Deliverance

God first spoke to me when we were camping at Pinchot.

When we were kids, Mom took us to Jones Beach. The sun was going down and we were talking and I could hear our souls. I heard them another time in the night in David Ormsbee's back yard.

Sean and Richie, there is an anti-perspirant called high endurance. My friend, Panda at Bloomsburg said anti-perspirant is not healthy because we're supposed to sweat.
I don't use the high endurance that sits on my bathroom shelf. But it reminds me every morning to have courage and never give up.

I was on Kulp's Hill in Gettysburg and my car rolled away. After fifty feet, it went alongside some rock and came to a stop. The rock left a small scratch on the side of the car.

Saint Joseph was a flying saint and is patron saint of aviators and students.
Sri Sri Paramahansa Yoganandaji, my Gurudev and patron saint of his disciples and their runaway cars.

Daddy said it was too expensive on Long Island and thought that we should have stayed in Queens. Mom was from Pennsylvania and we moved there after she lost her business. She lived in the same house for the next twenty five years. Her last wish was to leave the hospital and go home.

My sister, Toni took her home in an ambulance. They brought Mom into the house on a gurney. She recognized the ceiling in her living room and knew that she was home.
By this time, her voice sounded like it was already in heaven.

Her last words to me were, "Love you forever and forever." I started to drive up to see her the next day after work, but I was tired and went home instead. I woke up early the next morning and drove up to see her. But when I got to her house, my sister Laura told me that she had just passed away.




Mom was a waitress at the Waldorf-Astoria and was living in Queens when she met Daddy. He would go to the Waldorf for dinner on Sundays if she was working.
Mom brought Daddy to Pennsylvania and he liked the open fields. He grew up in Queens and the only fields that he had ever seen were ball fields.

I played ball with Daddy and the kids on 52nd Avenue in Queens where Grandma lived. When I visited Grandma, we would ride the bus or subway and go shopping.
I once got lost in a nickel and dime store. A lady grabbed me by the hand and helped me find Grandma.

The butcher shop where Grandma went had sawdust spread on the floor like snow. She bought Entenmann's cakes and would let me drink coffee with our breakfast.
At night, we watched Perry Mason on TV before going to sleep on the fold out couch in her living room.

Grandpa passed away when Daddy was a boy. Uncle Jimmy was the oldest. He was going to become a priest, but he had to start working when Grandpa died. I thought the picture of Grandpa in Grandma's bedroom had been taken in heaven.

Grandma cleaned houses and they lived in four different apartments at one time or another on 52nd Avenue. Uncle Jimmy and Uncle Walter graduated from New Town High School. Daddy graduated from Powell Memorial Catholic in Manhattan.

I would look out the window of the vacant apartment across the hall from Grandma's and wait for Daddy to come home from work. There was a nice smell of old wood in her hallway when you came in from outside. Heaven came through the windows of her apartment on Sundays after church.

Her apartment had high ceilings with tall cupboards in the kitchen. Aunt Rose and Uncle Dom lived downstairs. When Grandma came to live with us, they kept her apartment vacant in case she decided to move back. She didn't stay with us very long. It didn't work out with her and Mom living together.

There was a grocery store called the Met near Grandma's. The Mets were her baseball team. Before them, she liked the Brooklyn Dodgers. In the summer, Uncle
Dom would put the TV on the back porch after dinner and watch baseball. Mom bought our first color TV when the Mets made it to the World Series.

Daddy took us to a Mets game on Uncle Charlie's birthday. He was married to Aunt Lizzy, who was Grandma's best friend. Aunt Lizzy looked and sounded like Edith Bunker from "All in the Family." When Grandpa was alive, he and Uncle Charlie would go to the garment district to buy five dollar suits. Uncle Charlie was a great story teller.

I was going with Grandma and Aunt Lizzy to visit their friend, Miss Rose Brett. We walked past a bar and Grandma said she was going in to have a beer. She laughed and said that she was only teasing me. She didn't drink.

Daddy laughed when I bought him some tools for Christmas. He wasn't a handyman.
I saw a yogurt ad with Willis Reed on the subway. I had never eaten yogurt but it sure looked good. Daddy took me to a Knicks game and they beat Oscar Robertson and the Cincinatti Royals. Reed scored thirty six points.

At Rockaway beach, Grandma laughed and yelled when we came sliding out of the fun house on our rear ends. She didn't want to go on the roller coaster and she asked some older kids to take me on with them.

