I really enjoy Demented Diary's (see list to left) daily entries, but I have been frustrated trying to leave comments because now Diaryland thinks I'm a spammer. Dunno why.

However, be that as it may, he points out that today is St. Anskar's feast day. He is the patron saint of Sweden. Well, that explains why my great-grandfather was named Anskar. He was a wonderful man, tall and straight, even into his 80's.

He was well-to-do until he lost everything in the Great Depression (except for his house, which had a paid-off mortgage). He was lucky; he found work driving as a chauffeur for a man who had been his employee, and had kept his money in a jar instead of in a bank or in the stock market, and turned his good fortune into a thriving business. Great-grandpa was very fortunate to have been able to find any work at all. My grandmother went to work as a secretary for Hartford Insurance Company--the insurance companies did quite well during the Depression.

Three generations of us, and then with my birth, 4 generations, lived in that mortgage-clear house right through WWII, when my father (in the Navy, Pearl Harbor) and mother (worked for Pratt & Whitney testing aircraft engines) moved out to a Navy housing project.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

P.S. Demented writes about this being the Sunday before "forty days and forty nights of gluttonous overindulgence in meaningless self-deprivation"--I love this phrase. Think I'll give up meaninglessness for Lent.