March 20, 2021

Good morning everyone, today is Saturday March 20, 2021. The sun and warmer days will be returning to us once again this week. I hope everyone enjoyed their St. Joseph’s Day, and your zeppole were good. I truly enjoyed mine it is something I look forward to all year long. And my wonderful wife once again amidst protest, seeing no point to a gift gave me a beautiful vest to match the scarf she is making. So that sweet tradition continues. Well at 5:57 this morning our Winter of Discontent came to an end replaced by the Spring of York. This line has been used by Shakespeare and Jon Stienback and even The British Government over the years. Our miserable winter of COVID is over and now we are looking ahead to a brighter future with the vaccines and doing the right protocols. We are not out of the woods yet but there is a brighter horizon ahead. Thank God our prayers are being answered. We all children and adults have suffered greatly over the last year, the residual I feel will last a long time to come.
Fifty years ago today I embarked on my first trip to Europe, Paris to be exact. This is something I had wanted to always do and when the opportunity arose I asked my parents to allow me to go. There was very little resistance, they both actually thought it would be a good experience for me. Little did we know those two weeks would actually change the course of my life and affect me 50 years later. Now you know I believe things happen for a reason and we don’t always know why. But this trip gave me a new perspective on life, I began to look at things differently and set a course of doing things differently, maybe it was exposure, which again teaches us everything. Exposure to history, beauty, culture, refinement, These all made a great impression on me. The beaches of Normandy and the endless cemeteries there made me realize what it meant to be a true American, remember at the time back home we had protests everyday for something especially the war in Vietnam, but here I saw what the Americans actually did to help save the world from fascism. Exposure to spirituality when I visited Lisoux the home of St. Theresa, who was always a favorite of mine, but seeing and learning of her life created a life long devotion. I rarely go without thanking her and a list of others and asking them to intercede with our lord on my behalf. I gained an appreciation for art and artists that you will find no where else in the world. My fear of height kept me off the Effel Tower but a print of it has woken me for 50 years, it is the first thing I see every morning. It still give me motivation. Now we have all heard about one thing changing history or the shot heard round the world and I’m sure at some point in time someone will say the pandemic changed the way we live. But in reality one event can change your life, a wedding, a birth the are all life altering. Those two weeks altered my life, I can truly say it opened my eyes to be the person I wanted to be and the way my life would evolve.
Well it is once again Saturday and I will give you my advice Enjoy a beautiful day and find something to make you glad that spring is here and the weather will cooperate so be happy. We will talk again. Til Tomorrow!