He is looking for someone or something that no one will discuss, that he has only inferred, for the unnamed person of thing whose advent or presence has been troubling the company all day.

Then a hand as massive and hard as an elk’s horn, lashed by tough sinews to an arm like the limb of an oak, grabs the boy by the shoulder and drags him back to the wings.

“You know better, young man,” says the giant, well over eight feet tall, to whom the massive hand belongs.

Rather, my beloved Yankees are playing the Tigers — calling up my childhood allegience to Jim Leyland, former manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Of course, in the other AL contest, Minnesota is in play — yet another year when I might have to choose between the Bombers and the Twins, which was a frequent and troubling dilemma when I was in graduate school.

But, in the midst of all of these conflicting loyalties, one thing is never in question: The Mets don’t have any right to exist as a Major League team, nonetheless to win the World Series.

So, our friend Wordsworth describes these instances that he calls “spots of time” in which all of the elements of experience and sense and memory come together to take a person back through their lives. (All of you English lit scholars out there, sorry if I’ve butchered this in the shorthand….) At anyrate, spots of time show up in Book XI of The Prelude:

There are in our existence spots of time,
Which with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating Virtue, whence, … our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired

Pretty great, right? I thought so, and I had to wonder whether he was secretly friends with Proust and really liked cookies (think time-travel). But, that’s beside the point.

The Point. Right. So, lately I’ve been consciously spending more time with my music collection than usual — not just letting it float in the background as I usually do, but really listening. In part, I’m doing this to try to pull out some iconic pop culture from the 80s and 90s for a friend. But, really, it’s been a tremendously interesting autobiographical journey. I know exactly where all 3000 songs came from and why I bought them. More importantly, I keep having these crazy sensory experiences that are the closest thing I’ve ever known to spots of time. If Springsteen’s “Tunnel of Love” can put me in a beat-up Mustang on a country road at 14, and The Cure’s “Pictures of You” can put me in a convertable Rabbit a little more than 10 years later, what would Wordsworth have done with an ipod?

So, according the the NYTimes, Waterford hasn’t been doing so hot lately. When the Irish CEO stepped down recently, the head of All-Clad took over. Here’s hoping they lower their prices on all counts…..

September 3, 2005
Irish Crystal About to Get a U.S. Touch
By BRIAN LAVERY

DUBLIN, Sept. 2 – When the crystal and ceramics manufacturer Waterford Wedgwood bought All-Clad, a high-end American cookware company, in 1999, no one could have known that a future chief executive hid among all the pots and pans.

Peter Cameron, 58, stayed at the helm of All-Clad throughout the acquisition, for $110 million, and after he helped orchestrate its subsequent sale for $250 million last year, he stuck around as chief operating officer of the company.

When the chief executive of Waterford, Redmond O’Donoghue, announced his resignation last week after a four-year earnings slump, Mr. Cameron was in a crucial position to assume the top job.

But he is far from getting worked up about what has to be done. “It really is a question of getting the costs in line, so that the margins associated with luxury goods products are available to us,” he said.

Along with Guinness and U2, the 222-year-old company behind Waterford crystal and Wedgwood china is one of Ireland’s best-known names. But since 2001 the company has failed to recover from an economic downturn and turbulent geopolitics, which eroded the consumer confidence necessary to sell luxury goods. It has also been hurt by the slump in the dollar, because its expenses are mostly in euros but half of its sales are in the United States.

“We really haven’t done much in terms of adding to the brand cachet,” Mr. Cameron said from his office in Boston, his hometown and that of his alma mater, Northeastern University. “And we haven’t done much in terms of new product innovation and introduction.”

With two sons in college, he plans to continue to work from Boston. Analysts say that will help him stay in touch with the American market.

In the year ended March 31, Waterford Wedgwood lost 149 million euros ($187 million), more than triple its loss in 2004. “There’s no evidence of sales recovering,” said Stuart Draper, head of research at Dolmen Stockbrokers in Dublin.

But Mr. Cameron, who became chief executive Thursday, is optimistic that he can steer Waterford Wedgwood back to comfortable profitability soon. “I would be disappointed if ‘07 isn’t the year,” he said.

For a man who describes his various positions in corporate America as “assignments” – before All-Clad, he ran its rivals Farberware and Revere Ware – getting to profitability is a nuts-and-bolts process, starting with the cost-cutting he began this year. The company is shedding 1,800 jobs, which even meant putting out the furnace at Dungarvan, one of its flagship factories in Ireland, three weeks ago.

“He has been very much a manufacturer,” said Brid White, an equity analyst at Merrion Capital in Dublin. “And I don’t think that’s a bad thing for Waterford Wedgwood at this juncture.”

On the surface, Mr. Cameron has a practical and conservative demeanor. His presence at meetings is noted more for his height – 6-foot-5 – and his customary V-neck sweater, even under business suits, than for his vocal contributions. (He called it a “tragedy” to be photographed on one of the few days that he came to work without a V-neck. “My friends joke that that’s when they can tell summer’s officially arrived,” he said.)

It may not be a common touch, but Mr. Cameron has a knack for knowing what people want before they do. A sense of the market is one strength, according to Ms. White, the analyst. “They need an operations person who’s able to listen to the marketing people,” she said. “He’s very good at watching trends.”

