Looking around the room we were gathered in, I realized I was standing in my family's former church building. It was here in 1988 that we had said goodbye to Dad at his funeral in September before burying him in a veteran's cemetery called Raleigh National Cemetery downtown.
Walking over to look more closely at the Founder's Wall, I saw my parents' names "Ronald and Lynne Troy" listed among their friends and fellow parishioners who had help to establish the church in 1983.
Thinking back to those days, I remembered returning just two months later with family and friends to celebrate my Thanksgiving weekend wedding with Jim. We had met in New York City and decided to marry and live in Raleigh, NC. We married at 11 O'clock on a Saturday morning as the sun came streaming in through the glass wall behind the altar on that unseasonably warm November day.
Just two days later we were off for our honeymoon to Mexico, when a tornado came screaming through town, through our new apartment, through our car's windshield, and through many other homes and places where all had seemed normal just hours before. The disaster was big enough to warrant a paragraph in the Acapulco Times which was promptly handed to us by our new friends at the hotel pool.
Twenty eight years have passed since then, and St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church has grown and expanded so much that this sacred place for many families has become just another multipurpose room with many new and larger buildings to replace it.
When I looked around me in that repurposed room, I felt the memories of those former days press upon me.
Walking over to look more closely at the Founder's Wall, I saw my parents' names "Ronald and Lynne Troy" listed among their friends and fellow parishioners who had help to establish the church in 1983.
Thinking back to those days, I remembered returning just two months later with family and friends to celebrate my Thanksgiving weekend wedding with Jim. We had met in New York City and decided to marry and live in Raleigh, NC. We married at 11 O'clock on a Saturday morning as the sun came streaming in through the glass wall behind the altar on that unseasonably warm November day.
Just two days later we were off for our honeymoon to Mexico, when a tornado came screaming through town, through our new apartment, through our car's windshield, and through many other homes and places where all had seemed normal just hours before. The disaster was big enough to warrant a paragraph in the Acapulco Times which was promptly handed to us by our new friends at the hotel pool.
Twenty eight years have passed since then, and St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church has grown and expanded so much that this sacred place for many families has become just another multipurpose room with many new and larger buildings to replace it.
When I looked around me in that repurposed room, I felt the memories of those former days press upon me.
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