Tag: family

No Time to Say Goodbye

Most of us have a friend like Tom – inseparable at one point in your life, but then the reality of time and adulthood get in the way. You lose touch, maybe move away. Build an adult life, marry, have kids. You get back together occasionally and, when you do, you pick up exactly where you left off. The same jokes. The same stories. The same memories.

Tom Racculia and I met in the 1970s, in our youth “folk group” at church. A handful of us played at 9:30 Mass every Sunday morning. It was a great experience for high-schoolers who fancied themselves as musicians – singers and guitar players. Tom strummed the guitar pretty well, but the show-stopper was his voice – a strong, clear, powerful tenor.

Tom’s great gifts included making people laugh, his loyalty to his friends, and his total and unconditional love for his family.

One Christmas, the music director combined all the choirs to sing at Midnight Mass. Tom sang the solo for “O Holy Night.” The first time around, he choked on the climactic high note. I immediately nudged the singer next to me and whispered, “Just wait.” The next time around he hit that note so powerfully loud and clear, I swear the old stained-glass windows rattled.

Tom was a born performer, a clown prince. Think Robin Williams. On speed. During that same Midnight Mass, as we sang “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” Tom leaned into my ear and softly sang a bastardized lyric. (Hey, we were 15!) In the middle of Midnight Mass, right next to the altar, I was unable to control my laughter. I would have been the object of the pastor’s wrath if one of the ladies from the adult choir hadn’t relied on too much pre-Mass anti-freeze to keep warm, nearly knocking over the Christmas tree.

To this day, I have drunk more beer with Tom than any other person on the planet. Our high school and college years were crazed. We hit the discos at least a few nights a week, wearing our Members Only jackets, polyester shirts, and platform shoes. Nights often ended at Mancini’s for pizza, always double cheese and sausage, usually around 1:30 am. But always, music was front and center – church and otherwise. Singing, playing, and listening.

In high school it was the music that drew us to the Friday night coffee house at the neighborhood Methodist church. They were semi-open mic nights. It was the folk rock, singer-songwriter era and many of the live performances were lights-out phenomenal. After the music, many of us stayed for discussions about Jesus, and then prayer. It was a time when teenagers started exploring truths bigger than themselves. One night in June 1972, we both had the religious experience of a lifetime. For Tom, that lifetime has now ended. 

I got his wife’s text over breakfast. Even as I write this, I’m enveloped in a crushing twilight of unreality. Through the haze, I’m upset at Tom, a cancer survivor, for not telling me about new, cascading health issues. I’m angry at myself for not calling him more often over the years, leaving us no opportunity to say goodbye. And I’m livid that I have allowed the tasks and concerns of everyday life to rob me of focusing on the people and things that are supposed to be most important in my life.

One of the greatest gifts God has given us is the gift of each other. It’s a gift worth treasuring. Every day.

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My Panties Fell into My Coffee!

“Oh No! My panties fell into my coffee!”

Hmmm… wasn’t expecting to hear anything like that.

“Uh, actually, it’s tea. I’m drinking tea this morning.”

Makes a difference, I guess.

Helen and I were in the middle of our usual Sunday morning sprint, racing to get dressed and out of the house for early Mass. She was overloaded with teacup, clothes, shoes and who knows what else when the mishap hap’d. I was yielding the bathroom to her and was also overloaded – tea mug, phone, bottle of water, Bluetooth speaker, hair brush, beard brush, styling wax, towel and morning meds. Microcosms of two overloaded lives.

Something’s gotta give.

Like Dagwood and his sandwich-makings, most of us tend to overload ourselves – too much to carry, too much work, too many tasks.

Helen and I seemed to be living in a constant maze of tasks. Day-to-day work, family, and home responsibilities have snowballed. Much like most Americans; probably very much like you and your family. Even when our bodies force us to take a break, our minds are still dizzy with an increasing number of items on our to-do lists – at least some of which will never get to-done.

At Mass, just an hour later, that sense of overload was affirmed. The gospel reading was the story of Jesus cleansing the temple of the merchants and moneychangers. Solomon’s Temple was heart and soul of Jewish society, and it had become polluted by far too many extraneous elements that robbed it of its singular focus.

