Today (October 17th 2015) Kate and I celebrate 40 years of marriage. There are not enough superlatives in the Oxford dictionary to do her justice. Like me she is not a fan of schmaltz anyway although we both do nostalgia pretty well. As she is a budding Irish language scholar I’ll address a few words to her in the language of her O’Hart, O’Neill and O Conghaile ancestors. Mo Chait tá grá agam duit. You have been a steadfast mate for 40 years in good times and bad. You have been my saving grace. As someone has opined “Marriage is a garden, not a fruit stand; you have to tend it”. Kate always had a green thumb. A little over 40 years ago I ran into a friend William Kavanagh, a newly qualified MD, and his new wife near the Clarence Hotel down by the Liffeyside in Dublin, Ireland. We had a few pints in the bar of the hotel. When I left I was merry but definitely not three sheets to the wind. After bidding adieu to the happy couple it was my intent to set sail, to use a nautical term, for my “local” McDemott’s Pub on Leeson Street corner, a student hangout formerly known as Kirwan House. The proprietor was a returned Yank and decent skin from the west of Ireland via Philadelphia who had achieved his goal of life of running a bar in his native land. Luckily I never made my intended destination that evening. As I emerged from an alley beside the Bank of Ireland opposite Trinity College on College Green I made eye contact with a beautiful young woman with a beguiling smile and dancing green eyes. Archbishop Fulton Sheen has said that everyone has in their mind a blueprint of their beloved. All I can say to Kate, a budding Irish language scholar as herein before mentioned: Is fior é sin. Too true. To make a long story short we had an immediate tete-a-tete and I invited her for “a cup of coffee”. She agreed and I extravagantly, being a penurious law student cum law clerk, hailed a taxi and directed the driver to Brannigan’s Pub on Parnell Street where something a good deal stronger than a cup of Java was imbibed. The rest as the saying goes is our history. Forty years on we are on life’s pilgrimage together. I have one anecdote from the “olden days”. In the early years of our marriage there were lean times. Sometimes the only protein foods we could afford were eggs and beans. We had an unexpected visitor from Ireland, a former colleague and a former fellow Solicitor’s Apprentice from my Uncle Jim’s law office in Dublin. He was in the Big Apple on a business trip but flew out to Lansing for a few days to visit us and slept on a couch. Kate was a stay at home Mom at the time while I was trying to eke out a living peddling life insurance. One thing we had in the refrigerator was eggs. Kate was a veritable Picasso when it came to cooking eggs. Our guest was served various forms of egg dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I recall scrambled eggs, omelets, boiled eggs, fried eggs and even a quiche. Our guest was happy and proved it by buying Kate a luxury box of chocolates for her mighty culinary feats. I may have been imagining things but when our guest was bidding adieu I thought I heard him clucking like a chicken as he headed for the airport terminal. Anyway Happy Anniversary to my favorite musician, best friend and the most generous and loving wife a man could ask for. I’m blessed. We have been both blessed by two daughters who have made us proud, a fine son-in-law, and two grandchildren who are to use some Irish parlance “almighty craic”. The sayings that come out of the mouths of these babes make us smile and indeed break out laughing. When we met I was 29 and my lovely Kate 25. To me she remains young at heart and the person with the greatest sense of humor I know. I love you Kate.

Solanus Casey and "Cole" Younger.

      Venerable Solanus Casey O.F.M. CAP. and the outlaw Cole 

      Younger.

Two of my favorite "saints in waiting" are Venerable Father Solanus Casey who spent nearly 30 years in the Motor City at Saint Bonaventure's Friary on Mount Elliot  and the former radical who became a convert to Catholicism and a founder of the Catholic Workers movement; Servant of God Dorothy Day. Both had in common a love for the poor and marginalized in society . Father Solanus Casey was the son of Irish emigrants who arrived shortly after the end of An Gorta Mor or The Great Hunger in the English tongue. Dorothy Day's father was of Irish heritage although native born. Both came to lead lives of heroic virtues in the end.  The French poet Leon Bloy's comment " the greatest tragedy in life is not to have been a saint" certainly would not apply to these lovers of the poor for saints they were. Dorothy Day's autobiography The Long Loneliness is on my "to read list" and I am currently reading a biography of Father Solanus entitled Thank God Ahead of Time, The Life and Spirituality of Solanus Casey. So far it has been an enlightening read as befits a book written by a man who knew him well; Father Michael Crosby, O.F.M. CAP.

