This is the third of four parts of an older brother’s eulogy to a beloved younger brother.
Kenny used football to teach a lot of things, even how to deal with celebrities with respect. Whether it was about when to get excited (like the moment he and Pat saw Al Davis riding in the next car over on the Thruway while driving home after a Raiders game) or when to contain excitement (which was pretty much every time Sam saw Marv Levy at Ilio’s).
But don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t as if Kenny wasn’t into fun. He was very good at doing fun. And when he found a gag that worked, you could be sure he’d use it – over and over again. For instance, at every baptism, without fail, when the time came for the godfather to hold the baby, Uncle Kenny would lean into Cesidia and whisper, “This is when I dropped you on your head.” Of course, sometimes he forgot his audience. One year – a different year from our opening story – his Christmas tree nearly fell on young Catarina. He caught the tree before it hit her, but he could tell she was scared. So he tried to make light of the situation by saying, “Catarina, you knocked down the tree!” Well, that was too much and Catarina started crying. He did his best to comfort her, but, well, you know, girls.
He didn’t limit his repartee to one-liners, either. He could out-slapstick the Three Stooges, but only when it came to the birds and the bees… and the occasional mouse. Yes, it’s true he and Betsy would pay their young innocent daughter Teresa a dollar every time she Continue Reading “Kenny Discovers the Birds & the Bees… and the Mice (Content for Family and Friends Only)”
Remembering Father Latus
Father Charles Latus presides over the first Wedding Mass celebrated at the new opened St. Catherine’s Church in the hamlet of Mendon, NY on September 28, 1991.
My father and brother erected the family estate with their own hands. After a long search my parents found a perfect parcel on which to build. While I toiled away deskbound in some distant cubicle, the other men in the family conveyed materials in a beat-up Ford pick-up to the site. Reminiscent of “Carosa and Son” (the masonry business started by my grandfather with my father riding shotgun), the two constructed a home of their dreams.
Oddly, it wasn’t their dream home. That would come decades later.
Coincidentally, they located both homes in the Town of Mendon. The first was the ideal family home. The second was the ideal home for retirement.
That first home was more than the “ideal” family home, it was the last home that housed the entire family – Mother, Father, two adult sons, a high school daughter and an elementary school daughter. We were all there. Until the company my father worked for decided to shut down the Rochester office and transfer him to Albany.
But that’s another story. This is a story about melding into a community.
We quickly adopted Mendon as our home. There are three things that make a community a Continue Reading “Remembering Father Latus”