Where's My Camera

ONLY IN AMERICA This is a F-----abulously Awesome Country! What a great country. I have heard stories from my uncle about how my father was on a crew that paved the Homestead Highlevel Bridge and worked in the steel mills as a teenager. Everybody did those days apparently in their hood. Either the coal mines or the steel mills to earn pocket cash. My Dad also parked cars for some nightclub in the Hill District in Pittsburgh when that was a rockin rollin place in the 40s. My Dad was born in 1932 before WWII. His uncle was a legit war hero in "The War" whose boat was sunk off the North African coast and he swam a mile to shore dragging someone with him, as the fish tale goes. His photo rests to this day on a table my uncle has in his living room in his Embassy Row house. Its a long way from a metal fenced small house in a suburb of Pittsburgh, but my uncle did well enough at Harvard and Yale law to be one of the officially Honorable Senate appointees and his brother, my Dad became eventually an international business executive starting offices all around the world for a Fortune 400 company. Its a long way from Pleasant Hills. This is a Great Country. Their father, my grandfather Francis Joseph Butler is buried in Thomas Jefferson cemetary in a suburb of Pittsburgh. That's where all my dead relatives live-- in the 'Garden of Peace' in the Thomas Jefferson cemetary. There is enough there to ponder on for a while. Francis Joseph was partially schooled by ruler knuckle slapping nuns and from an irish catholic immigrant family. That's where I can claim to be any part Irish- which seems to be a fairly dominant gene because my freckles overtake me with age. I am a JFK baby, born the year JFK was campaigning and won the Presidency in 1960. I can only imagine how my father felt when JFK was running. Probably something like unbelievable pride, admiration and a hope filled belief that if the skinny kid from "NINA" country (No Irish Need Apply, as it was known in Boston then) can be President, then ANYONE can do anything. My Dad can run a company, and did. My small claim to my strong willed irish side landed me today at the Irish Americans for Obama brunch where the Irish Ambassador reminded us that this year, 2013, everyone Irish is invited back to the motherland for a special "Gathering." The carrot-top from County Waterford sitting to my right told me to google it. Schumer, yes, the Senator, made an appearance at the coctail hour just before the sit-down, schmoozed a bit floating through on his way to solving the fiscal cliff. And I got to thank the wife of a former Ambassador to the Holy See for her talk at the JPII Center at the beatification of JPII, and thank her husband for coming even though he was a Bush appointee. I recognized him, I told him from Mass at the Catholic Information Center which shocked him because he wouldn't have expected anyone from the CIC to be at an Obama event. I was equally shocked to see him- but his claim to Irish is probably less tenuous than mine. I just kept thinking- what an unbelievably great country. And how unbelievably blessed I am to be American. I can sit and chat with a Senator, an Ambassador, a union President, a bunch of lawyers, who may or may not agree with me on everything or anything. But, Thank God Almighty We Are Free --at last. Congratulations to Obama on his Second Inaugural.