Good morning! I hope you have a good week!

I was fortunate that, somehow, I landed in the Human Resources Division of First Union National Bank in the 1980s. There I was taught several lessons that were foundational for me.

The lessons from that time that still resonate with me today have to do with perceptions.

Let’s look at three of these:

Rule Number 1 – Your Perceptions are Your Reality:

Yes, this is true. We constantly take in information through feeling, touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing. We then run all that data through the muscle we call the brain, and voila! Out comes a perception. These perceptions form the basis for our individual reality, i.e., what we experience in the world, and how we experience the world.

As always, lots of thoughts are going through my head. As always, the challenge is to capture my thoughts, transfer thoughts to fingers, then to keyboard, then, through the magic of The World Wide Web, to you, for your enjoyment, rumination, or perhaps annoyance and consternation.

“Thoughts for the Week” is celebrating its 2nd birthday! Instead of giving “Thoughts” a present, I am giving it scrutiny by asking questions such as:

1. What is this thing I now call “Thoughts For the Week”?

2. What am I trying to accomplish by writing this?

3. Why do this?

Ah, yes, we turn the calendar to the 3rd quarter of 2023. July, when the hot gets hotter, the month of the “Dog Days,” when the days begin to shrink, just like me. July, named in honor of Julius Caesar by the Roman Senate, who, feeling that they had not named enough for Julius, named the Caesar Salad after him! Apparently, shortly after Brutus had fileted Caesar, the senators considered naming a steak after Julius, but steaks had already been used to honor Diana, the Goddess of the Hunt. Given they had hoped that Julius would turn over a new leaf, several senators shouted, “LETTUCE NAME A SALAD AFTER CAESAR!!! So many Roman senators disliked Caesar that they decided to put anchovies on the Caesar Salad, which appeased Caesar’s many enemies.

Now that I am really into knowing more about the month of July, I have gone down into the Wikipedia rabbit hole... And I had no idea that:

It took 30 months for the words of the Emancipation Proclamation to reach slaves in Galveston, Texas, telling them that they were indeed free.

It has taken a lifetime for me to understand the significance of “Juneteenth”.

Juneteenth is the celebration of a day in June of 1865 when a tiny segment of our population was finally informed that of their freedom. Per Wikipedia:

“Despite the surrender of Confederate General-in-Chief Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, the western Confederate Army of the Trans-Mississippi did not surrender until June 2.

Buongiorno! Your intrepid “Thoughts” scribe, R. Corydon Perkey, is typing this into the Metasphere (isn’t everything a Metasphere?) from a hotel in Milan, Italy, the culmination of perhaps the best foreign excursion of my young old life.

This will be one of those stream-of-consciousness - whatever pops-to-mind automatic writings, where I have no idea where I will end up (relative to this edition of “Thoughts”) so here it goes:

1. First, I have a bone to pick with Mrs. Ella Hughes, the wonderful lady who taught Latin at Brookville High School in Lynchburg, Virginia, when I was Brookville “Bee” in the 1970s. I took five years of Latin from Mrs. Hughes, and despite my best efforts, I saw not one single Roman while I have been here in Italy with whom I could carry on a conversation in Latin. Not one!

May 31st was the 76th wedding anniversary of my parents, Ginnie and Chuck Perkey. It dawns on me that I should always celebrate my parents’ wedding anniversary because without their union, I would be either illegitimate or not here at all. Not that there is anything wrong with being illegitimate; there have been several significant historical figures who fit into that category of legitimacy. Chuck passed away in 1992 and Ginnie in 2012, so they only celebrated 45 anniversaries while on Earth. I am pretty certain that they have had a nice gathering with some of their closest friends in order to celebrate their 76th anniversary-Jack and Dot Purdy, Paul and Mary Smith, Rita and Paul Hutcherson, and many others. Chuck has mixed whiskey sours for everybody, and they have toasted the past and the future, with all commenting on how fortunate they are that there is no debt ceiling in heaven. Apparently no one is a Republican or a Democrat in heaven, but they make everything hell everywhere else.