HOW CRAZY CAN YOU BE?

I love to travel, but who in her right mind would leave New Jersey at 6 A.M. on a Saturday morning, drive four hours to see a two-hour basketball game between Syracuse University and Notre Dame, and drive four hours back in the same day? And then go to dinner and the movies with the excess energy accrued from sitting all day. Well, you may not think that subzero Syracuse is an exotic destination at this time of year, but my erstwhile son-in-law, Gary Shippy, will go anywhere (within reason) to see his Alma Mater play. And he decided the night before that this would be a blast. He also knew that when I was a student at Syracuse, I was an avid basketball fan. Unfortunately, his Alma Mater is Notre Dame (only unfortunate because of the score), but he is a courageous sort and had me run interference when he walked in amidst 30,000 yelling Syracuse fans, dressed in his blue and yellow Notre Dame jacket. Fair enough. We had a ball! And I love spontaneity. There I was, winding through the Cherry Valley on a sunny winter morning, reminiscing about those bygone days at the university and thoroughly enjoying the beauty of upstate New York, its bare trees silhouetted like lace against the almost white sky, and neat farms and snow-covered barns standing as a reminder of the old dairy farms, the smoke from wood fires curling from their chimneys.  Talk about a return to childhood….

Then, too, it was wonderful to walk on campus, admire the new buildings, groove on the old ones, visit my father’s office at Hendrick’s Chapel, and see the sanctuary where I was married so many years ago.

An added note of clarification to those of you who are having trouble fully retrieving the archived entries from past months and years. Go to Archives on the right side, click on the date you want, and when the first part of the text comes up, click, again, on the TITLE of the entry. Magically (or so it seems to me), the entire blog will appear. And don’t forget to click on the January entry, which describes my three weeks in Tanzania and Kenya.

This is the shortest blog entry of my life. Saints preserve us! And a Happy New Year to you all!!