Grandma and I would walk to a small amusement park near Macy's on Queens Boulevard. There was an old house next to Macy's that developers had been trying to buy for decades. The old woman who lived there wouldn't sell. Her son sold it after she passed away and they put a bank there.

Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Georgia lived near Grandma after they were married. The lady next door to them had a backyard full of cats.

Grandma had eight brothers and sisters. She told me that when they were kids, her brother Richie would hide in the closet and eat condensed milk. I only knew Aunt Florry and Uncle Tom. It broke Grandma's heart to see Aunt Florry suffer when she was dying from cancer.

Tom Junior was a politician in Queens and married a British girl named Peggy. Grandma got snippy when Pegggy asked for some tea one afternoon. Grandma told her that we didn't have tea time in this country. Daddy laughed when he saw Tom and Peggy's Volkswagen. There weren't many small cars then.

Daddy tried to get in the Navy after high school but he had a heart murmur and didn't pass the physical. He worked as a cook on oil tankers and sent us post cards from
all over the world. He always kept in touch with us by phone. He lived in Texas with June until she got a job in New Orleans and they moved there.

He was on a ship and saw a crew that had sailed around the world. Someone on the ship said that the sailing crew looked like a bunch of hippies. Daddy asked him what he knew about sailing around the world.

Daddy made fried lamb chops one night for the crew. A British guy wanted broiled lamb chops. He refused to leave the table until he got them. Daddy wouldn't make them and went to his cabin for the night. The steward came to his cabin and asked him to make broiled lamb chops for the guy, but Daddy refused.

The next day, Daddy told the captain that he was leaving the ship because of the
British guy and because the steward had come to his cabin. The captain was not happy with the Brit or the steward about having to hire a new cook.

I lived with Daddy for six months in New Orleans. While I was there, he was in a car accident after he had been drinking. The other driver had to go to the hospital. Living with him for six months made me wonder how he was still alive.

A few days before Mom died, we were watching the Belmont Stakes on TV.
It reminded her of when Daddy used to take her to the race track. I never heard her say a bad word about him. But when I was a kid, she told me that she would break my legs if she ever caught me gambling.

I was on a retreat at Greenfield when I found out that Daddy had passed away.




I grew up in East Meadow on Long Island. I learned to ride my bicycle going up and down the sidewalk between my house and Newbridge Road. I couldn't ride my bicycle in a straight line and wondered how cars could do it.

Mom went to a twenty four hour gas station. I thought that the man who pumped our gas had to be there everyday twenty four seven. I'd go to the A&P with Mom and run to the back for a packet of kool aid.

Daddy would take me to Kenny's Bar next to the A&P and buy me a cherry coke.
Before falling asleep, I would imagine that it was 2000 and I was forty one. I wanted to work in an office and go out for lunch and have tuna on a kaiser roll.

In grade school, I made Christmas bells from paper cups and colored foil for Grandma. Every year, she put them up with her other decorations. She had a little Christmas tree that went on the table in her living room.

Terry Weinstein lived next door. She was four years older than me. The Coynes lived there after the Weinsteins moved away. From our kitchen window, I would watch Mrs Coyne washing dishes in their kitchen. The family behind us had a swimming pool. Daddy didn't like me sitting on the fence in our backyard and watching them swim.

I came home one evening and there was an ambulance in front of our house. I prayed

that Shawn and Pat were alright. The ambulance was for Shawn. He was hit by a car while riding his bicycle and went to the hospital for six weeks.

We were in the car listening to the news on the radio that someone had died. Mom was crying. I hardly ever saw her cry. Another time, she was going in the store and told me to wait in the car. When she came out, she had a toy for me. I didn't want it. I wanted to go in the store and pick out my own toy.

Wayne Mathewson lived across the street from me and we were trick or treating. We went to a house on Andrew Road. No one was home but they had left a tray of candy on the porch. We took all of it. When I told Grandma, she made us return the candy to the house.

I had surgery for a hernia in grade school and couldn't play sports for awhile. Our class was standing in the cafeteria after lunch waiting for our teacher, Mrs Kupferman.
The cafeteria was also the gym and there was a chin up bar on the wall. A few of us got in trouble for getting out of the line and doing chin ups. Mrs Kupferman made us write letters to our parents telling them what we had done.

Mom read my letter and wrote to her asking why I was unsupervised in the gym after having surgery. Mrs Kupferman made me stand in front of the class and told our music teacher that I had lied to Mom about what had happened. I told Mom and she went to the school and had some words with her.

