Back To Rotary: Upcoming Presentations

When I felt my phone vibrate I immediately thought it was one of the usual family or lodge suspects sending me an update or asking me a question. What I didn’t expect to read when I opened up my text messages was a request from the President of the Rotary Club of Bala Cynwyd – Narberth to be a guest speaker at one of the upcoming meetings. While it has been some time since I was last a regular member, I am still proud to hold the title of Honorary Rotarian and it will certainly be a privilege and pleasure to reconnect with the people who have continued to support me despite my long absence. Following our brief conversation, I will not only have one opportunity to revisit this find group but two opportunities to join them for lunch in the coming months.

The first presentation I will be making is on the transforming my everyday experiences into a daily blog and, recently, into a collection of books. I started my blog while still very active with the club and I have continued writing daily posts. Now numbering over a thousand, I have begun the process of transforming those posts into essay collections on individual topics.

The first book to result from this effort is The Good, The Bad, And The Adorable: My First Year As A Father which recounts all the moments from the time my wife and I found out we were having a baby all the way through my son’s first birthday. I guess you could call it a baby book on steroids. The second book, Out On the Limbs: Searching For Answers In The Family Tree, was released at the same time and includes many of the family stories that have been passed down to me as well as the recreations of some of the lives of my ancestors which I have pieced together through years of research. Of course, there are numerous more on the way this year but this gives you a sense of the subject of this presentation.   

While genealogy is a topic that I have discussed before during a meeting this presentation will be completely different than the last one. The second presentation, which was actually the original impetus for the outreach, will be on the research, application process, and joining the Sons of the American Revolution. This has been a goal for several years and now it is finally coming to fruition. During this presentation I will not only talk about the discovery of this family line which was unfamiliar to the family during my youth but the process of researching and ultimately proving this lineage to the point where it will stand up to the scrutiny of an independent third party such as the Sons of the American Revolution. Of course, this is just the beginning and I will also touch upon the repetition of this process that is before me as I begin pulling together the documentation for thirty supplemental applications.

All that is left is to coordinate a day that works in my schedule. Hopefully, this will be a regular commitment as I continue writing and researching… there are certainly enough topics that I can speak on, maybe not intelligently but enough for a presentation. But, for now, I will enjoy the opportunity to visit my club, share my passions, and spend a couple of days with some great friends.

Time To Party: Part I

Last weekend, after a long day at the lodge blood drive and only spending a couple of hours at home, I took a short walk through the woods between the houses and met our neighbors for the first time. I wasn’t sure about attending given our schedule that weekend but I am certainly glad that I made the time. I liked our house and the area before I had a chance to meet anyone and now I am even more appreciative of having found our home in this neighborhood. As a bonus, there is only one neighbor that owns a cat which may not seem like a big deal to many but for us it allows us to be more welcoming to our fellow neighbors in our home.

That wasn’t the first time we had met some of the neighbors. A few weeks ago, shortly after we moved into our new home, our next door neighbor rang the doorbell and gave us a wonderful pot of soup and an invitation to their holiday party. I was out at the time but my wife had a very nice conversation with her and the soup was definitely appreciated as it provided us with an additional meal that we didn’t have to prepare that weekend. The invitation was a bit unexpected but a pleasant surprise. Almost immediately, with that single encounter, we felt welcomed in our new neighborhood.

It was interesting learning about all of our neighbors who seemed more eager to meet me than I was them. We are an interesting little collection of people with a variety of backgrounds and a diverse collection of occupations. However, the common thread among all that I spoke to at the party was that each of them wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. And this is coming from a group that included someone who has lived on the same street his entire life (50+ years) to those that used to be the new people on the block having moved in about a year or two ago.

With our son down for the night and my wife doing her best to relax and stay awake at home, I had to cut the evening short and was heading back home about an hour after arriving. It is safe to say that, so long as we get another invitation, we will both be attending the party next year. In the meantime, I am looking forward to getting to know all of our neighbors and making the time to visit each of them. This is something that we have been search for and an aspect of finding our home that we are grateful for and will certainly enjoy.