Mr. Cameron says that he wants Waterford Wedgwood to escape its cycle of cutting production and inventory levels to match falling sales, which leaves it relying on 10-year-old designer lines instead of innovations. He said he hoped to gain younger consumers with staples that critics say the company should be making already, like affordable wine glasses.

“We know who they are and where they’re shopping,” he said, in a broad Boston accent. “They’ve gotten far more oriented towards what I’d describe as luxury-casual entertaining. People are entertaining in kitchens now.”

He speaks with a passion for how consumer products affect people’s daily lives, a connection that he says began in the early 1980’s when he worked on the origins of digital photography at Polaroid.

He takes pride in having brought populism to the cookware business by enlisting the first celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse to lend his name to an entire All-Clad range.

“Chefs had not historically had much luck with their transition into products or product endorsements, and Emeril really changed all that,” Mr. Cameron said. “It was successful because of his unique personality, but we figured that out before others.”

Such a close affiliation with the mechanics of cooking, however, does not necessarily rub off. “I actually am not a particularly good cook,” Mr. Cameron said. “But I’m a great diner.”

Just about a month ago, Fr. McFadden (the voice of Hoyas basketball, and the man who taught me my first formal theology) gave a pretty great homily about water. Now, Fr. McFadden can tell a story, and he usually does. On this Sunday the gospel was about Peter walking out to meet Jesus on the water, and then getting scared, and starting to sink.

Rather than starting here, Fr. McF. began with the wonderful imagery from Gilead, where John Ames is recalling walking to his church one morning when he comes up behind some young lovers out for a walk. He sees the young man jump up and shake a tree branch, showering the young woman with glistening drops of water from the leaves. Rev. Ames is overwhelmed with the pure joy of this interaction, and comments that, “it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash.” It’s this infusion of the holy into the mundane that makes Gilead such a great book.

But, Fr. McF’s point was altogether different–though he loved the imagery–we know, as Peter knew and the folks in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas know, water can be a tremendously dangerous and scary thing. It’s hard to see how this water could be a blessing. But, I suppose, it’s our chance to pony up some serious support, ’cause these folks are sinking.

• American Red Cross — (800) HELP-NOW
• America’s Second Harvest — (877) 817-2307
• Catholic Charities USA — (800) 919-9338
• United Jewish Communities

So, this time I ended up with a broadcast from Focus on the Family Radio. Very interesting stuff. The main broadcast, aptly titled “From Jihad to Jesus,” was a testimony, given shortly after September 11 by a Dean from Liberty Theological Seminary (Jerry Fallwell’s institution), Ergun Caner. Though this fellow teaches systematic theology and church history, he isn’t your average evangelical Christian. Rather, he was raised as a Muslim and his father was a prominent mwazien. So, he addressed a Texas congregations in an effort to explain to them how the 9-11 terrorists, and other suicide bombers, could do what they did. Of course, he was also testifying about his conversion.

It didn’t take long for me to be totally fascinated by this man’s talk–troubled, but fascinated. For instance, he explained that since a Muslim’s life is judged by weighing his good acts against his bad acts, he can perform all of the duties and rituals of Islam and still go to hell–based on this behavioral accounting. Then, he explained Muslims have no way to alter this situation other than through martyrdom. Thus, suicide bombers abound. As far as I can tell, this is the most simplistic explanation for this phenomenon that I’ve ever heard.

Simplistic though it was, it fed right into his conversion story. After coming to the United States at the age of 17, Caner was asked to come to a revival by one of his new friends. By the end of the week, Caner had embraced Christianity based on the availability of redemption through faith–no more permanent scales of good and evil acts. This all sounds fine to me — based on a narrative of Islam in which there is no way to make up for past transgressions, salvation through a merciful and all-forgiving god really does seem like a reasonable choice.

Yet, there were things about his conversion story that troubled me. For example, in Caner’s narrative, after he has tackled the preacher at the end of the revival, ready to articulate his acceptance of Christ, he and the rest of the teenagers in the congregation go out to Denny’s for food and fellowship. Caner’s first act as a Christian is to order a ham steak. This portion of the story drew gails of laughter from the audience, as he explained, “Now I’m a ham-eating man.” As if the dietary laws of Islam were the essence of the entire religious system…..

After his conversion, Caner saw not only his brothers, but also his mother and his grandmother, convert to Christianity. His father disowned him, but eventually, when he was on his deathbed, did speak with Caner. This all seems fine and good.

In his closing remarks, however, Caner articulated a stance that I just cannot get my mind around. As a man who came to Christianity based on the notion of God’s forgiveness and mercy, Caner was still able to express the belief that had he not converted, his whole family would be “on its way to a devil’s hell”. Go figure. God is only loving and forgiving if you’re a Christian–the rest of you are up a creek….. Needless to say, this is not my understanding of Christianity and the fate of my many, many non-Christian friends. I gotta figure that we are all so flawed as human beings, God cannot hold our very different understandings of the world against us….

But, this was all thought provoking none the less.

The next program on the network was about domestic violence, and I was totally interested to hear how they would approach this topic since the intro piece began with the startling statistic that “one in four women in your congregation is or has been a victim of domestic abuse.” But alas, as I got closer to DC I lost the signal….