I’ve seen this quote all over the news lately. Funny thing, but I remember the quote and not the news story that prompted its use. The quote is from Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises. In it, Bill asks how Mike went bankrupt. Mike responds with the now literary meme, “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”
It turns out this “gradually then suddenly” concept applies to a lot more than bankruptcy. Think about how the Roman Empire fell. This applies both to the OG empire centered in Continue Reading “Why I Started To Write”
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”