Fr. Jhon Guarnizo’s insightful homily hit a perfect bull’s eye, comparing the ancient Jerusalem temple as the dwelling place of Yahweh with our own hearts as home for the Holy Spirit. Just as Jesus drove out everything that did not belong inside the walls of that holy place, Fr. Jhon cited our need to dislodge “the rush of busy-ness, where we measure our days by productivity instead of prayer.”

Jesus cleansed the temple to put the focus back where it belonged. Today, it’s a metaphor for us to focus on the true substance of our lives.

No, we can’t ignore the laundry or the dishes. But maybe we can make a little time – ten minutes – for reading a daily devotional or Bible verse, and then offering a quick prayer for a loved one, either living or gone. Yes, we must still go to work, but maybe in the car we can stream “Let Me Be Frank” instead of “Howard 100.” And, overall, less doing and more reflecting. Something, anything, that reminds us we are human beings, not human doings.

Still, I don’t expect Helen and I will be changing our well-choreographed Sunday morning sprint. Just please don’t forward this post to her. The last thing she said before heading for the shower Sunday morning was, “And I don’t want to read about it in your blog!”

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I Am a Person

“Do you have any idea what her mother would have done if she knew?” my cousin asked my sister. “She would have killed her!”

My sister Bobbie Lynn Featherstone didn’t
know her mom had another child – me –
until we connected in 2017.

I had only known my cousin Grace for about an hour. I first met my sister Bobbie – a biological half-sister but a complete sister in every other sense of the word – only the day before. It was a beautiful, sunny July day on Bobbie’s back deck. I listened as the cousins talked family history. Bobbie had said she was mad at our mother Lynn for keeping her out-of-wedlock pregnancy – me – a secret. Grace argued my pre-natal existence was a secret she had to keep.

I was born in 1956 and, contrary to nostalgic belief, the number of out-of-wedlock pregnancies was not insignificant. But it was still not socially acceptable – not by a mile. Families sent daughters to “visit out-of-town relatives.” Others, including my birth mother, hid their pregnancies. A few pursued so-called back-alley abortions. But mostly, adoption agencies suffered no shortage of available newborns to place with couples who could not conceive themselves.

My birth mother, Lynn Welch, was still married to her abusive husband when she fell in love with co-worker Angelo Barone, my father. She hid the pregnancy from everyone – possibly even him – and put me up for adoption with Catholic Social Services. Lynn and Angelo married after her divorce, and they later had two more sons – my brothers Joe and Marc. Angelo raised Lynn’s two previous children, Bobbie-Lynn and son Dana, as his own. My birth parents remained deeply in love until Lynn’s untimely death by heart attack in 1992.

My biological mother, Lynn Welch, married my farther, Angelo Barone, after giving me up for adoption.

I dearly wish I would have had the opportunity to tell my birth mother how eternally grateful I am that she made the excruciating choice to give me up for adoption. That I grew up in a wonderful family that would have otherwise been childless. That I had careers as a journalist and an educator. That, while I didn’t cure cancer, I impacted lives as a husband, father and friend.

If I had been conceived 17 years later, however, there would have been a much greater chance I would never have been any of those things. I would not have existed. Not after the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973.

Before that ruling in Roe v. Wade, abortion was quietly available, yes, but as socially forbidden as an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Today, abortion has been normalized in our society, as acceptable as buying a toothbrush. To believe otherwise is to be an unenlightened, paternal Neanderthal, dedicated to denying women the freedom to make decisions about their own health care.

This is what I looked like about six weeks after I was conceived. You, too!

Why did I have a right to live in 1956, but a person conceived after January 22, 1973, does not?

When I hear the argument that abortion is a legitimate choice to an unwanted pregnancy, this is what I hear: My humanity, my membership in the human race, is invalid. I am beyond any significance. Simply – I have no value. In the balance of nature, the world would be better off if I had never been born. In the politics of pro-choice, the person most affected has no choice at all.

I know all the arguments in favor of abortion. Many of them seem reasonable and sensible. But I have not yet heard one that matches nullifying my existence. Do I take it personally? Yes. Because I am, and always have been, a person.