Dear Customers,
The next three months are arguably my favorite quarter of the year, at least weather wise. This past winter I happened to watch a couple videos from 2021 and while it was stark white and gray outside, the colors from the Memorial Day parade video were brilliant. It almost looked fake the colors were so saturated and dazzling. I had forgotten how beautiful sunshine reflecting off Hamlin Lake could be.
This May has a lot of firsts for our family. My youngest son, Noah, is graduating from St. Bonaventure a year earlier than planned. When he enrolled, being as he was the first of my five children that followed my footsteps to St. Bona’s, I had his younger sister, Chloe design a license plate for the front of my truck. It features the old Bona logo, the Brown Indian headdress rather than the wolf and the words, Class of 1976 and Class of 2023! Now I have to plead with her to scrape off the “3” and change it to a “2”!
Also, this month my oldest daughter, Maggie will graduate from Campbell University in North Carolina as a surgeon. Words cannot express my pride in both of them. I knew Noah could handle college if he put his mind to it, but he exceeded even my expectations. Maggie however was another story entirely. She always set her sights high and would announce her plans, confidently. However, when she only applied to main campus at Penn State, I urged her to have a backup plan. Turns out it wasn’t necessary. Then when she announced her intention to become a pediatrician, her mother and I rolled our eyes and assured her that it was good to have lofty goals, but we didn’t really believe.
When in the midst of her medical school rotations, a renowned surgeon told her she would be wasting her talents as a pediatrician, she switched gears and began concentrating on surgery as a career. In March she was awarded her first choice of residency hospitals and her mother and I were again, tearfully stupefied. Maggie may not have always been the smartest kid in the class, but she was always the most determined and dedicated. Had I possessed even half of her ambition, I’d have more supermarkets now than Wegman’s!
I know this column has nothing to do with the grocery business, but since I’ve been writing a couple thousand of them every week for over 40 some years, I feel I can digress once in a while. My mother, Margaret Costa, passed away in 1981, never even having been introduced to her last three grandkids. Her 105th birthday would have been this week and I can’t help but think she too would have been extremely proud, particularly since Maggie was her fist and only namesake out of 15 grandchildren. If this sounds like one of those self-indulgent rants we’re all so familiar with, take comfort in the fact that at least I didn’t post my “kid-boasting” on Facebook!