Why I Started This New Blog

Dear Byron,

I'm sure you've heard from your parents or your Grandparents that I wrote three novels are about one young couple, Tillie and Albert Freitag. The series is called The Spiral Bridge Mysteries. One day soon I'll tell you more about the real Spiral Bridge. You may even be able to find my novels in ebook format.

In my novels Tillie and Albert fall in love, get married and have their first child, Louise, a beautiful little girl. My readers meet their families and friends, discover their thoughts and feelings, their doubts and fears, their joys and sorrows. That, of course, is why we read novels. In them we learn to love, like, admire, hate, fear or despise the characters—or not.

In this Blog I'll take you back at times to some of the events portrayed in my novels, but only to illustrate. My aim is to help you as you face the same kind of experiences Albert and Tillie encountered way back in the days of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Yours is a very different world, eighty years later. Yet in many ways it remains the same. People still quarrel, fall in love, have babies, grow up, try hard to make good grades in school, struggle other kids, get married, fail at marriage and divorce one another. They cheat, steal, celebrate birthdays, attend funerals, lose their jobs, go on trips, find new challenges and on and on. That's also what I'll be writing about in these blogs. As you grow up, Byron, you'll face the same kind of things, even though your world has outwardly changed very much.

One thing never changes: God's Word, the Word recorded in the Sacred Scriptures and proclaimed across thousands of years. I'll be drawing from that Word also as I ponder with you about the challenges of growing up, getting married, living in a family and learning how to trust God and His love for us all. I pray that you will receive many blessings by pondering that Word as you too grow up.

And please, Byron, be assured that I'll be praying for you, both during the days remaining to me on this earth and then in the great and wondrous hills and halls of heaven.

—Your loving Great-Grandpa Al