HERE’S TO YOUR HEALTH
This week’s Here’s To Your Health is a continuation of Keith Ls’, story:
My father never had an automobile until after he retired and then us kids went together and bought him one. It was never about him, it was always about others, he was altruistic to a fault and he always put everybody else before himself. We grew up that way and I’ll never forget being around the steel mills and coalmines. The coal miner’s were interesting people. They got up, got dressed and ready for work and then turned on their radios for the daily mine report. The report announced the miner’s number, who would work that day, on what shift and at which mine and, if your number wasn’t called that day, you didn’t work, so my father knew if somebody hadn’t worked for a while.
When our family said the rosary, we’d pray for that family. Then my father would give mother a cardboard box and she would fill it with groceries she didn’t know we had. She always put in coffee and few things for the children and then she’d ask us kids if we had anything extra we wanted to put in there? I vividly remember having once won a Duncan yo-yo contest and first prize was a brand new yo-yo. I knew the kid that lived in the house Mom was taking the food to, had broke his yo-yo and so I took my new one and put it in the box. It seemed to me that I held my prized yo-yo over that box for an eternity before I finally dropped it in the box. Mother cried, she put her arms around me and said, “You’re a prince of a man and I love you.”
We took that box down to the miner’s house and the man invited us in, but my mother didn’t want to embarrass them so she said, “No, we have to get back home because the children should be in bed.” All the way home my mother prayed for that family.
Recently my wife Julia bought me a Duncan yo-yo and I’ll be darned if it wasn’t exactly like the one I had dropped in that box; all those years ago. You cannot out give God; you can’t do it.
I was a troublesome kid, because I was fear driven long before I ever picked up that first drink of alcohol. I was extremely nervous and insecure so I did things to get noticed and I got into a lot of trouble, not with the law, but in school. I went to high school at St. John’s Central in Bellaire, Ohio. There I was always acting out and one of the things that happened was if we got in trouble we had to serve detention in the library with Sister Victoria. She would have us put together rosary beads to send to the different missions around the world.
If my family had the money they probably would’ve diagnosed me as ADD, or a hyper-child, but since we were poor, I was just a punk!
Sister Victoria was wonderful, she used to say, “Every boy is a prince and every girl is a princess because our Father is a King! So the kids in detention called each other prince or princess and it didn’t seem so bad. I served hundreds of hours in detention making rosary beads and the standard rosary has 10 beads per decade, but I made them with 11 beads and over four years, I probably had hundreds of rosaries out there with extra beads. When I was getting ready to graduate I confessed to Sister Victoria because it would’ve been for nothing if she didn’t know. Anyway, I told her what I’d done and she said, “Yes, I know what you did you sly little prince and I know why you did it, people all over the world are saying extra prayers and God will give you the credit. I’m glad she told me because I didn’t have the foggiest idea why I did it?
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