Kindness at Random
“Pay It Forward” is a movie in which a young boy, who believes in the basic goodness of people, decides to try to get as many as he can to do good. Instead of paying a favor back, he asks them to pay it forward and, in that, do something for someone else. A boy with a drum, wanting to give something to a very important person of his time, but having very little, decides all he can give is his music. It is one of the best gifts. “Seven Pounds” is a movie in which Will Smith stars as an IRS agent who, due to a haunting secret, decides to change the lives of seven people he does not know. And, finally, there is the story of the young girl who gives her last peso to buy a cage for a bird with a broken wing. A king comes to town. ...
Living the Hyperopic Life
About fifteen years ago, in a former life, I worked with Josephine and Josephine had a plan. She was driven by a single goal which was to work as hard as she could, climb the corporate ladder and make enough money so she and her husband could retire at forty-five and live the rest of their days in relaxed splendor. Jasmine planned to begin working part time about two years ago. In her mid forties, she felt it time to spend more time with the kids who had, up to this point, been brought up by nannies. She was considering going freelance and starting her own consulting business. Her time would become her own and she’d made enough money that she and her family were pretty well off. Hunter has worked extremely hard for the last several years...
Happiness Served Here
“It’s ‘The Decade of Discontent’,” I said a few years ago during a conversation about being in your forties. And it occurred to me this very well could be. Professionally, people of this vintage are often on the cusp of deciding to chase the money, continue to chase it, stop chasing it or do something completely different in an effort to find that which fulfills them most. The children are grown, but not all the way so there is still that dependence but independence has crept in so parents aren’t “needed” as much. The body starts talking back too, asking “what exactly are you doing working me like this and why is coffee not involved?” And then there’s the big stuff. Shocking and...
Driving Drunk with Both Hands on the Wheel
I wonder what the woman was thinking as she sat on her motorcycle at a stoplight in suburban Chicago a few weekends ago. She might have been thinking of her kids, where she was headed or maybe nothing at all. No one knows but I bet it wasn’t about the car coming up behind her, at speed, as it plowed in and took her life. The woman who hit her was putting nail polish on. The forty six passengers who were hurt on Boston’s green line when the trolleys they were riding in collided weren’t expecting to have to be attended to by medical personnel. They were just riding the trolley home on the evening commute. They were thinking, for the most part, what they think about every day on that ride. The twenty-four year old driver of the trolley that caused...
How Do You Take Someone’s Freedom
I watch as the slippage peeks out here and there. I hear the questions repeated and know the previous asking has been forgotten. I see the slow, gray veil of confusion imperceptibly descending little by little. I am powerless to stop it; powerless to stem the damage to the mind. How do I tell them it’s time? What does it take to go to someone and tell them they are not the person they still believe they are? Does anyone have the will to be unshaken by the look of hurt or confusion that follows? Can I muster the fortitude to believe I am doing the right thing even though the sadness is telling me to take it all back and convince myself that it just isn’t that bad? The person before me is not the same, but I still care for them as I always have. They...
A Number Beyond Imagination
I am a numbers person. Having studied math in college, I have always found all different manner of numbers, equations and formulas fascinating. There have been a lot of big numbers bandied about lately — usually with dollar signs bolted on to the front — and I got to thinking about how big those numbers are. During all the talk about the $700 billion dollar bailout package, I wrote about how big the number one billion is, what a billion dollars could buy and a few ways you could use to visualize such a number. Half that money has been spent (on what, no one seems to be quite sure) and the rest, $350 billion, is now being distributed with anyone and everyone slithering in to try to get a piece of it. I’m not so sure Gordon Gecko was right in the...
A Love Story
It was the early nineties and the first time I saw Cortni, I was blown away. She had eyes like a cat with a regal aire that commanded the attention of the young men in the office. Carla, a co-worker, and I were across the room one day watching this phenomenon. She leaned over to me and whispered, “look at those wolves.” I turned to her and said “I’ll get her.” And I did. Three weeks and three days after our first date, we rode to the Jefferson Memorial on my motorcycle and I proposed to her on the steps amidst the cherry blossoms and white stone majesty of my favorite monument. Three and a half years later it ended. Because that’s not a love story. It’s a fairy tale. It’s believing marketers selling an...