599 + this 1 = 600 -- CELEBRATE BY READING IT

HEY!  I didn't think that I had 600 thoughts in my coconut.  6 or 16 maybe, but 600...Not on your life. That's a 600 page book for crying out loud!

Thank you, Tom

The interesting thing about it all is that I have some that I will never publish.  I have been pushing them out of the line of fire for nearly three years now.  I am glad that I have had the common sense and the circumspection to stay away from certain expressions of my convictions.  I do not feel squeezed or encumbered by any of this.  I don't feel as though my freedom has been tethered and curtailed because of my decision to keep certain personal and family facts off the pixellated page and away from the consciousness of the readers.  Believe me, this is true.

Those of you who get email from me fairly often, and even those who get email from me occasionally can see that I have more than one blog containing my ramblings.  I don't know why, but lately I have been reading quite a bit of what I have written at random.  I kid you not, random.  Stuff from many years back.  Stuff that appeared long before I was answering the challenge of the 365 Thoughts in one year.  Some of it is really good.  Some of it makes my eyes bug out and make me say, "Did I write that?"  Just as well, some of it makes me wrinkle my nose and say, "I wrote that &*%@+~??..."  So you see, I do know the difference between right and wrong.

It is true that I have some wonderful experiences that would really look good on paper.  They would really be wonderful snapshots of my journey along the road of life but I do not feel compelled to release them into the ethernet.  I think that sometime early in the series I mentioned that I would refrain from using foul language and staying away from the seemier adventures that I have experienced.  For the most part, I have done that.  Not that all that is secret is seemy.  Nope.  Some of it is quite elegant, really, but this is not the place for it.  Not according to me, anyway.

This blog is one thing. The blog "No Crying at my Funeral" is quite another.  It is meant to be an expression of my experience as a Cradle Catholic who neither could nor would be anything but.  It is a Catholic life style blog from the point of view of someone who knows the Catholic Religion from the inside out and who tries to live according to the expectations of that Religion.  This blog is part and parcel of an online Catholic Life Style weekly magazine.  I have some five or six years of contributions to that endeavor.  There too, there is some amazing stuff...on both sides of the meaning of amazing stuff.  The fact that I have a masters degree in Theology from a prestigious Vatican University doesn't protect me from producing some really horrible stuff.  It also doesn't guarantee that the good stuff is equally good all the time.

You see, I just told you that I was enjoying some of the old stories that I produced.  When I lit up my computer this evening, I saw that I had written 599 articles under this title of 365 Thoughts.  So, why not open my heart a little bit and let you in.  I still have some tellable tales.  My #2 son has asked me for one.  I have some that I have been thinking about.  Nostalgic stuff.  You know like, "Given inflation, is today's $0.99 store the .05 and .10 of yesterday?"  "How many times have you been knocked out in your life?"

Tomorrow (Today?) is Hiroshima day.  60 years now, I think, or maybe more.  The other day was the end of the Korean war, 50 years ago.  We in South Hadley have a bad memory of that.  A sweetheart young man named Mike Barney was killed after the armistice in that war.  So see, I still have stuff that I can talk about all the while keeping secret what I want to keep secret and not feeling crimped by it one single bit.  Good, bad or indifferent, there's plenty of other stuff to put out there.  Maybe I'll do better when I produce # 601!