Three years later, she was Pat's teacher. He had broken his elbow years before when he fell from a playground slide. He couldn't straighten his arm and held it at a ninety degree angle.

His handwriting was not so good. Pat told Mom that Mrs Kupferman was making him write with his other hand. Mom went to the school and had some more words with her.

For Christmas, she gave me a hockey game with players that moved back and forth. We were outside and Pat and I were fighting. He went home and jumped on the hockey game and broke it. I was a bully with him and Shawn when we were kids.




We'd go to Havens' Luncheonette for buttered rolls and egg creams. Next to Havens' was Joe's Deli and Joe the Shoemaker. Danny's Pizza and Carvel Ice Cream were across the street. Fast food was just getting started. We'd ride our bikes to the movie theater on Hempstead Turnpike or to Model's department store for hot dogs and soft pretzels.

The deli by the Grand Union made great subs. Mom would bring home Chinese food
or pizza from the Villa Napoli. She sometimes had a sandwich buffet at the Rogo and we ate the leftovers for breakfast.

There was a pinball arcade at the Great Eastern next to the junior high school.
I made tips loading groceries into cars and would spend the money on pinball.
We made money shoveling snow from sidewalks and then would go to Havens' and drink hot chocolate.

There was a pit on Andrew Road where we went sledding. The pit had tunnels for storm water. We were crawling in one of the tunnels and someone saw a rat. We crawled out as quick as we could and never went in them again.

We would go to Pennsylvania for the weekend with Mom and Joe. We left early in the morning after she came home from work. I'd sleep in the backseat with Shawn and Pat and we would stop for burgers with the sun coming up.

Joe called everyone "Babe". We watched "I Love Lucy," on TV and he would say that Desi Arnez couldn't sing his way out of a paper bag. He called President Nixon a fish faced bum. He left when Laura was born.




In sixth grade, I stayed home from school on Thursdays because I didn't like going to trombone class. Sometimes I would skip Wednesday or Friday so that no one would figure out what I was doing.

My trombone teacher gave me passing grades even though I hadn't been there since September. I almost made it through the whole year before someone at school figured it out and I had to start going to trombone class again.

We would hang out by Larry's house, swim in his pool and play cards and board games in his garage. I also would go to Bobby's house. His mom was like a second mother to me.

I was envious of Bobby and his family. I tried to get him in trouble once by calling his mom and saying that he wasn't in school. I tried to disguise my voice but she knew it was me.

When I was a paperboy, I sometimes hid the newspapers behind our garage instead of delivering them. Mr Foley was my boss. We were in his car and he let go of the steering wheel while we were driving and grabbed me by the throat. He was screaming at me about money that I owed him. He never got his money.

My bicycle had a flat tire and I needed to deliver my newspapers. Gil Bradeen was at school and I went in his shed to take his bicycle. His mother saw me and came out of the house. I told her that I only needed the bicycle for an hour. She didn't want to hear it.

Grandma told me that I should always go to church. Shawn and Pat sometimes came with me. Gil and his brother George came with us once. They acted up until the minister stopped the mass and yelled at them. Shawn and I received our First Communion but Grandma was disappointed that Pat didn't receive his and that we were never confirmed as Catholics.

Frank Petty was a boxer and hung out with us at the school yard. Mike the cop would
drive through the school yard and keep an eye on us. Timmy Bradeen once showed him a marijuana pipe and Mike handcuffed him and put him in his police car. Timmy was yelling that he couldn't be arrested for having a pipe and Mike laughed and let him go.

Timmy had been upstate in juvenile detention. He was two years older than me and Gil. There were eleven Bradeens and they were all tough as nails. Mrs Bradeen and their stepdad Tony raced cars at Islip Speedway. She only bought a half dozen eggs at a time so that Timmy, Gil and George wouldn't take them outside to throw.

Gil and I were good friends but his body odor got bad in junior high. He was playing pinball at Danny's Pizza one night and we all started yelling at him to take a bath. After that, he didn't hang around with us anymore and kept to himself.

We were riding home in the back of the school bus. Mike was behind us in his police car and Timmy was making obscene gestures at him. When we got off the bus, he grabbed Timmy and took him to the police station.

Mike was struck and killed by a vehicle during a police chase.




I was in sixth grade when Sheila was born. At school, Greg Donovan teased me constantly about being an uncle. He wrote a note calling me Uncle Ed. I had had enough of the teasing. I gave the note to our teacher and he got in trouble for writing it. We weren't friends after that.

