ACTIVISM

I was supposed to go to Middletown, N.Y. this past Sunday for a lay Carmelite day of recollection.  It didn't work out well though.  Originally I planned to meet Rita at the Perkins in Pittston Township, on Rte. 315.  I got a telephone message from Barbara, though, on Saturday afternoon.  When I called her back to see what she wanted she explained that Rita has been having trouble with her health & would not be available for a while.  I don't know how to get to the exact place in Scranton where we always meet for things like this so I was forced to back out of the trip.  It's fairly easy to get there but I don't have the directions memorized.  Lent is soon to end.  Last night at O.L. Sorrows there was a penance service with individual confessions available.  I made sure I went to  confession.   The men's meetings at O.L. Sorrows' rectory, twice a month, have been working out really well.  Tomorrow night there will be another meeting at St. Anthony's in Exeter.   Spring has been going well so far but yesterday & today have both been too cold.  I like, though, that there has been no ice on my car windows in the morning.  Yesterday was a national day of epilepsy research.  Everyone was supposed to wear purple.  To my chagrin the only purple article of clothing I have is a short sleeved t~shirt.  I was quite cold.  Lately I've been reading a lot of poetry, as well as Thomas Mallory's "Morte D'Arthur", Harold Bloom's "The Western Canon" & Samuel Beckett's trilogy, "Malloy", "Malone Dies" & "The Unnameable".  Because this is a presidential election year people really have to take the HSS Mandate quite seriously & to do all we possibly can to rid the world of Obamacare.  Our First Amendment right to freedom of conscience is literally at stake.  All my activist friends & connections are working to make things happen.  Unfortunately entirely too many of them are liberals so they are working to the detriment of the common good.

ST. PATRICK & ST. JOSEPH

The lay Carmelite meeting, this past Saturday morning, went really well.   We meet every third Saturday at 9:00 a.m. at the Little Flower Manor in Wilkes~Barre.  Rosemary Lancellotti & Fr. Garth were there from Middletown, N.Y.   Our attendance was really good.  Sr. Mary Robert showed up early to help set things up for us.   We're supposed to get together to go to Middletown for a day of recollection this coming Sunday.  It will be the Feast of the Annunciation.    Last weekend's meeting was on St. Patrick's Day.   That's the big day each year when we Irishmen get to celebrate our cultural heritage.   The English, since even before the Protestant Reformation, have always been abusing the Irish so we truly deserve a good party every once in a while.   Uncle Frankie, Fran & Lisa visited my parents.  I hung around with them for a while before I went to O. L. Sorrows for their party.  While I was there I ended up sitting at a table with a woman who was the mother of one of the girls Fran grew up with.  She  said I must be related to Fran on her Irish side because I couldn't possibly pass for Italian in a million years.  I'm both.   Each year I always make sure I tell people about the time my father took Mary Anne, Earl & me to the parade in Manhattan where we met Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.   Unfortunately it was his last parade.  He was assassinated in June of that year.   Today is the first day of a long~anticipated spring.  Our weather this past winter was unusually mild but I'm glad it's over.  The weather lately has been nice but lately there's been a bit of rain.  I always get headaches when the weather changes.  The meetings on Thursday nights have stopped.  Now we go to St. Anthony of Padua Church, at St. Barbara's Parish, in Exeter, for a meeting each Wednesday night.    Oblate Fr. Phill Massetti is in charge.   Yesterday was the Feast of St. Joseph.  All went well.  I've been reading quite a lot of classic poetry lately.  Thngs get a bit weird when I get to the collected works of people like Walt Whitman & Allen Ginsberg.

CLASSIC LITERATURE

My fifty first birthday is tomorrow. Hay fever's been getting me crazy for the past quite a few weeks. I haven't had any bad headaches lately except for one a couple of weeks ago. Uncle Frankie & Fran came over for a while one night last weekend. She's been doing quite well with getting settled into her newly purchased house lately. I've been doing a lot of reading these days. Besides classic poetry, I recently re_read Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" & Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" & "Alice In Wonderland". The Beatles & their musical contemporaries were all greatly influenced by Carroll's work, & by classic literature in general. Glenn Yanik showed up last Saturday morning, at O.L. Sorrows for a meeting of his men's group. Fr. Leo was there too. We shall be meeting at the Oblates' seminary on 315, on October 2 for a meeting with Bishop Bambera. Mike Aquilina, a Catholic apologist from EWTN, who was raised in Pittston, will be there. I lectored at 11:00 a.m. Mass last Sunday. The new schedule is now official. Michael called last week. He's home from Costa Rica. All went well for him & his friends over there. Although it was during the time when Hurricane Earl struck nothing bad happened anywhere near them. To my chagrin the summer will very soon be over. The weather lately always seems to be very cold, & frequently foggy, in the mornings. It gets very nice during the main part of the day though. There were a couple of thunderstorms a couple of days ago. We really need the rain so I didn't complain much.