HERE'S HOWE -- THE AIRPLANE'S SHADOW

HOW FAST IS IT GOING?

Sorry for being late.  I have to tell you a secret: I was working at a gainful project.  Can you imagine that?  It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, I have to drop a lot of things to make sure that the gain is full, or as full as possible, anyway.  The other part of the secret is that I was also busy composing responses to a person who had submitted three responses to one of our catechetical blogs entitled, "Catholic Q & A with Father Mike."  The comments came back, not as answers to our questions, but as challenges and more questions about our Catholic faith.  So naturally, since I am the Theology Editor of the magazine I had the joy and duty to respond to the person who composed the comments and for the enlightenment of those who would eventually read them.  Father Mike is a celebrity and he doesn't have time.  We 100 year old grunts are the warriors in these battles.  So now that you know more about my personal life than you ever wanted to know.  Let me tell you some more about it.  This is more autobiographical and light hearted than the first part.
When I was a boy, a younger boy than I am presently, EFR Dion would bring home the Sunday editions of two New York Newspapers every weekend.  No, not the Times.  I remember one as being the Mirror and I forget the other.  It was always interesting to read these papers because they had a wonderful line-up of cartoons.  Let me try to remember a few.  Henry (Carl Andersen); Terry and the Pirates (I've got the guy's name on the tip of my tongue...); Little Orphan Annie; The Katzenjammer Kids; Superman; Blondie; Dick Tracy; Nancy; Pogo and a couple more that I can't remember.  There was one about a caveman but I can't recall the title, and finally don't forget Joe Palooka.  It was a lot of fun reading these items.  There was also a semi-glossy magazine in one of the papers and outside of the pictures, I didn't pay too much attention to the content.  There was however one section that I learned to appreciate and never really missed.  It was so intellectually satisfying.  So much so that I have forgotten everything that I ever learned there except for two things.  Yup, all of two.  The first one was easy and I remember feeling that I knew the answer even before reading it, but rather than to try to answer it form my own resources, I read the answer anyway and got this reaction that we all know so well, "I knew that!"  The question? "If you wanted to always walk in the same direction around the earth, in which direction would you choose to walk?"  See, you know the answer to that and perhaps have known it for many years.
The second one is a little trickier and believe it or not, I really did not understand the answer as it was written in the newspaper.  Being a simple tyke of perhaps 10 or 11, I guess that my puzzlement would be understandable.  "Does and airplane's shadow travel at the same speed as the airplane?"  Now that, my friends was a mystery to me.  All the more so that the answer started of with, "It all depends..."  I think that it was then that the curtains came down over my brain and I lost it.  I tried to understand it but could not.  For some inexplicable reason, I never asked EFR Dion for an explanation.  I decided, out of a sense of pride?, that I would solve this one myself.
You know that it took longer than a day.  It took longer than a month.  It actually took years.  In order to protect the innocent, I won't say how many years. Here's how it happened.  I was in the car with EFR Dion and we were going to pick up MJT Dion, his Voice from the Kitchen.  She was coming out of the hospital with my second brother.  We were driving up to what we used to call "The perpendicular parking" space.  Nose to the building, rear to the sun.  There was our shadow on the building.  We were moving and it was not.  Wow, I thought I had it.  I had to test it.  I kept it to myself.  This was too good.  I tested and tested but was never satisfied with my experiences.  The profile of an automobile is too low to get good shadow extension, so the experimentation was taking a long time before bearing any solid fruit.  Then came time to go back to school.  That was to be the key of the latching on to the truth.  The high profile of the bus and the low sun early in the morning were a perfect lab for me to try out my senses.  For the fifteen minutes that I was on the bus, I marveled at the way the shadow would jump from one building to the next at the speed of light while bus was crawling along the street.  I had it.  It was, and still is,  all in the angle.  Ya know what?  That night EFR Dion got an earful!