This is the third is a series of memories.  The last two were on prayer.  My tendency is to want to stop on that subject, but I must complete the task so it all fits into a whole.

Prayer

In high school I often attended mass during the week.  I received the religion and citizenship award at graduation.  That didn’t make me a saint by any means.  The saints are often quoted as saying, “Lord have mercy on me, a sinner.”  I never understood how saints would have to say that prayer, but I understand it now. It’s not that I’m a saint, but I know that I am not a perfect human being and know that no matter how hard we try, we will never be.  So I find myself saying, “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.

Somehow this seems important to what follows, but I can’t tell you why.  I spent a few weeks of the summer between my Junior and Senior year with a friend and his family in Carmel.  We spent a day at the beach laying in the sun and body surfing.  I took off my class ring and put it in my shoe to keep the stone from getting scratched.  After body surfing for a time, we decided to walk down to the next beach.  I grabbed my shoes and and after walking a couple hundred yards, remembered my ring.  It wasn’t in the shoe.  (The ring was important because as Junior Class President we decided to change the ring from the square type to one that looked more like a college ring.  The school still has the same ring today.)

Two hundred yards of beach sand made me think I’d never find the ring.  We  retraced our steps back along the hot sand to where my friend’s  parents sat on beach blankets, but no ring.  I didn’t know what to do and fell to my knees, not to pray, but to sulk.  But then I did pray, and promised another decade of the rosary. ( Looking back now, that ring doesn’t seem that important, but it was at the time.)  Anyway, I knelt there and prayed, almost as an afterthought.  I dropped my right hand into the sand.  When I brought it out, the ring was resting in the sand in the palm of my hand.  Another coincidence?  Possibly of course, but three coincidences seems unlikely.

The ironic thing is that my ring was stolen when I was a playground director in San Francisco.  A boy asked to look at it.  I took it off and gave it to him, then got sidetracked.  That was the last time I saw the ring.  I didn’t notice the ring  was missing for a couple days because I normally never took it off.  I cornered the boy the day after I noticed it missing, and he said I hadn’t given it to him and it must have been someone else.  That’s life.