Kansas City Winter Update

        It’s been a busy two months since my last update. The main event, of course, is the  health of my twin brother, Jim. You may recall in my last update he has kidney failure. After many doctor’s visits and blood transfusions and out-patient surgeries and blood tests and epogen shots and bone marrow testing and lack of sleep he started dialysis 5 weeks ago. Thank God he is now starting to get some energy back. Today was a big day because he was able to drive himself to and from the dialysis clinic for the first time. I have been living with him and driving him for the first three weeks to each session, three days a week.   

        On Feb 1 I flew to Miami FL to visit my friend Rose for 12 days, as I have done the last several years. We had a great time. Rose and I met at Maryknoll and attended language school together in Tanzania 8 years ago. Rose was raised in Miami so she really knows the restaurants well there. She took two weeks of vacation from Camillus for my visit. The Caribbean food options are wonderful but so is just about everything else we tried liked Peruvian and Irish, Italian and Mexican. The timing of this trip could not have been better as the weather in Kansas went from bad to worse while the Miami weather stayed around 80F every day. We got in a picnic while listening to blue grass bands in the park. We got in a couple rounds of golf at a nice little public course. Rose rented me a Harley so I could ride with her friend the Archbishop on his 2^nd annual Poker Run with 125 other bikers for fund raising. We spent a day driving down to beautiful Key West and touring that area. I got a tour of the new Camillus House for the homeless and we then attended a lecture there by one of my favorite religious speakers, Fr Lawrence Freeman from the UK on meditation and addiction. We talked by phone with our old Maryknoll classmate, Jason Oberfeld, as he was passing through Miami airport on his way back to Bolivia. We had a nice Superbowl party at Rose’s house. We attended a celebration at St Thomas University one evening. I spent some time with Rose’s brother Tim on their grandmother’s water well. I also spent a few hours putting her financial data into Turbotax, as I did last year. I toured the Barry University campus while Rose was teaching nursing classes one afternoon and got information on enrolling African students. Maybe most enjoyable was seeing Rose’s many good friends again, like the archbishop. And I even met a few new ones like her old classmate from Houston who came in one weekend on nursing business. We also talked about maybe visiting her friends in Haiti or Cuba next year, God willing. She has done several medical mission trips to Haiti and one trip to see the pope in Cuba.

        I just signed up for a Lenten course on the mystics with Sr Teresa at Guardian Angel parish where my contemplative group meets each Tuesday morning. That starts right after I get back from my son Kyle’s wedding in the Houston area on March 1. Kyle and his future wife, Chrystal, moved to Atlanta in mid January to start his new job with eVestment, so they will be arriving about the same time I do. His uncle Phillip will be riding with me and will be presiding at the marriage service at a local yacht club. It should be fun. Of course, it will be great to see the grandkids again and hear how my son, Adam’s, new job is going in Pearland, just down the road.