ONE LAST WORD : Mrs. McCarthy takes her leave.

This is my last column for Commonweal. I will miss the periodic sense of communication with like-minded people and, conversely, the occasional dispute with those who are not. The purpose of a column, says Roger Rosenblatt in a valedictory of his own, is to provide a place for ruminations on a subject. In his case, because he was writing for Modern Maturity, he was confined to "the various new directions of body and spirit that a person takes after fifty."

My charge was less specific. When James O'Gara, then editor of Commonweal, wrote to me in 1974-twenty-five years ago-about my agreement to write a Commonweal column, he gave me a wide latitude in the choice of subjects. "Part of the value of a columnist," he wrote, "is that he or she dreams up new ideas not dreamed up by me. And with your background and interests, I'm sure you won't have any problem once you get started."

He did, however, have a few suggestions. "To begin with, though, there is the whole feminist business, inside and outside the church. We would welcome comments from a woman's viewpoint, something we haven't had too much of. Then, too, there is the Washington scene." The fact that at the time Commonweal had a regular political columnist did not mean, he said, that I was barred from political comment if I wanted to make it.

My columns in the year following 1975 show me finding my way. They did include two that could be described as being written from a woman's viewpoint, and others that could be called political commentary. The first two were "Dear Sister Kate" and "Our Fiction and the Family." "Dear Sister Kate" was a plea that a feminist in her concern for the drastically oppressed should not overlook the less dramatic forms of injustice and work to right them as well. "Our Fictions and the Family" took issue with some then current dire predictions on what effect the woman's movement would have on the family.

"One of the most common myths about family," I wrote, "is that the historical norm has been the mother who stayed at home, kept house, and took care of the children until they all left home. This situation has been true only of middle-class women for a comparatively short time in history. Most women have always worked-and had only spare time left for cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing. True, a woman might work in the fields beside her husband like today's migratory worker-but she might also be the primary agricultural worker as in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Immigrant women cooked and did the laundry in other people's houses, and were often allowed one day to go home to their own children, for a few hours. They worked in the textile mills ten and twelve hours a day in New England, and in the sewing lofts of lower New York-and no one cared about them until they formed their own unions."

In "Our Search for Roots," I puzzled over the new ethnicity-a popular movement at the time which has now almost disappeared. "As a development it followed so close on the heels of the black-power movement as to be certainly both reaction and imitation. It is at once a remedy for alienation and the politicization of the powerless." "But," as I quoted Father Andrew Greeley, "for most white Americans today outside of certain urban enclaves ethnic identification is a matter of choice...ethnicity is an option, not an obligation." And I pointed out, "for ethnicity has a way of suddenly melting away. Because, for example, as my great- grandparents and grandparents were immigrants of Irish origin over a century ago, I have always thought of myself as Irish-American, as did my parents, and proudly so. But my children are part German; I have blood cousins of Swedish, French (and probably of American Indian), English, Polish, and Italian background; my children have cousins of Egyptian and Russian Jewish ancestry. I cannot be anything but moderate or marginal in my ethnicity without denying or denigrating people with whom I share a physical heritage. This must be true of millions of Americans."

I have chosen these examples because I think they may be illustrative of what Rodger Van Allen wrote of my column (Being Catholic: Commonweal from the Seventies to the Nineties [Loyola University Press, 1993]) and what I hope is true: "If there was an overarching theme, it seemed to be a quest for human and religious authenticity." He also noted that my interests were broad (something I also hope is true) and "included literary as well as social and political commentary."

Some of the literary columns were just sheer fun to write, like "The Moon was Shining Sulkily," included in those 1975 columns. I had browsed through old "readers," the anthology-like texts left from my father's teaching days, and found one delight after another. One of the old Child Life readers, for example, fed a need newer texts seldom do-the need for escape into nonsense and fantasy. The editors, for example, found room for Tweedledee's recitation for Alice,

"The moon was shining sulkily,

Because she thought the sun

Had got no business to be there

After the day was done-"

Thus, almost anything and everything is grist for the columnist's mill. The effort to share an experience or insight with readers and to illuminate it for them is a habit of mind and one I think I will not lose. It has been a pleasure to do that with Commonweal for these twenty- five years. In farewell, I again quote Roger Rosenblatt: "Thanks for reading."