Purple & Red Traditions

March 17, 2024, at home

My St. Patrick's Day - St. Joseph's Day tradition

Follow me on my longstanding, personal tradition, and then ask yourself, as I do now: Why do I make my life so complicated, especially in regard to the color of my garments?

I am once again following my own decades-long, personal tradition of wearing the color purple on St. Patrick's Day today (March 17, 2024). Here is a selfie of myself wearing my favorite St. Paddy's Day shirt. I have been doing this since my age was in single digits in the late 1960s because I am half Italian. (I am also Austrian, Swiss, and Portuguese.)

Purple is the color of the Italians. I am a lifetime member of Alpha Phi Delta, which is a national, Italian-heritage, social-service fraternity, mostly at colleges and universities in the northeastern section of the United States. I became a member in the early 1980s, when I was studying for my undergraduate at Villanova University near Philadelphia, and was soon elected as a member of the fraternity's local executive board, specifically as "Recording Secretary." Our fraternity colors are purple and white, with the white carnation as our fraternity flower.

When I started my tradition in the late 1960s, around seven or eight years old, it was slightly before I had discovered that we Italians have our own celebratory day -- St. Joseph's Day -- which is two days later on March 19.

After all of these decades, I continue to keep my purple tradition alive, as you can see in this selfie from today, as I engage in convalescence in bed at home.

However, we Italians wear red on St. Joseph's Day, which I will be doing in two days.

As an aside, do not wear the color orange on St. Patrick's Day, that is, unless you want to offend the Irish Catholics. Orange is the color of the Protestants. And, of course, wearing green on either day was never an option for me due to my contrarian nature.

PHOTO: Here I am during early afternoon today receiving two intravenous antibiotics infusions (bags with slow drips) starting simultaneously every morning and continuing concurrently into the afternoon depending on their flow. I also receive a third bag every evening. All three bags are administered every day by my home nurse and by my wife as part of yet another six-week-long daily regimen for a bone infection within my right ankle and an infection under the surrounding skin. I also continue to sniff on oxygen.

In addition to my ankle infections, I am still gaining strength from recent surgeries:

March 2022: quadruple coronary artery bypass surgery
May 2022: TWO chest surgeries
September 2023: spinal surgery
October 2023: another spinal surgery