Mario Fante

On a voyage of rediscovery. Check out our children's book about adventure, optimism and good advice - in space!

[Mario Fante @AviatorMario]

Hey parents! Do you love comics? Are you looking for gentle comic-style kids books to introduce your children to the genre? My daughter and I, and our wonderful illustrator at @WhimsicolourArt, have just the thing for you! Please check us out! https://t.co/ZnRBG4r9qj

[Mario Fante @AviatorMario]

@Catholic_bro Amen.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Falcon is a beautiful rocket

[Mario Fante @AviatorMario]

@Cary_Bleasdale @LindyCapitalBDC Well said. My prize find is an early edition of The World Crisis by Churchill, found just that way. 🙂

[Mario Fante @AviatorMario]

@RaminNasibov Startide Rising by David Brin. Hopeful sci-fi with great characters, and an amazing universe.

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

C.S. Lewis, what a line

[Mario Fante @AviatorMario]

@MemoryMedieval @TimelessTrvlr Fun place. Good for hours of walking and browsing.

[Mario Fante @AviatorMario]

A fun visit to Dover, NH today.

[Mario Fante @AviatorMario]

@myWinnipesaukee Please accept my condolences.

[Mario Fante @AviatorMario]

@HunterBiden @Kenneth_Belkin Imbecile.

[Mario Fante @AviatorMario]

@LFODCandles A family member from New York (which I fled over 30 years ago for NH) was just in Alaska. Said it was breathtaking and fun, but the pizza was meh. 😂

[Mario Fante @AviatorMario]

@Mhyssart Prayers humbly offered in welcome.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

In America, a stranger will say "bless you" when you sneeze.

It is meant to be nothing. A reflex. They do not even look up.

I know this.

That is the problem.

The first time, I sneezed in a grocery line. The man behind me said "bless you" and kept scrolling his phone.

He had guarded my soul. In its weakest moment, when it tried to leave my body, he called it back.

Then he forgot he had done it.

Where I am from, a debt like this is repaid over three generations.

I turned to thank him.

He was already gone.

So I started a list. Every voice that has ever caught my soul mid-flight and asked for nothing in return.

The list is forty-one names long.

I will never find them all.

So I have chosen a different path.

If I cannot repay them, I will become the one who guards.

Now I stand near the registers. Silent. Listening for the moment a soul tries to flee.

Yesterday I blessed four sneezes, two coughs, and one shopping cart whose wheel cried out as it passed.

The cart, I admit, was a mistake.

But I could not take the risk.

Its soul, at least, is safe.

Has anyone here ever heard a soul leaving, and known you were the only one close enough to call it back?

[Lily Tang Williams @Lily4Liberty]

We will never forget the Tiananmen Massacre!

[Lily Tang Williams @Lily4Liberty]

We don’t know where the Tank Man is. We don't know his name. He disappeared after that courageous moment, but the world saw him and his legacy lives on.

I pray there will be millions of him in China.

Someday, there should be a movie made about Tiananmen Massacre and Tank Man!

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A potluck. Everyone brings one dish. I have never been so out of my depth in my life.

I was invited to a gathering. "Just bring a dish to share," they said. Simple words. I did not sleep for three days.

Because I understood instantly what this was. A summit. Every guest, a lord of their own house, arriving bearing tribute. And tribute is judged. Tribute is ranked. To bring the wrong dish to the wrong table is to fall in standing before your peers, possibly forever.

So I prepared. I made my finest dish. I carried it to the door with two hands and a straight back, braced for the weighing of my worth.

The first lord arrived with a bowl of orange powder noodles. Macaroni and cheese. The crowd roared. He set it down at the center of the table. The CENTER. I noted this. The center is the seat of power.

The second lord brought a tower of small brown meat orbs in red sauce. "Meatballs," he announced, like a man laying down a sword. They were placed beside the macaroni. A strong showing. An alliance, perhaps.

I studied the table like a battlefield map. Potato salad: defensive, reliable, old money. A vegetable tray, untouched, clearly a hostage offering no one expected to win. And then a woman walked in, raised a flat box overhead, and the entire room turned and CHEERED.

Pizza. She had brought pizza. Store-bought. Still in the box.

I was stunned. She had not even cooked it. And yet the people rejoiced as if a king had entered. I revised my entire understanding of the hierarchy on the spot. Effort means nothing here. Only the roar of the crowd decides rank.

I placed my dish down, humbly, near the napkins. A peasant's position. I accepted it.

And then a man tapped my shoulder, pointed at my dish, and said the words that changed everything.

"Whoa, did you make this? This is amazing. Everybody, you GOTTA try this guy's thing."

The room turned. The room came. The room ATE. My dish vanished in ninety seconds. The pizza woman herself took a second helping and looked at me with respect.

I had won the summit. By accident. With a dish I placed by the napkins.

I understand nothing about this country. I have never been happier. I am hosting the next one.

So tell me, America.

Is there a system to the potluck? A secret rank? A hidden law?

I have decided there is not.

You just bring the thing you love, and everyone eats it, and somehow everybody wins.

It is the most insane way to hold a war.

I will fight in every single one.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

In America, a stranger will rename you in a single breath, and you are simply expected to come when called.

I went to eat at a busy restaurant. A young man at the front asked for my name, to mark my place in line. I gave it the weight it has carried for eight hundred years.

"Nobunaga."

He smiled, nodded, and wrote it down with great confidence. Then he read it back to me, to be sure he had honored it correctly.

"Perfect. Banana, party of one."

Banana. He had heard my name, held it a moment, and returned to me something rounder and more cheerful. To refuse the name a host gives is to refuse his welcome. I bowed. I was Banana now.

Then he handed me a small black disc, said it would "light up and buzz" when my table was ready, and turned to the next guest as though he had not just placed a living thing in my hands.

I held it in both palms, the way one holds a small sleeping beast that may wake. I found a place to stand. I waited, ready.

It woke.

It screamed. It flashed red. It leapt and shook in my hands like a captured spirit demanding release. A lesser man would have dropped it. I did not. I gripped it, steady, looked into its blinking lights, and told it, in a low voice, that its time had come. Then I carried it back to the host with both hands, the way one returns a hawk to its master.

He took it without looking and shouted across the entire room.

"BANANA! Party of one, your table's ready!"

A hundred strangers turned. I rose. I crossed that floor as Banana, spine straight, chin level, a man answering to his name. A child pointed at me. I gave the child a small bow. He had recognized me.

All through the meal they kept me. "How's it tasting, Banana?" "More water, Banana?" The check, when it came, said Banana, and thanked me for visiting. By the end the whole staff knew me. They waved as I left. "Night, Banana!"

So tell me honestly.

For eight hundred years my clan answered to one name. Tonight I answered to a fruit, calmed a screaming relic in my bare hands, and ate among people who were glad I came.

When the little disc lights up, is the table truly mine, or am I only keeping it warm for the next Banana?

Because I have already decided to return on Friday, and to ask, very humbly, for the same disc.

[The Knowledge Archivist @KnowledgeArchiv]

"Evil cannot create anything new, it can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made"

—J.R.R. Tolkien

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

Leonardo da Vinci's greatest paragraph

[Mario Fante @AviatorMario]

@LFODCandles Prayers offered.