There always seemed to be an adventure to be had and a story to be told, written or remembered! Pursuing a dream to travel, see amazing places, meet wonderful people from all walks of life, and sharing thoughts and experiences in my journals was the best way to memorialize it! Starting in my early youth, fantasizing about travel and adventure from books, movies to re-enacting them with make shift forts, rafts, and friends, a little "Walter Mitty-esque"! It was amazing to read our old encyclopedias, looking at world history and maps, learning about legendary figures! I wanted to be a writer, an artist, a singer, an athlete...lead a cavalry charge, swing from tree to tree, climb the highest peaks, cross the great divide, etc...endless dreams. At the age of 17, I was fully grown and asserting my young adulthood, with a say in my life decisions about my future education, activities, and travel! One of my best friends and I took off for NYC, Boston, and Walden Pond the summer before our senior year in high school for a TRULY awakening experience!!! A year later in college at Alfred State together with some other friends, 2 years later off to Arizona State with another friend, back east to SUNY Oswego, Outward Bound program in North Carolina and ultimately off to Bruges, Belgium to end my senior year of college and beyond... Did I say MIND-BLOWING, 5 years later and 22... on roads less traveled! Come join the ride and or continue on your own journey!!!

It took me years to appreciate and a lifetime of memories to reflect, but it only took a glance at my grandmother’s photo hanging on my Kelly green living room wall and within minutes this story started to evolve. This photo was discovered by my mother and I back in 1976, at a vacant relative’s cottage while we were travelling together in Ireland, as told in my first novel “BICENTENNIAL ABROAD: A DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE”! In 1920 when mom was only three years old her mother died in the Spanish Flu Pandemic along with her newborn baby as well as the eldest child in the family. Her life and the family’s was changed forever. Mom ultimately entered the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet to become a nun when she was twenty one, but she left four years later (with about three years of college credit). She met dad, had three “rambunctious” sons and we lived in public housing on the East Side, across from the “Iconic” Snowflake Bakery, along with other great local businesses. My mother went up to Syracuse University to complete her higher education in 1960, graduated the following year, when us three were about seven, ten and eleven years old. Then about one and a half years later we moved to the West Side where mom grew up in Tipperary Hill, and on to Saint Patrick’s School! In this book there are many other stories of family roots, connections, childhood adventures and travels retold from the vivid memory of this one Son of a Nun:)