Column: Goodbye America

Dear readers,

Wow.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have announced they're moving back to England.  I wanted to go to their garage sale and buy a souvenir, but Johnny said it wasn’t in the budget.

I’ll get back to Harry and Meghan in a minute. First, I must give a shout-out to loyal reader Sophia Keith. She came to my rescue last Friday night.

It began innocently enough. I was listening to Johnny McCrory's play-by-play of the high school football game on Giant FM. The Golden Bears were putting the Pirates in their place.

The game was winding down like a slow-motion victory lap. I was dozing off and then my cell phone rang. It was my granddaughter June, needing a ride home from the game.

I drove out to the high school, found a parking spot, and discovered that my cell phone wasn’t working. No signal. No texts. No way to tell June where I was parked.

That's when I spotted a woman in a nearby car. Trying my best not to look like a creepy old man and end up being pepper sprayed, I knocked on her window.

She rolled it down. I used my usual stupid conversation starter

 "You might not realize it, but to my family, I'm a local celebrity."

To my surprise, she didn't roll the window back up. Instead, she said, "Yes, and I have your refrigerator magnet on my refrigerator."

It was long-time reader Sophia Keith. She sent June a text explaining the situation, and my problem was solved. Thank you, Sophia Keith!

Now back to Prince Harry and Meghan's move back to the UK.

I do hope Meghan apologizes to her father-in-law for trashing the royal family on the Oprah special. I'm sure the King will forgive her. After all, it wasn't entirely her fault. Harry was also to blame. He should have known better. He is British.

Meghan has an excuse. At the time of the blunder, she was still so swept up in the rapture of her wedding that she actually believed it was all about her.

Let's be honest. Meghan wanted to be a celebrity. She was, at most, a C-list celebrity before getting engaged to Harry. She was known for a TV show most people never watched. Then came the fairytale wedding, viewed by a global audience estimated at nearly two billion people.

That huge boost in popularity had very little to do with Meghan and everything to do with Harry and his family. His grandmother was the Queen of England, for heaven's sake. His father was soon to be King.

America fought a revolution to escape being ruled by Harry’s great to the 6^th degree grandfather, King George III. Americans will still hold up signs proclaiming “no Kings” in our country, yet for some reason, we are absolutely obsessed with the Royals.

Their wedding was the event of the year. It was the Super Bowl of weddings. It was everywhere. There was no escape from the endless media coverage. It was the same as a generation ago when Harry’s dad married his mom.

And what a wedding it was. Harry's family reportedly spent $40 million dollars on the affair. Sir Elton John himself sang a special version of "Tiny Dancer" to Meghan at the reception.

Meghan mistakenly believed those two billion people tuned in to see her. She didn't realize it didn't much matter who was wearing the dress that day. What mattered is that it was a royal wedding.

Years ago, Grace Kelly, an Academy Award winning movie star, also married a prince. When she married Prince Rainier of Monaco, she understood something that Meghan didn’t understand. Grace knew that her new crown was far bigger than any movie star status she'd ever achieved. She retired from acting, never looked back, and became Princess Grace of Monaco.

I do hope Harry and Meghan find happiness back in the UK.

See you all next week — same Schwinn time, same Schwinn channel.