Bryan's Blog

When I was 9 years old, my parents loaded up the car and took me to Cooperstown. I was a huge baseball fan growing up. After school, I would watch the day games at Wrigley field with Ryne Sandberg and Harry Carrey on WGN Then switch to TBS for Sanford and Sons reruns on TBS as it led up to the Atlanta Braves games with one of my boyhood favorites, Dale Murphy until I had to go to bed.  We didn’t have cable then and the Red Sox were on NESN, so I was able to explore and fall in love with baseball as a fan of the game not locked into a team which happened later when I followed the family tradition and followed the Red Sox.  In Cooperstown we stayed in a motel a few blocks away, it is still there. The day we arrived we just walked around, saw Doubleday field, all the main street shops, and other sites around town  The second day was the day we went to the Baseball Hall of Fame. The shrine for the sport I loved. I was in heaven, I could and still do feel an aura around the town, like the s

  Freemasonry Thanks You 2020, No, Really.   This year has been amazing for Freemasonry, more especially the future of Freemasonry. This year started out like every other, 4-5 nights out a week, mostly doing things we were obligated to do but not really enjoying ourselves. Then everything came to a grinding halt, no more meetings. Horrible right? The pandemic realigned my priorities, my lodge’s priorities, and my family’s priorities. I completed several projects that I did not have time for around the house previously. My lodge formed work parties, created a beautiful social room in our building, and completed several other much-needed updates in the building. Most important to me, I reconnected with my family. I pulled myself away from Freemasonry to take a much more local vacation than we would have to Niagara Falls. A stop and smell the roses moment for sure. Within a month or two, we were holding business meetings and lodge social gatherings online, and the fraternalism was

  Memento Mori (I wrote the following in November 2019) Over the past few weeks, my family and I sat in a small hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, and watched my father pass away. Arguably the hardest thing I have ever had to experience. The doctors had done everything they could, it was up to his body to fight the sickness and there just wasn’t enough strength left in him. So, we sat, taking turns in the small ICU room, slowly watching each grain of sand slip through his hourglass, unsure how many remained. One of those evenings, I received a call at 1:00 A.M., the doctor on the other line was concerned his vitals were dropping and he couldn’t get ahold of my mother. The hospital being close by, I was there quickly. They had stabilized him with medication and a breathing mask. I recall thinking for the first time that my father was dying.  No way, he will be fine, he has been through worse. A tremendous weight fell on me and when it began to lift, I found myself, victim, to the evi