean Howells. Now relegated to some obscurity, Howells was a literary lion in the America of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Besides being Atlantic Monthly editor, he wrote several novels, formerly read.

His first local home, two blocks from mine, though only a fifteen minute walk from Harvard Square, stood isolated from other houses. He and his wife apparently relished their isolation. In fact, when others started moving in, the Howells couple moved away to a posher location removed from the new arrivals. These newcomers to whom Howells objected were largely Irish immigrants for whom the writer felt contempt.

Had my maternal grandfather settled in Cambridge rather than Peabody, he would have qualified for the Howelles' disdain. No matter his fine personal qualities and his respect for learning, Richard Barry was an immigrant from Ireland, enough to make him objectionable.

Last month the Massachsetts legislature cut health care funds for some thirty thousand legal immigrants living in the Commonwealth. Presumably the legislators did so without contempt. They did not follow the federal government's shameful treatment of many more immigrants imprisoned under inhuman conditions. However, not to have access to treatment for illness will do harm to the Massachusetts imigrants and their families.

Incidentally, William Dean Howells, for his part, did not get off scot free from prejudice himself. The local Yankees looked down on him for being from Ohio.

1) hospice services; 2) palliative care; 3) counseling on end-of-life issues. Three ideal benefits for older Americans and others in need of medical help. Any national health care reform ought to include these features at least.

To have such features portrayed as a neo-Nazi plot amounts to a national disgrace. And to have senators say that number 3 will be withdrawn almost rates as a national tragedy.

How can our nation give way to vested political and commercial interests of this sleazy sort? 

On the elevator at Symphony Hall:

 Jack: "I thought that was you."

 Me: "I thought that was you."

Fellow passenger: "You were both right."

At the Harvard Epworth Church, during a memorial service for member Geneva Malenfant, the former pastor, Ed Mark, got off the best lines. He recalled one Sunday when, as a candidate for pastor, he preached.

After the service that day, he stood at the door greeting departing parishioners. Geneva came by, shook his hand, and said to him: "That was the worst sermon I have ever heard."

Ed's second line also drew laughs: "That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

At a gathering after an actors' reading of the Waste Land and other poems of T.S. Eliot, I chatted with Dame Eileen Atkins, a star of both stage and screen.

She spoke of staying in touch with Eliot's widow, now quite old.  When I told her of enjoying her 2002 Broadway performance in The Retreat from Moscow with John Lithgow and Ben Chaplin, she said that she had stayed in contact with John.

About the difference between appearing in a movie and acting on stage, she has definite views. She finds the latter much more satisfying. In a film, you don't have much of an idea how the whole thing will look when it is finished. And you don't always know when you are being taken by the camera. On stage, you have a clearer sense of where you stand in the action.

This charming 74-year-old actress proved as fetching a party conversationalist as she is a performer on stage.

"This country is all under shock, they population is all gone to America."  These words, taken from a letter dated January 23, 1853, were written by my great-great-grandfather from the town of Portumna in Ireland. 

They speak for themselves.