What are the Odds?

There was a lot of excitement this past week over the Mega Millions lottery drawing with a payout of over half a billion dollars. There were people throwing out a dollar or two that have never bought tickets before. I even read a story this morning about someone that bought 2600 tickets just so they could increase their odds of winning. With the odds of winning at over 175 million to 1 it is truly a long shot if you do win. Personally I don’t think it matters if you buy one ticket or a million the only way you are going to win is if it is your turn to win and fate points its finger at you. I am not a regular player, but I bought a couple of tickets just in case it was my turn to win. Obviously the odds were not in my favor since I didn’t win. When it comes to the chance of winning millions people do not really pay attention to the odds. They get caught up in the excitement and the chance of being financially set for life and ignore their odds of winning. People don’t mind playing the odds when there is a big payout.

We are all players in the game of life and it is truly a game of numbers. We all play the odds every day. When most of us think of playing a game and being against the odds though we all like to look at the brighter things in life, like winning the lottery. But there is a numbers game that each and every one of us plays throughout our life where our chances are greater than 175 million to 1 and you play without ever buying the first ticket. If you are a male did you know that of all the different types of cancer that people could possibly have, your odds of developing one type is 1 in 2. Your odds of dying from cancer are 1 in 4. If you are a female your odds are a little greater with your chances of developing cancer at 1 in 3 and chances of dying from it at 1 in 5. 

So let’s break it down using just the male numbers for the sake of simplicity and give you a good visual perspective of what those odds look like. Let’s say you live in on a street with three other families. Each family has four people living in their house, so you have 16 people total living on your street. Of those 16 the odds are that 2 people in every household will develop some kind of cancer in their lifetime. Of those 8 on your street that develop cancer the odds are that 2 will die from their disease. Now there are a lot of factors that change those odds. For simplicity we base the odds on all types of cancer and we would have to assume that everyone had the same type of cancer. The odds change with every different type of cancer that people can get, but even so look at the chances you have of developing cancer of any kind.  

When it comes to cancer, no one wants to buy a ticket to play. We would much rather shell out a few dollars playing the long odds at winning the lottery. But if we look at the odds, you are more likely to get cancer than to win half a billion dollars in a lottery. So why don’t we spend our money to decrease the odds of developing something we don’t want rather than throwing it away on something we do want, but have very little chance of getting. The cure for cancer is not going to miraculously appear out of the blue. The only way to find the cure is through research and research costs money. In 2010 an estimated 5.8 billion dollars was spent on cancer research in the U.S. By comparison in that same year North Carolinians spent 1.45 billion on lottery tickets. If that number is average for all 43 states that have lotteries then Americans spent somewhere around 62 billion dollars on chances at becoming millionaires. So think of what 62 billion dollars spent on cancer research could do. That is 10 years’ worth of funding! 

So pull a dollar out of your pocket and take a long look at it and decide which game of odds you really want to play it on, a 1 in 175 million chance of becoming a millionaire, or a chance at increasing the odds of not developing cancer in your lifetime. Just remember, millionaires can get cancer too. What good would all that money be if you have a 1 in 2 chance of developing a disease that you have a 1 in 4 chance of dying from.

Crud in the Coffee Pot

Everyone needs a little adventure in their lives.  I am not talking about the adventure of not being able to stop off at Starbucks and having to get your java from the office coffee pot, or heading down the nearest freeway off ramp onto a road you have never explored to escape the standstill traffic caused by rubberneckers watching someone change a tire.  I mean real adventure where you get out of your daily rut and leave your personally imposed safe zone and do something exciting and unusual that involves a little risk that you don’t know what the outcome will be going into it.   A lot of times going on an adventure means packing up and heading out on a big trip but sometimes you can find adventure as close as your own back yard.  Adventure waits just outside your door, you just have to let go your inhibitions, be willing to take a little risk and try something different.

  I have definitely had my share of adventure in my own backyard on the Cape Fear because there were times when risks were taken and outcomes were unknown.  I can hear in my mind to moon the current a thousand times over and over and still sometimes lean up river and flip over in a broach.  Local outfitters won’t rent their equipment to anyone on the river if the water level is above what they consider “safe” at 3 feet on the gauge, but I have paddled my familiar 10 mile run in less than an hour when the water was running at 5 feet.  I went once at 10 feet in my 16’ sea kayak, dropped over what looked like a perfectly innocent wave only to see nothing but sky and then water as the hole on the other side pulled  me backwards and sucked the whole boat down.  In a panic I popped the skirt a little too early swallowed a whole lot of water and was just lucky that it spit me, the boat and my paddle all out at about the same time in the same place.  I don’t mind saying that it scared the bejezus out of me.  Anyone who tells you that they have never been scared on the water is a liar. 

