February 10th, 2025

Saluti,

      Julie is on her way…if all goes well, she’ll be here tomorrow tonight…I’m very happy but I have to say I’m a little bit nervous. I haven’t had much interaction with anybody in the past seven days and I’ve been turning a bit inward, but then I started thinking back…back to the days when we first met…..

     Let me tell you something about this very special woman. I first met her back in 1983 at my cousin Rick’s wedding reception. We had a conversation and I was probably waving my hands and ranting about something political….like I did back then. She had a keen mind, a good vocabulary and an interesting sense of humor. But we were just two people passing in the night and I never thought much about it. Just one week later my first wife passed away and my life took a different turn. I had two kids to take care of and that was the main thing on my mind. I bought a house and I started operating Bernunzio Vintage Instruments in Penfield, NY as well as being a full time special education teacher. There wasn’t a lot of room for recreation. After about a year, I was asked by my long time teaching partner to be a substitute bowler in a league that she had joined. It was a couple’s bowling thing and they needed an extra couple for one week and could go with Julie Schnepf, who is a friend of her sisters. I said, "Well, who the hell is Julie Schnepf?" She explained, "You know Julie, you met her at Rick‘s wedding reception." So I agreed to go bowling… but just once.
     
       How do you explain falling in love on your first date…. I think we were in love by the fifth frame… we never went bowling again until our 25th wedding anniversary. We were our own team!  So it was, that 40 years ago this past January, my young girlfriend, Julie Ellen Schnepf and I took off to go to Buffalo. I had a banjo to sell to my old friend Eli Kaufman (I only introduced her to my best friends first!). I suggested we could then sneak across the border to Niagara Falls and then move on to Niagara-on-the-Lake. We stayed at the Prince of Wales Hotel and were rightly snowed in….a good, deep Canadian snow storm. We had to call our parents, who had our kids and tell them that we would not be able to be make it home for a few days (there was NO snow in Rochester!). Likewise, we had to call our jobs and say it looks like we were going to be snowed in at Niagara Falls. The magical snow started as we sat in the Sheraton Hotel on a little tufted red velvet bench. I ordered a bottle of champagne and I asked that young girl to marry me. It was a tender moment to say the least. Of course we didn’t get married until two years later…we had a long engagement which involved living in Europe for a year….

    So how do people stay in love for 40 years? ….everyone I’m sure has a different answer,  but I think you don’t stay in love for 40 years. Your love takes different twists and turns and shapes, just as the path of your life. It’s all good and natural and it’s over way too soon. It’s the way things work, it’s the course of life.

   So I leave you with a few collages below of pictures over the years of my darling Julie. Wish us a great reunion….

Cu la paci, 

John Bernunzio