Small Miracles

 

Today I went to campus and joined my other FART 5 peeps, thinking surely my issues with the new system had been resolved, but no. I ended up helping the same colleague again. My boss was very frustrated because she said she had submitted a request to update my permissions and the request was canceled by someone.

"I guess someone really wants you to get a paycheck for doing nothing," she said.

"Are you sure I wasn't laid off?" I asked, but she assured me that I was still on payroll. Still, I was feeling really down. She said I was the only one in FART 5 that this had happened to, but that it had happened to people in the other four FARTs. OK Universe, I got my comeuppance for thinking I could just breeze through Go Live - can I get back to work now? And then Seabird told me she couldn't walk at lunch because there was a retirement party in her department. She's been on vacation for a week, so I haven't seen much of her. Hardingfele couldn't walk either, so I set off glumly for my walk alone... and promptly ran into my Irish teacher, who works in my building but usually is remote all summer. She asked how I was and I told her my sad story, so she said, "I'll walk with you." After I had complained enough to get it out of my system, she told me about her wonderful trip to Ireland. It seemed like that had to come from God, because how else to explain the timing?

I'd like to say that set the tone for the rest of the day, but unfortunately the rest of my workday was just as frustrating. I have to print a bunch of donor letters, and our fancy printer can supposedly fold them, so I watched a video to see how it's done and tried... just to find that choice grayed out. I fetched my much younger and more technologically advanced coworker, but she was just as clueless so I didn't feel quite so stupid. We tried a million things suggested online, but the button for "folding" remained stubbornly grayed out. It looks like a folding party might be in our future. 

I am having a very restful and quiet evening because Travalon is hanging out with one of his guy friends. My big decision now is whether to go back to campus again tomorrow, and my second decision is if I should wear the goose T-shirt. It kind of fits my mood right now.

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Vivaldi and Me

 

Today I worked from home and walked with my neighbor, who is moving soon. Travalon cooked hotdogs for the kids at work (he hates hotdogs), then he handed out fruit to kids in the neighborhood from a food truck called the Munchmobile:

Mmm! The fruit looks delicious!

Right after work I drove to Holy Name Heights for an organ recital by my OTHER choir director, and since the Dairyman's Daughter works there, she was able to reserve a conference room for us to have dinner. She picked up a lasagna, and I told her to add a salad and garlic bread and I would pay her for it. Rich brought juice and mints, Kathbert brought homemade gingerbread for dessert, Jilly Moose brought veggies and homemade garlic bread, and another woman brought strawberries, raspberries, and red wine. The Single B-Boy thought he was going to fly to Northern Wisconsin, but the weather wasn't good enough, so he was able to join us too. There were some pretty flowers in front of Holy Name Heights.

After dinner we went up to the chapel, and then our group scattered because Kathbert and the other woman sat with some people they knew, Rich and the Dairyman's Daughter sat with the man who makes fabulous desserts and his son, and Jilly Moose and I sat with Pete the Sailor Man, the guy Travalon and I went hiking with at the start of the pandemic, and another woman. The penultimate piece of the concert was an arrangement of Romanian dances by Bartok, but the last piece was the Bach transcription of the Vivaldi Concerto in D Minor from L'Estro Armonico, and I was in heaven while listening to that. Kathbert said she looked over and saw the look of pure bliss on my face.

I can't say if my life is a series of wacky coincidences or a carefully scripted story, but I like to believe it's the latter. Vivaldi taught me to read music as a child, as I may have mentioned on this blog before, when I loved his Concerto in A Minor for one violin so much that I would follow the written music while listening to it. In college I listened to L'Estro Armonico over and over, and when I pondered what had moved him to write such wondrous music and then learned he was a priest, that was one of the main things that attracted me to the Catholic Church. Once I became Catholic, I would pray for his soul in Purgatory (was it there? who knows?), and once I had a dream that if I went to Mass every Wednesday and Saturday, I would see a miracle. So I started going every Wednesday and Saturday, and I had a dream that in Paris I saw the Pope on a see-through bus, and he saw me and smiled and waved at me. When we were actually in Paris for World Youth Day, Ethel and I got separated from our group and were so far back from the Papal Welcome that we decided to cut out early and go to a Vivaldi concert at Sainte-Chapelle, but all the nearby metro stops were closed, so we were running, trying to get there in time. Suddenly they wouldn't let us cross the street, and then along came the Pope in a see-through vehicle, and I waved at him, so he saw me, smiled, and waved back at me. Just like my dream!! And it was all because of Vivaldi! Ethel pointed out that was the miracle that I had been promised, and that maybe it meant Vivaldi's soul had been released from Purgatory. I have often felt that Vivaldi is pulling some strings for me from heaven - he even found me a husband who shares his name - and tonight I felt like we were in total communion. If it is all true, I hope he is one of the first people to meet me when I get to heaven. If it isn't true, then that is a seriously crazy series of events.

