Category: Kind of Plaid

As heroes go, Scott is not an obvious choice. He’s a little on the ordinary side, smart enough and funny enough, not exactly teen heart-throb material, a good baseball player, and that’s about it. He made it this far without having to think too deeply or experience much out of his comfort zone.  Maybe this…

Most of the kids at Dalriada are just kids, a little bit of this personality or that characteristic, and a common sense of trying to find their way in life. What sets Devin and Alice apart from the other kids Scott meets at Dalriada is they each have a strong personal sense of mission, of…

The engineer and the ballerina. Son of New England old money and daughter of a Romanian goat herder. He graduated from MIT at nineteen, she was dancing en pointe at nine. He was touring Europe studying great engineering and design, she was touring Europe in the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Love at first sight. A love…

We meet the Bonomo sisters, Margaret and Elizabeth, when Gizmo introduces Scott to the kids gathered for the first baseball game of the season at Dalriada. Gizmo tried to get the attention of a girl in an Operation Ivy t-shirt listening to a Walkman on headphones. “Beeboo! Beeboo!” No response. “She’s the best pitcher in…

Scott was about to slip away from the circle, having determined the conversation to be nothing but the usual boring stuff that adults find endlessly fascinating, when Tony joined the group next to Beatrice. He was all scrubbed and groomed, smelled like he had collided with an aftershave truck, and gazed at Beatrice like a…

Holly stood in Scott’s doorway at the top of the stairs. “There are three boys waiting for you on the front porch, a nerdy one, a chubby one, and a jock. They need a dorky one to complete the set and heard about you.” Mom entered right behind her. “These must be the boys Beatrice…

The interaction with Sweeney in the Dalriada woods is at Scott’s initiation. The idea of some mysterious Irish performance artist (whatever that is) living in the woods proves to be too much for him to resist. His suburban neighborhood near Indianapolis definitely didn’t have one of those. Scott reaches out to Sweeney just to see…

The works of Christian fiction that I hold in high regard take me on a deeply personal journey and show the hero’s dilemma as though it were my own. We can identify with artfully crafted characters confronting sin, what sin does to all of us and the world. Sin need not be spectacular to be…