Daddy took us to Colorado to visit his cousin Mary. She and her family lived on a farm outside Denver. We visited Mom's sister Gwen in Denver and went to a rodeo, a livestock auction and an Old West town in the Rockies.

We were coming back from the Air Force Academy when someone cut us off and Aunt Mary lost control of the car. There was eleven of us in their station wagon. We went off the road and the car was damaged but no one was hurt.

I was on the safety patrol and we were watching some younger kids before school.
It was the first time Patty Sanchez was allowed to wear stockings to school.
I was teasing her and she chased me. She fell and scraped her knee and her stockings were ruined. I was fired from the safety patrol.

I had a crush on her for two years. I didn't see her at school anymore and found out that she had moved to Florida. Later, I saw her at a carnival. I didn't talk to her because she hadn't said goodbye to me before she moved.

Later, I liked Sue Guenardis but was too shy to ask her out. It was the same with Debbie Conway and Judi Leuzzi.




Mom worked nights and would call to see if we were home on time. She would hit us with the belt for staying out too late.

She was going to send me to the childrens' shelter for stealing money from her and
I ran away. When I called her, she told me to come home and she said that she wouldn't send me to the shelter.

Wayne and I were skipping school in junior high and were in his house watching TV.
Someone from the school called his dad at work. He came home at lunch time and we ran out the back door. We flopped down in a pile of leaves in his neighbor's yard.
Mr Mathewson came outside and was yelling for Wayne. We were only fifty feet away but he was color blind and couldn't see us.

Mrs Mathewson came to say goodbye when we were moving to Hicksville.
Later, she and her husband got a divorce. Bobby and I visited her and Wayne's brother Glen in Merrick. We used to played football all the time with Glen on Stanley Road.

My English teacher, Mrs Hurley slapped me in the face for talking back to
her. Mr Polednok was standing next to her. He was a big guy with a goatee.
Everyone called him King Tut behind his back. I had long hair in junior high and there was a girl in my class, Pat Pantano who was always telling me to wash it.

Mr Mushhorn was my favorite teacher. He ran the Saturday recreation at the elementary school. After I beat him one on one in basketball, he wouldn't play me anymore. When we played floor hockey, he would blow the whistle if someone took a slap shot. He didn't want anyone getting teeth knocked out from a high stick.

He taught at the high school. I only went there for a month before we moved to Hicksville. I was cutting classes and he told me to straighten up or else.




Ricky Luneberg's mom passed away when we lived across the street from them in Hicksville. Donny Elliot's mom passed away when we lived across the street in East Meadow. Donny was like a big brother to me.

We had a surprise party for Grandma at Uncle Walter's house on her 75th
birthday. My cousin Jimmy Long was there and told me about a girl he liked.
He asked my advice about her. I didn't have a clue about girls.

Victor asked Grandma to marry him. She laughed and said that she was too old.
She never looked at another man after Grandpa passed away.

Our house in East Meadow was run down and Mom wanted to move to Hicksville to be closer to the Rogo. The high school was on the other side of town. It was a long walk home if I had to stay after school for detention.

I sat next to Ray Shalley in French class. He had quit the football team after the coach grabbed him by the hair. I saw the same coach push someone to the ground for smoking during gym class.

My biology teacher told Mom that I was on drugs because I didn't participate in class.




Frank was a customer at the Rogo and he started going out with Mom. He was from Utah and asked her to marry him and he wanted us to move there with him.

Pat ran away with his friend Tim Lipert. The police caught them trying to buy bus tickets to visit our sister Toni in Pennsylvania. I went into the city with my friend Nick and picked them up at the police station. Mom was not happy with him and she took him to live with Toni.

I failed my first two road tests. When the results for the third test came in the mail,
Mom said that I still hadn't passed. Then she smiled and handed me my driver's license.

Daddy and his friend were in the Rogo and got in a fight with another customer. Daddy
was always getting in bar fights.

He took us to Queens for Chinese food after my high school graduation. Kerry and I went to Chinatown with some friends for dinner. The check for the four of us came to four dollars. She was my girlfriend in high school. We stopped seeing each other when I moved to Pennsylvania.

I worked at a twenty four hour gas station in Hicksville. My friend Bob Dibart closed the station for a few hours on New Year's Eve and was fired.

I became the day bartender at the Rogo when I was seventeen because Mom couldn't afford to pay a regular bartender anymore. The legal age for a bartender was eighteen.
It would have been the end of the Rogo if I had gotten caught.

