The Stuff I Come From...

I sit here to night in the warmth of my apartment, food at my fingertips, shelter, despite my desire for more, I have all the money anyone should ever need. I have an education that led directly to the career and income that I have...but I must never forget where the motivation and spirit for all of this started...

It all goes back to that little Irish girl Mary Cooper. She grew up in the poor family led by her father, an unemployed shipworker in Belfast. At some point something inside of her pushed her as never before to win the ONLY scholarship in her school of Irish ragamuffins.

She married the Saskatchewan farm boy. He went through the depression, raised by a mother who's people came to this land from Tipperary in the belly of a ship for something better.He went through the war in the foreign jungles of Burma and vowed that if he survived that time of Evil, fear, and the stench of death, he would make something of himself.

We don't celebrate these people because they have always been here as ancestral claimants to this great land. We celebrate them because they left what they knew and drove blindly into a storm we can't imagine...No...I want their Faith...not the cautious old religion of this land.