Can you believe it’s Christmas already?

Now that I’m retired, I’m finding that I’m watching a lot more daytime TV than I used to, otherwise I would never know what day it is.

First of all, I want to wish everyone the happiest of holidays and a prosperous and healthy 2020! Let’s hope that voters see things clearly in this upcoming election year.

Sharon Morgan’s passing caught me completely off-guard. The last time I saw her was about three weeks earlier. The long-time chamber special events coordinator and the town’s first woman mayor was also a special friend of mine.

We shared the same philosophy about our community involvement. We talked about it at the last Chamber Gala.

“It seems like we’re always at the same events,” she said, as she approached me from behind.

“Hi, Sharon,” I said without turning around to see who it was. “I’d recognize that voice anywhere. And yes, we have been at many of the same meetings or special events over the years.”

I reminded her about the talk we had about Sister Cities including the history of the program in the bar area of a hotel in the heart of Brussels.

She had just been elected mayor and knew nothing about the Sister Cities program. Despite the fact that we had just endured a 14- hour flight to Belgium, she was interested in what I had to say. We were on our way to Kasterlee to enter into an agreement she would be signing that would make the town in north-central Belgium our first sister city.

I first started discussing the possibility of getting involved with the program in my newspaper columns some five years earlier. I had seen that Canberra, Australia had one of the world’s tallest fountains as its centerpiece. The Red Mountains were on one side of the city, which is the capital of Australia. Red Mountain is one of the names that Mount McDowell is called to our south. Canberra later told us that they weren’t interested in becoming a sister city with us. And we found out that we couldn’t be involved with Sister Cities International until we became incorporated.

David Jackman was cochairman of the Sister Cities committee. He had done business in a town called Kasterlee in Belgium. He said it had a lot of the same “feel” of Fountain Hills, except it was green with lots of trees.

Jerry Miles, who preceded Morgan as mayor, remembered those newspaper columns and contacted me the first week he was in office to put together a proposal to the council to begin a quest for a sister city for Fountain Hills.

Jerry and I led a group of Fountain Hills residents and Vice Mayor Marianne Wiggishoff to Kasterlee two years earlier. Much to Jerry’s disappointment, we couldn’t get the Kasterlee council and mayor to agree to the official signing before he left office. We found out that the people in Belgium are a lot like people from Missouri. And they don’t call it “the Show Me State” for nothing.

During those two years, we took two different groups to Kasterlee all at their own expense. We also sent two high school students to Kasterlee and they sent four boys in exchange.

Sharon became so involved in Sister Cities that she took over the chairmanship when doctors told me I had to start getting uninvolved due to my Parkinson’s Disease. She also took charge of the Business Showcase from me and converted it to the Business Expo.

There was one thing I knew and that was leaving anything in Sharon’s hands, you could be sure it would get done.