Fifty years ago to the day ...

     It's not too often that you can say exactly where you were on any given day in the past.  Major news events are one thing, because you have the media that informed you as a memory to guide you.  Family matters are something else entirely.     
     I can tell you exactly what I was doing, and where, and who else was involved on this day in 1959.
     I was serving as an altar boy, along with a classmate named George Bailey, at my Brother Rick's wedding to Patricia Ann Baranoff.  The service was at Our Lady of Perpetual Help RC Church on Fellowship Road in Maple Shade, NJ, and was officiated by the parish Pastor, Father Thomas Nolan.
     This may have been something of a trend setter:  an essentially agnostic young man of Dutch and German descent who once considered a vocation as a Priest in the Catholic Church (and who would soon convert to Orthodox Judaism), the son of a convert to Catholicism and a dyed in the wool agnostic, marrying a Jewish girl of Russian descent at an RC church in a primarily Italian city officiated by an Irish priest.  Talk about your diversity!
     I can only imagine the way Father Nolan justified all this taking place on a Saturday afternoon in his newly constructed church.  This was, by the way, the same church that, many years later agreed to hold a Catholic funeral service for our Father following his cremation.  We never made it easy for OLPH, especially when I was in school there.
     And today is Rick and Pat's 50th wedding anniversary.  Their kids have set up a renewal of vows in Israel, where the family has lived for years.  I can't be present, but I did an Obama and sent a video.
     Rick & Pat, Mazeltov! And may you have at least fifty more!