I know, I know.  We’re nearing Saint Patrick’s Day so I should write about him, but the older I get, the more I call on Saint Anthony.   Saint Anthony is the Patron Saint of Lost Things.

Keys, eyeglasses, my purse. “Dear Saint Anthony,  please come around, for something is lost and must be found”.

Saint Anthony, Patron Saint of Lost Things

We all have our miracle stories, of something so completely gone it had no right being found.  Like my Dad’s school ring, Holy Cross, class of 1940.  He was swimming at remote Block Island, Rhode Island one summer when he emerged from the chop with an empty right hand.  No ring.

You think finding a ring in the ocean is like finding a grain of sand at the beach?  It is, only a hundred times harder.  Try standing upright,  neck deep in dark cadet blue pounding Atlantic surf while your toes attempt to distinguish what is a rock and what is a shell and what is a pinching crab and what is a 10-carat gold ring while the waves bring you under every ten seconds or so and you’ll understand why not even Saint Anthony himself could be found that day.

But he showed up months later, when the seas at State Beach were placid and a stranger who was wading noticed something shiny near his feet and it was Dad’s ring, sans purple stone and some of the detail on the sides.  But “1940″ was still there, and the initials M.R.M. inside too.  The stranger called Holy Cross College which in turn notified my dad that the ring he never thought he’d see again had been found by someone  in the ocean.

Saint Anthony hovered above a pear tree on Chandler Street in Worcester, Massachusetts around 1967.  That’s where I grew up and one late summer afternoon my mother came in from cutting four acres of lawn with a clutch-driven professional walking mower –the property was too steep for a rider–and announced the diamond had fallen out of the setting of her engagement ring.  I was ten and it was the first time I remember her crying in front of us.  Dad tried to console her but she was sad and silent throughout dinner.

Liz and Matt McCann

While Mom was grieving, Dad was thinking.  Did she recall whacking her left hand against anything during her eight hour weekly lawn cutting task?  “The pear tree” she said.  She remembered grazing it as she went by.

After supper Dad handed three wooden yard sticks to my sisters and I, and brought us to the base of the little pear tree where he placed the sticks in the grass to form wedges from the trunk.  He instructed us to get down on our hands and knees, and beginning at the base of the tree,  go back and forth within our wedge and turn over every, single, blade, of, grass until…..I don’t think 20 seconds went by and I found it!   Right there, clear as a little light bulb in the scented green grass at twilight, the diamond that meant so much. Thank you Saint Anthony!  For the extra scoop of ice cream I got that night that I thought should have been some cash, and for making my mom smile again and for not making Dad angry that the stone got lost but for giving him a smart way to find it.

Many months or 20 seconds later, Saint Anthony is pretty reliable.  He makes us wait just long enough to put the lost thing in perspective.   Sometimes the thing stays lost and keeps part of us with it, and then other Patron Saints take over.  But if it’s something you’re missing and you’d like a little boost in finding it,  even on Saint Patrick’s day, remember “Dear Saint Anthony….”

Have a cool lost and found story of your own?  Post and share.

The U.S. workforce is hemorrhaging jobs.  Since the first of the year 210,000 workers have been told the bad news.  Yet there is one sector of the economy that is expanding.  It’s the federal government which last year added 181,000 workers to the payroll.  Suddenly, government is cool.

Government jobs have something the private sector doesn’t have right now; expansion.  It’s not going anywhere,  and the benefits are stable and lasting.  Plus, some people believe that New York City with it’s dependence on Wall Street, has lost it’s luster and Washington is the place to be.

There’s another job that may begin to look appealing again, and that is the Roman Catholic Priest.  The Priesthood has been decimated in recent decades, by the Priest sex abuse scandal, and by the private sector which pays well, is socially rewarding and allows employees to be married.

Will this economy spur people to work for the government and in the church?  So far, there’s no indication that young men are lining up for the stability of the priesthood yet,  but the government is attracting new interest.   A recent job fair in Tuscon, Arizona  attracted 800 people looking for information about Border Patrol jobs.  That area of the government alone is expected to hire 11,000 workers this year alone.

In a challenging economy like this, work that had little interest  just two years ago has sudden new appeal.