Yep, Sunday is special. Loretta and I usually go to Mass, and we dress up for that (it’s a special occasion) and breakfast at the diner. It’s a scenic tour for the mind; people I know are pictured there, things I have to do that week are briefly included, and yes, there’s a whole lot of gratitude.

I try to keep all of that secret (the Lord doesn’t like blaggards, or boasters) but I do enjoy meeting old friends. There’s something memorable about the people I have met, most of them by chance (Providence) because my relatives are at least eight miles away. These friends came with the neighborhood or the job or whatever. They are gifts of God.

I don’t fish for compliments, but the respect in their demeanor lifts the soul. And what else is Sunday morning for?

It’s not complicated, but there’s a right moment to do things. For some things we have hours, or days, or weeks. The window may even be a month, even a year. The apple may be ripe for picking for a week. The child may be ready to read for several years. The young lady is ready for marriage years ahead or after the first opportunity. But it’s not a must. The apple doesn’t have to be picked.

Then there’s the exception. Did you ever wonder why the farthest known star is billions of light years away, through millions of solar systems and more than that number of livable planets, just to impress these human beings? How else will they learn they have thousands of opportunities? Some outside the regular ones? But who’d ever recognize all his opportunities?

Your world was made for you. You don’t have a billion opportunities, but the choice can seem like it. You work with what you have, and your good decisions will reward you in your old age. You learn to function on terra firma.

To be human is to make mistakes.  It may also be a sin, but the two don’t necessarily go together.  Then there’s intervention, which may make your mistake a fortunate mishap that leads to a whole lot of good.

When I was very young, that intervention was the doing of one of my parents or teachers, and when I was old, it usually was divine doing.  Yes, I have made mistakes that were turned into a golden happening by God! (Who else could do it; I mean a mistake of the proportions that I made!)

And so the believer has the happy auxiliary of chance (Providence).  The unbeliever gets anonymous gifts, too, but of none is he so aware as the believer.  I’m sure Christ made mistakes, too, but he had the Father to make them right.

I lost track of my youngest son, Freddy, one summer day when he was about ten. He told me he was going to a friend’s house not far away, so I said OK. What I didn’t know was that he and his friend, Judd Apatau (that’s right, he’s now a Hollywood producer) decided to take the train into New York City to a trading card convention.

When my wife called up from her friend’s house where she’d been invited for lunch, she wanted to know where Freddy was. She didn’t like my answer. I got on my horse and found out the details from the Apatau household in ten seconds flat. When my wife found out, she shouted, “What, two ten-year-old boys in New York City alone? Are you out of your mind?”

I’m a man of action. “I’m going into the city right now. It’s probably in the Biltmore Hotel, or one of the mid-Manhattan hotels, and I’ll find them at the convention.”

I left Syosset at three in the afternoon and got home at nine, empty-handed. The boys had in the meantime returned and my wife’s anger subsided. Sometimes we search for life’s most important things, and come up with nothing.

My wife wanted to go, a spiritual getaway on Scripture, as planned by the bishops. It did what it was supposed to do, aroused slumbering thoughts on the purpose of my life (had I succeeded, failed?) and I drew the happy conclusion that Providence (fate) had saved me from a colossal debacle, with an opportunity at an exhilarating triumph.

There was a hitch, though. The place was St. Aidan’s Church in Williston Park, a beautiful church designed with eons old acoustics in mind, and I had difficulty hearing the speaker, who was using a modern loudspeaker system. But never mind, I rested in my own thoughts — I’d forgotten how satisfying they could be.

As a novelist, my goal was to reach as many readers as I could. The bottom line was the IRS form listing my royalties. I was going to buy my wife a villa on the Riviera with the money, in Europe, I told her all the time. I said I was just waiting for my ship to come in (an old New England expression, no doubt). Well, when she enters the Pearly Gates she’ll see a message from me: “I have ships galore. Meet me at the docks.”