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Guest Post: Miracle at the Walk to Mary

I had asked Rich some time ago for a first-person account of the miracle he experienced on the Walk to Mary, figuring it would be better if he recounted it than if I did. Here it is:

The “Walk to Mary” is an organized pilgrimage walk that starts at the National Shrine of St. Joseph on the campus of St. Norbert’s College in DePere, Wisconsin, to the Shrine of our Lady of Good Help in Champion Wisconsin. The distance is 21 miles. In 2022, almost 3,500 people made the walk.

The “official” photo library of the Walk can be viewed here.

A group of 4 of us from Madison traveled up to the Green Bay area in two cars on Friday night, April 30, 2022, and stayed at a facility run by the Norbertines over night.

The next morning, Saturday, May 1, we assembled outside the Shrine of St. Joseph for the pre-walk prayer service, and the start of the walk. Our group met a number of other people, including the B-Boys from Madison, and Ethel from the Milwaukee area.

Once the bell was rung, we started the walk, which starts off by leaving the St. Norbert’s campus, crossing a bridge across the Fox River, and then walking for a few miles along the bank on the south side of the river, toward Green Bay.

After a couple of miles, Luxuli, who was walking beside me at that point, said, “Rich! You are walking differently all of a sudden.” I looked down and saw that my right foot was indeed pronating severely! I sat down on a nearby bench, and was making ready to remove my shoe, thinking that something had gone wrong with my support inserts. It turned out that half of my shoe heal was missing! The shoes I was wearing were running shoes I had had for some time, and I had no idea that the heals were in bad shape. I was a bit mystified.

Of course, I could not possibly make the walk with half of one shoe heal missing without making a big mess of my knees, so I started looking for something to stuff into the heal to take up the empty volume. Luxuli had a spare plastic bag, so I tried stuffing that into the void. That seemed to work, but I needed a way to keep it in place. A little further down the path, I stopped by a first aid station to see if they had any bandaging tape. To my surprise, they had none. The best they had was Bandaids, or the equivalent.

So we did the best we could with those, and continued. I knew, from having done the walk once before, pre-pandemic, that there was a major stop at the 7-mile mark, at the parish of Sts. Peter and Paul, where there would be sandwiches and other things for the pilgrims, in addition to water and portable toilets.

We got there, now toward the end of the population of pilgrims (it is still a mystery how we wound up at the rear of the pack, as we were making pretty good time). I was hoping to find some duck or strapping tape to reinforce the repair job on my shoe. I approached one of the women who was volunteering, and asked if she could find out where on the parish campus I could find some duck tape, showing her my shoe, and explaining my predicament.

She immediately brought me to her husband who was nearby. He indicated that he had some tape in his truck, which was parked nearby. He then asked my shoe size. I replied “11-1/2”. He then said that he also has some running shoes of that size in his truck, which shoes he was planning to replace anyway. So he brought me to his truck and produced a pair of running shoes.

They fit just about perfectly.

I transferred my arch-support inserts to those shoes and put them on, continuing to be amazed that someone just happened to have a pair of running shoes that fit me just about perfectly.

I removed my shoes, and gave a thought to repairing them, until I looked at them. The soles were falling apart, suddenly, on both shoes. I’ve never seen soles and heals fracture on running shoes that way before. Then it dawned on me that the shoes — New Balance running shoes — were about 30 years old. They were not all *that* worn, but the synthetic material had failed from aging.

So, thanks to a small miracle at the hands of our Lady and our Lord, and by the kind offices and generosity of a parishioner of St. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Green Bay, I was able to successfully complete the walk.

Let us be thankful for the small miracles, as well as the larger ones!

Richard Bonomo

Miraculous Sideways Icicles

Yesterday at Mass the reader announced a reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Collisions - wonder if he's related to Light Bright? - and it was that oddly controversial reading about how women should be submissive to their husbands.  Helloo, ladies, if you think we got a bad deal, read the next section about how men must love their wives like Christ loved the Church.  That's right, they have to be ready to die for us and we just have to humor their silly requests.  So WHO got the bad deal?