Mom was a bartender there before she bought it. She had the Rogo for six years before it went out of business.




When we moved to Pennsylvania, Mom needed to have surgery. She waited for six years to get health insurance before she had the surgery done.

My first job in Pennsylvania was at a window factory. Jack Young worked there and we hung out together in Shamokin. He had gotten a medical discharge from the Marine Corps when a drill sergeant broke his foot with a rifle butt.

I bought a car from Toni's friend, John Mabus. The hood of the car would sometimes fly open on the highway. I would lean out the window to see until I could stop the car and close it.

The distributor was under the engine and would get wet in the rain or snow and make the engine stall out. It would be twenty minutes before the engine started again.

I was on the interstate in the Poconos coming back from New York. It was snowing and the engine stalled. There was an embankment to my right and I couldn't see the shoulder because of the snow. Everyone was driving in the right lane. I got into the left lane and was praying for my life as the car came to a stop.

I got out and it wasn't long before a tractor trailer came along in the left lane and had to jackknife to avoid hitting my car. Then a tow truck came and the driver got
my car started. The tractor trailer driver was waiting for a bigger tow truck to get him off the shoulder.

I got off the interstate and took the back roads the rest of the way home.




Grandma's rent was only a fraction of what the apartment was worth. When Uncle
Dom died, Aunt Rose raised the rent and it became too expensive for Grandma to stay there.

I was going to school at Bloomsburg. Uncle Walter worked at Kennedy Airport and he got me a summer job there. I rented a room from Grandma's friend Victor for the summer.

I went back to Bloomsburg and Grandma left 52nd Avenue after living there for sixty years. She moved to the second floor of Victor's house and things got a little weird. Victor called Uncle Walter and accused me of stealing from him. He didn't want me coming to his house anymore to visit Grandma.

She had a good deal on her rent there. It would have been expensive for Uncle Walter for her to move somewhere else. To keep Victor happy, he asked me not to visit her anymore.

Grandma didn't know about any of this. We talked on the phone and she asked why
I didn't visit her anymore. But she came to visit me on the night that she passed away. She used to say that she would hear God ringing his bells when it was time for
Him to take her.




I worked at a cheese factory in Sunbury before I went in the Air Force. I grated blocks of parmesan cheese in a mill. Sometimes the mill jammed and metal parts would fly out from the front of the mill. It was a little dangerous. We also made mozzarella cheese and ate it fresh out of the vat.

I met Jennifer through a pen pal club. I went to The Philippines to visit her and we were married in the U.S. She was pregnant with Sean and went back to The Philippines while I was at basic training in San Antonio.

In basic training, it was competitive between us and Flight 106. They beat us on the obstacle course. Before graduation, we were lined up with them for roll call. I shouted to them that our flight had two honor graduates more than they did. They shouted and cursed back at me.

Daddy visited me in Biloxi when I was there for admin training. He laughed when I told him about my fifteen hour bus ride from San Antonio to Biloxi. He thought the Air Force should have flown me instead.

I requested to be stationed in The Philippines but we could have been sent anywhere.
Ray Arrington was in the bunk next to me in basic training and he was stationed in The Philippines with me.

Sean was born at Clark Air Base three months after I got there. Richie was born three months before we left. Jennifer was in labor for twenty hours with Sean. After he was born, I was across the street from the hospital at a hot dog stand. I had never felt better.




When I got to Clark, I was assigned to an admin office in a maintenance squadron and worked there for eighteen months. I told a master sergeant in personnel that I was having problems with my boss. He got me an interview with the 13th Air Force protocol office and I got the job.

At Protocol, we greeted VIPs when their planes arrived at the flight line. We handled their baggage, reserved hotel rooms and arranged meals and transportation. VIPs included U.S. congressmen, cabinet members and U.S. and Pilipino military.

Kris Kristofferson was visiting Clark and my friend Dorothy in admin wanted to meet him. The Protocol office wasn't handling his visit, but we knew where he was staying.
I called his room to ask if Dorothy and I could stop by to say hello. He yelled at me and hung up the phone.

When I was on leave, we waited all night in the flight terminal for ten dollar plane tickets. We went to Hawaii for Jennifer's U.S. citizenship and also went to Japan and Korea. Manila was one hour from Clark and we would go there to visit Jennifer's family. We also visited Hundred Islands and Baguio.

