Friends, for many years

I am back in the United States now but it would have been much simpler and easier to retire in Asia. The main reasons I returned to Louisville are my brothers and sisters and cousins and my friends. Today Donna and Nancy took me to dinner for my birthday. They were students in my class in high school and both have become significant actors in the deaf world. And remained my friends. They are the types of friends it is very difficult to find in another country, another language, another culture where we have almost nothing in common.

A long collaboration

Today we celebrated a memorial service for one of our Louisville priests who died. Archbishop Shelton Fabre presided. Next to him (on the left) was Deacon Dennis Nash whom I worked with in the 1970s when he was a high school student and I was running a youth group. We’ve been in contact over the years and it was great to see him now ministering to the People of God here.

Around Louisville

Part of my transition back to Louisville is getting acclimated to Cherokee Park. Through extremely visionary planning on the part of Louisville’s early leaders, a series of large urban parks was created here by Frederick Olmsted, the designer of Central Park in New York City. One of these is the 400-acre Cherokee Park on the east side of downtown. All of my early years were in the West End of Louisville and my years as a priest in the South End so I’m very unfamiliar with the maze of trails and paths in Cherokee Park which is near my home now. Today I took an exploratory bike ride to the park and ended up at the Daniel Boone statue, one of the park’s landmarks.

Reflections on love for Valentine’s Day

by Anne Lamott (gifted author interpreter of the human spirit)

Love springs from new life, love springs from death. Love acts like Gandhi and our pets and Jesus and Mr. Bean and Mr. Rogers and Bette Midler. Love won’t be pinned down.

Love is often hard, ignored, or hilarious. But one thing is certain: Love is our only hope.

On the road again…

The past two weeks have been terrible for bike riding: temperatures mostly in the 20ºs and 30ºs and then 8″of snow that just started disappearing two days ago. The cold I could deal with; the ice and snow on the streets were a no-no. But today the sun was out, the sky was clear, and the thermometer rose to the low 50ºs so I rode to the Maloney Center, the former St. Vincent de Paul School turned into a diocesan office building.
The riding was great after such a long absence. The large majority of the snow has melted. The snow that remains is in piles where parking lots were plowed—like above at the Maloney Center–and on really small streets untouched by sunshine.