Still Behind But Catching Up

As you have most certainly noticed at this point, I am a little behind in writing blog posts (again). There was little time while we were away to write anything and when I did have a free moment or two there were a slew of emails that need to be sent. When those were done I decided to upload the pictures from the camera and sort through them rather than writing the posts to accompany them. I am actually glad that I did it this way as I was able to organize the hundreds of images making the subsequent writing much easier.

I am slowly catching up but still have a lot of work ahead of me all the while the amount of free time seems to be evaporating with every project that we have been putting off can’t be delayed any longer. There is some overdue cleaning that insidiously welcomed us back after our time away and there is a lot of organization that has been a nonstarter up to this point as well (mostly in our offices). And, of course, there is the readjustment back to our daily routines and the various tasks at work that seem to be convening this month just as I am just starting to get back ahead of things at the office.  

With that said, I am slowly getting the backlog of posts written and actually beginning to plan a fair amount of future posts as there are a lot of topic that I hope to cover in future days, weeks, and months as well as a number of places, events, and news items that I am planning on revisiting. There are also a few things marked on my calendar that should provide a bit of fodder for the blog. While I like to be a bit more ‘in the moment’ with these posts, having a good list of topics and ideas is a great way to prevent the long periods of inactivity due to a lack of material (the worst kind of gap).

However, while I have a long list of topics, subjects, and events that I will be writing about, I welcome any suggestions that you might have. After all, you are the ones that are reading these posts every day (even when they aren’t quite fresh given the number of views I received absent of new content). Additionally, I welcome guest posts, especially those from family members about our genealogy as well as submissions from other families about some of the interesting stories and discoveries that they have found. Hopefully, there will be a few such post in the future but, in the meantime, if you don’t have the time to write feel free to share your idea in the comments below. Maybe it will be the subject of a future post.

My Favorite Kind Of Email

A pile of petitions ready to be filled out!

During the course of my regular morning at the office I opened up my lodge mail just to make sure that there were no masonic fires that needed to be put out. Just the usual daily task that I have integrated into my routine at work. Usually there is nothing to read however there are occasions when I get emails that have to be addressed right away. Fortunately, this was not one of those instances. Actually, I received the best kind of email… an inquiry from a prospective candidate who wanted to learn more about the lodge, becoming a mason, and freemasonry in general.

As it turns out, our journey of inquiry was very similar. While I had known about my uncle and my grandfather (different sides) having been masons, it wasn’t until I really got into the genealogy and the legacy of the fraternity that I became interested in learning about freemasonry and subsequently interested in becoming a Mason. The email I received came with a similar story as he had been researching his own family and discovered that his great great grandfather was a Mason in New York. That was the catalyst that started his initial journey to the fraternity and lead him to contacting my lodge.

So, after a few emails back and forth we agreed to meet at the lodge last night. Hey, I’m already there on Tuesday nights so I might as well not waste time and show him around and meet him face to face. I got to the lodge a bit early and took care of a few meetings before the 7:30 appointment. Just the usual weekly items that need to be taken care of with the Treasurer. With about 10 minutes to go some of the other Brothers began walking up to the front door. Soon after, and 5 minutes early, the prospective candidate turned the corner and approached us asking if I was the one with whom he previously spoke.

We walked around the lodge, top to bottom, and talked for about 30 minutes. While I can’t say that I am the best at giving tours, I have gotten better since the last time I showed someone around. He asked a few questions here and there but, for the most part, he seemed to want more of the formal introduction to the lodge that this tour was accomplishing. At the end of the evening, I handed him a petition and invited him to dinner next Thursday so that he can meet many more brothers and talk with them about becoming a Mason.

It is this initial reaction and exposure that really makes me think back to the moment I walked through the doors of the Grand Lodge in Philadelphia and asked to speak to someone about becoming a mason. That first step can sometimes be the hardest but at soon as you take it the rest of the steps soon follow and before long you are walking along the Masonic path in a journey that lasts a lifetime… sometimes a journey that spans generations. Yes, this morning I got my favorite kind of email and I look forward to the next one to pop up in my inbox.

Yeah, The Grand Lodge is a little bigger than my lodge.