Who's counting anymore but it's about to be my birthday

 March 4, 1957 sometime in the early morning hours I made my grand entrance in the world.  Yep, that would be 64 long years ago.  The national President was Dwight Eisenhower, the Pope was Pius XII and LSU won a national football championship.  We had no New Orleans Saints or Pelicans, we had not yet landed on the moon, no one owned a computer and telephones were connected to the wall.  What a long time ago.

My birthday almost always comes in the season of Lent, although sometimes it falls on or near Mardi Gras.  My birthday is followed by one day the birthday of my first born son James and by two days the birthday of my third grandchild Brennan.  Believe me, her birthday will be so much more fun than mine.  After all, celebrating three year old grandchildren is pretty exciting.  My mom's birthday was always a week or so after mine as well; she's been gone now some fourteen years.

So I guess this is my first full birthday in a full blown world-wide pandemic.  We know so much more today about this virus than we did one year ago and there is hope it's maybe on the run thanks to these vaccines.  This is also my first birthday since about 1983 not working in the banking/consumer finance industry.  While I continue to shake my head at that event and still have more questions than answers, I am really trying to move on.  Oh I will be going to work tomorrow on my birthday only this year it will be at my church parish of St. Jane in Abita Springs, the town where I've now lived since 1996.  And tomorrow night I plan to be at my local Knights of Columbus meeting.  That will be more than enough for me although I will look forward to hearing from several family and friends.

I hope this birthday year will bring some closure to final decisions on how I move forward post banking; will it be disability or just plain old retirement.  And I do plan to keep working part-time as long as I am valuable to my church parish, which is really my church family.  I earnestly pray that this birthday year will also bring major strides in defeating Covid19.  It will be nice to return to some much loved normalcy.  One thing I hope to be able to do soon is return to prison ministry; it's been 368 days since I've seen my faith family at Rayburn Correctional.

So the annual renewal of my birth will come and go and I remain ever thankful for the gift of life and all my blessings from God, the love of family, and of friends and a chance to keep on keeping on.