I was amazed to see sideways icicles on the fire escape of the old Our Lady of Perpetual Sobriety school building, and I couldn't help wondering about this miracle:  do the laws of physics not apply to OLPS?  Here, for reference, are your basic vertical icicles hanging from the eaves of my roof and the roof of the building across the way.

Ready?  Here are the sideways icicles!  I regret to inform you that there is nothing supernatural about this phenomenon.  Let's see if you can figure it out like Richard Bonomo and Kathbert did.

Did you figure it out?  Yes, the fire escape was horizontal when the icicles formed, and then the weight of all that ice pulled the fire escape down.  You can see more clearly in this closer shot that, as the icicles melt and refreeze, the ends are bending straight down.

I know you are jealous, but here at Our Lady of Perpetual Sobriety we have a Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration Chapel so you can adore Our Lord 24/7.  Not only that, but it was just redone.  I knew they were going to redo it, so I took a "Before" shot.

They turned the chapel from the width of the room to the length, which is much lovelier except that there  are two pillars, and now they block the view of the monstrance a little bit.

So we went from a makeshift altar to this beautiful triptych, which looks oddly familiar:  the golden color, the Gothic arches...  Compare it to this photo I took (that didn't turn out too clearly, unfortunately) of the Lutheran church.  Rich, Kathbert, Cecil Markovitch, Hardingfele, Rockstar Tailor, and I were just there for the Third Day of Christmas Carol Sing, and the church was decorated beautifully so I took this picture of it.

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In This Valley of Tears

In this month of Our Lady of Lourdes, I should mention my own miraculous healing. Per my post about the leopard movie, quite possibly I brought this on myself, when God said, "To achieve enlightenment in one lifetime would take almost unbearable suffering," and I said, "Bring it on!" At least, that is how I would comfort myself when things were almost unbearable, by thinking it was all part of some grand plan.

It was always clear that something was wrong with me as a child. My parents would take me to experts, saying I seemed to be autistic except that I could talk. A lot. In fact, usually the hard part was getting me to shut up about my favorite topic, zoology. I knew EVERYTHING about animals and had a nearly photographic memory for anything I'd read, although I could barely understand what people said to me. My mother would yell at me constantly for not being able to follow verbal instructions.

I didn't like people and mostly tried to ignore them. The experts diagnosed me with a bewildering array of issues: avoidant personality disorder, hyperkinesis, schizoid disorder of childhood, borderline personality disorder. Finally I had to go see a child shrink who somehow convinced me that it was BAD to live in my own little world and that the highest good was to win the approval of others... but he didn't tell me how to do this. I found people totally bewildering; I took everything they said literally and couldn't pick up on their body language. Heck, I couldn't even recognize them by their faces! People would get so furious because I could remember everything about them and yet couldn't recognize them out of context.

Obviously I found this all a little discouraging. My parents were more concerned with my brother's academic struggles than my social ones, but my mother saw something on TV about Attention Deficit Disorder and decided she had finally figured out my problem. She dragged me to see more experts who said I definitely had ADD and a personality disorder on top of that, but because I did well in school, I didn't need any treatment. So I started seeking my own treatments. I read about the Feingold diet and tried to avoid additives and artificial colors and flavors. I tried different herbal teas and discovered that ginseng and yerba mate helped with my attention problems while ginkgo and rooibos helped me think before speaking. I saw a shrink on my own who prescribed a drug for the ADHD which caused me to have a seizure, but to my amazement it gave me depth perception, which I had never had before. It did something even more incredible, although I didn't realize the significance at the time: it made me feel the emotions of others. One day I watched a muskrat eating clover by the side of a pond, and it was so happy that I felt happy.

From then on it was as if my emotional development, which had somehow never begun, unfolded in real time. Now that I am in my teens emotionally, I am almost indistinguishable from my peers, since teens are almost as mature as adults. I didn't understand exactly what had happened until getting a job at a clinic that diagnoses children with autism. Some of the children were obviously autistic, but some of them were just like me when I was a child. I was shocked that they were diagnosed with high-functioning autism, or Asperger syndrome. "How can they label these kids when they're just a little different, like I was?" I wondered. Then it occurred to me - did I have Aspergers? Do I still? "Autism" literally refers to someone in his own world, which I definitely was as a child. Now that I can pass as normal but just offbeat, holding down a job and owning my own condo, it doesn't quite seem to apply. But when I talked to my mother about it, she said once upon a time the experts had told her I would most likely need to be institutionalized as an adult. Looks like they were wrong! Maybe it was Our Lady of Lourdes begging her Son to heal me, because to me it seems like a miracle.

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