Jennifer's grandparents lived two hundred miles east of Clark in Pangasinan. They lived in the country with no electricity or indoor plumbing. There was no asphalt, only peaceful dirt roads. When I first went there, the kids crowded around me. They had never seen anyone from the West.

Jennifer's family had a party and someone told me that we were having duck and everyone laughed. The joke was on me. After we had finished eating, they told me that it was dog, not duck.

Dr Anderson was a professor at USC and a retired fighter pilot. He said that if he had to do it all over again, he would not have spent five years of his life working on his PhD.

Captain Bobby Henry was in my class at USC. He was killed in an F-5 crash.

The official cause was determined to be pilot error. I had transferred from the protocol office and was working for Colonel Nesbitt in 13th Air Force Operations. He wanted General Carns to send a letter to Washington saying that Captain Henry had crashed because the Air Force was overworking their pilots.

General Carns was in line for his third star. He agreed with Colonel Nesbitt that Air Force pilots were overworked but he wouldn't send the letter.

Three guys from Clark went to Hundred Islands. They hired a boat to take them diving at a small island and one of them drowned. The captain wouldn't allow the body on the boat. One of them went back with the boat to get help. The other guy stayed with the body.

It got dark and the rats came. He kept them off the body until help arrived in the morning.





If someone at Clark went downtown and had a big night at the casino, they would need a police escort to get home. Guys got in crooked card games at the bars and would get involved in the black market to pay their gambling debts.

Suspicious purchases made on base were flagged. Anyone caught black marketing would be court martialed and sent to federal prison back in the States.

The Pilipino workers at Clark went on strike and were picketing the gates. Political agitators got involved and shut down the gates completely. No one could get on or off the base.

We lived off base. I was running an errand near the base when two guys approached me. They were on leave from Korea. They were going to climb the fence to get back on base to catch a flight. They wanted me to toss their bags over the fence to them.

They started to climb the fence and two Pilipinos with picket signs came running and screaming. The picket signs had long nails sticking out. They were swinging them but the two guys made it safely over the fence..

The four of them were screaming at each other as I tossed one of the bags over the fence. One of the Pilipinos yelled and raised his sign at me. I left the other bag on the ground and walked away.




We wanted to bring Jennifer's mother, Elsie with us to the U.S. Her visa wasn't ready when it was time for us to leave Clark and I brought her into the U.S. illegally.
The immigration clerk at the airport gave me a long look but he let her through without a passport.

The Air Force had given us a plane ticket for Richie, but he didn't need it because he was only three months old. Elsie used his ticket and that saved us a thousand dollars.

Uncle Walter was going to get me a job at Kennedy Airport. I got there and saw how expensive it would be to live in New York. The Air Force had shipped our furniture and belongings to a warehouse in Brooklyn. I rented a truck and picked up our things and we moved to Harrisburg instead.

I had worked for Colonel Lewis at Clark and I visited him at the Army War College in Carlisle. He was retiring from the Air Force and both of us were looking for jobs. He had an offer to fly for an airline in New York but it didn't pay much.

When he arrived at the War College, it was a little strange for him because there weren't any young people stationed there. The War College is where the military puts old colonels out to pasture.

A lady at Mom's post office told me to take the postal exam in Harrisburg and I worked there for eight years.




After high school, I was curious about meditation but couldn't find any books about it at the library. When we moved to Harrisburg, I began to think that there must be something more to life. I just wanted some peace.

I read about Buddhism and Native American chanting and learned hatha yoga. I went to a kundalini yoga class and met a woman who taught transcendental meditation but she wanted a thousand dollars for initiation. I read "Autobiography of a Yogi," and was initiated in Kriya Yoga. I have been practicing it ever since.

I started the SRF lessons and Mother Center sent me a letter about group meditation. At the time, there was no group in Harrisburg and I joined the Lancaster group. This is where SRF came alive for me. It has always been like that when I go to group meditation.

Master wore his hair long like his guru, Swami Sri Sri Yukteswarji. He didn't wash it very often because he didn't want it falling out. I stopped washing my hair for awhile and my friend, Biri noticed and gave me a bottle of shampoo.

Master was near our house in Penbrook. I could see him only from the waist up. The rest of his body was not there. He told me that he had chosen me. Then we were walking and I was listening to the rustling of his robe. He handed me a letter that a monk had written to him and he told me to keep it.

We were driving. I turned the car but Master wanted to go in the other direction and
I turned the car around. Master, when I first saw your picture, did I recognize you from before?