The future Father Francis Solanus Casey was born, the sixth of sixteen children, on an 80 acre farm overlooking the Mississippi River and the neighboring state of Minnesota near Prescott, Wisconsin on November 25th 1870. He was christened Bernard Joseph after his father upon his Baptism at Saint Joseph Mission Church on December 18th 1870.

Before he entered the novitiate in Detroit on Christmas Day 1896 he led a somewhat peripatetic existence .
At age 17 he left the farm to work in a series of jobs in his home state and across the river in Minnesota, working as a lumberjack, a hospital orderly, a guard in the Minnesota state prison in Stillwater, and as a street car operator in Superior, Wisconsin. When my wife Kate and I took a swing out west to the Black Hills of South Dakota, Sundance,Wyoming, and the site of Custer's Last Stand on the Little Big Horn River in Montana, we decided to return via US 2 . The western segment runs from Everett, Washington to Saint Ignace, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula but it runs through Superior, Wisconsin across the Richard I. Bong Bridge from Duluth, Minnesota. We had intended spending the night in Duluth but the hotels were full so we stayed in Superior on that Saturday, returning back across the bridge the following morning for Mass and a bit of sightseeing. At the time I was unaware that in the past the then Bernard Joseph "Barney" Casey and his family had sold their farm and had gone to live in Superior and also that this same city  was the last port of call for the ill fated Edmund Fitzgerald.
 At one time Barney Casey had a shine on a 17 year old girl Rebecca Tobin and wanted to ask for her hand in marriage but her mother would have none of it and sent Rebecca off to boarding school. Barney never saw her again. As a youth Barney Casey had learned to play the fiddle and knew the popular dance tunes. While his playing was just passable he did so with energy and he and his fiddle were welcome guests at any party. Barney had worked as a prison guard at the penitentiary in Stillwater, Minnesota which brings us to his connection with Cole Younger, the sidekick of Jesse James.

Cole Younger was Thomas Coleman Younger, a former captain in the Confederate army and later a member of the James-Younger gang. After being wounded and captured during the infamous Northfield Bank on September 7^th 1876 raid he was imprisoned in Stillwater Penitemtiary and served 25 years of a life sentance before being paroled in 1901 along with his brother Jim who shortly thereafter committed suicide in a St Paul, Minnesota hotel. Cole Younger gave up his career as an outlaw and along with Frank James later joined a wild west show. He repented of his outlaw past when he found religion. During his time in the hoosegow he was befriended by Barney Casey, the future Venerable Solanus and gave Barney a clothes trunk, a handy piece of luggage which Barney probably took with him as he went on his trek to Saint Bonaventure Friary in Detroit to join the Franciscan Capuchin order. One would like to think that Barney Casey had an influence on Cole Younger. Certainly the old outlaw from a well to do family who had been an officer in the Confederate Army, a guerrilla fighter  with the infamous Quantrill's Raiders, and a member of the notorious James-Younger outlaw gang later amended his ways and died with his boots on.  Barney Casey would become in due course Father Solanus Casey, the friend of the poor and the downtrodden. I first made a visit to his tomb at St. Bonaventure's some years ago with a good friend, the late Jane McAuliffe, RIP, from Knocknagoshel, County Kerry along with a group from Saint Therese Parish in Lansing. Since then Kate and I have visited again and always found it to be a place of peace. There is no doubt in my mind that one day the venerable Solanus Casey will be canonized as a saint. "For Solanus," Father Crosby writes, "knowing God demanded a threefold response: appreciation, love and service. Solanus wrote that everyone's purpose as a rational creature is to recognize and to know his Creator, so as to be able, intelligently to love Him, confidently to hope in Him, and gratefully to serve Him" Great words to live by for sure.