 Ladybug has had her share of broaching, wet exits and getting hung up in strainers, all things that make a memorable adventure on the river.  Her idea of fun does not involve rocks as they tend to attract her like magnets.  She has had so many bad experiences with rocks in the water that it sometimes affects her ability to successfully navigate around any kind of obstacle that has a degree to difficulty to it.  I think she sees what she needs to do to get around it but she panics in the moments leading up to it and in doing so misses that small window where she can successfully maneuver around.  Fear is a good thing sometimes because it can keep you out of trouble but in other situations that same fear can lead to inactions that only further push you into peril.  Rocks may be her mortal enemy and chop and waves are definitely on her least favorite list, but I have seen her make open water crossings in waves that have kept grown men standing on the bank yearning for calmer waters.  She will tell you really quickly that it scared her to death, but it hasn’t stopped her from going back out in unfamiliar waters in less than perfect weather.  I have seen that excited look of accomplishment on her face far more often than she will admit after particularly difficult or hairy paddling excursions.  It is one of the things that keeps her going back for more.

Adventures don’t always have to carry you to within an inch of your life.  Some of the biggest adventures Ladybug and I have had paddling together were on the calmest of days with nary a rock nor wave in sight.  We have paddled among the wild horses at Shackleford Banks and the Feral horses at the Rachael Carson Reserve.   We paddled out into a lagoon with hundreds of other paddlers and baked in the sun all day long to watch some people lift off on their own adventure into outer space.  We paddled across a lake with 900 feet of water below our hulls to a long forgotten town accessible only on foot or by boat.   We paddle into a pod of dolphins that excited us so much we completely forgot to pull out the camera.  Pictures are not always worth a thousand words, it is sometimes best to leave the camera lens covered and just watch things unfold with your own two eyes.   We took over 200 pictures between three of us as we sat on Lake Drummond and watch a sunset.  None of the pictures we brought back can ever really convey to anyone what we actually saw or the emotions unleashed as Laura, Kim and I sat alone on the lake in our kayaks unable to distinguish where the Earth ended and heaven began. 

Adventures don’t always have to involve sitting in a cockpit with a paddle in hand, I have had many adventures in my life far removed from the water.   As we have prepared for what again will be an adventure of a lifetime, it seems though that water has been a big part of our life for the better part of the last year and a half.  Some of the places we have been and things we have seen we will never visit again or be able to see again.  They are unforgettable memories made on other adventures of our lifetime that we can never truly convey to those who have never experienced anything of the like. 

Get off your tush, and start living life.  There is way more to it than a 9 to 5, bills in the mailbox and cars jammed on a freeway.  You only have one life to live and when it is your time to depart this world I would really feel sorry for you if your last thought was “What an adventure I had seeing that guy changing the tire on my way to drink crud from the office coffee pot.” 

Follow along with at www.hopefloatsnc.com

We Can Remember and Celebrate

Cancer is not something that we like to talk about.  Unless it is happening to them or someone close to them, most people would rather put the subject in the back of their mind.  Cancer is not a subject though that our family can ignore.  Far too many of our kin have been touched by and affected by cancer.   Some of us have lost parents or grandparents, some have lost aunts, uncles and cousins and some have lost best friends.   Some have even lost children.

My grandmothers were both strong women, full of life that worked hard every day taking care of themselves and their families.   They were well known in the community and gave as much of themselves to friends and neighbors as they did to their own family.  They knew no strangers and they offered and gave freely to anyone without asking anything in return.  To a young child growing up they seemed invincible.  But no one is immune or invincible when it comes to cancer. 

I still remember my mom telling me her mother had cancer.  I can’t tell you the day or even the year anymore but I know exactly where I was and what I was doing when she called out to me and my brother from the back door of our house and sat us down out on the deck outside and told us that Mama Gladys was sick.  I don’t remember the exact words or even If she said she had cancer, but we knew from what she was saying that it wasn’t good.  She fought long and hard but in the end there was nothing anyone could do.  My parents moved in with her and lived back and forth between our house and hers just before the end.  Luckily my brother and I were old enough and responsible enough to spend some time at home by ourselves.  It was our way of helping out and the least we could do as we helplessly watched my grandmother wither away and finally succumb to the disease. 

I don’t remember when or where I was when my parents told me that my dad’s mom had cancer.  I was much older but still living at home when my Grandma fought the beast.  Working with my dad at the time, we went by her house at least once a day and sometimes more often as things got closer to the end.  When it got to the point that she needed to stay in a hospital bed we set it up in the back family room so there would be more space for her caregivers to get around her to work and so more family and friends could sit and fellowship as we comforted her and each other.  I was sitting in a chair just at the foot of her bed as she took her last breath.  Her battle over she left the frail shell of what she had become and journeyed home where she could finally rest.

You can never really know what it is like to go through cancer unless you have the disease or you are a caregiver of someone who does.  Being there day after day and seeing how even the smallest of things we take for granted like changing clothes, going to the bathroom, feeding yourself or even taking a sip of water becomes a struggle or is impossible without help.  You can’t fully understand the feelings or emotions that go along with the battle, unless you are locked into a fight to the death or holding a loved one’s hand as they swing their sword against the disease.   I can see why some people don’t even want to think about the subject and keep it behind closed doors in the dark closet of their minds.  If you don’t pay attention and stuff too much in a closet though, sooner or later it is bound to tumble out on your head when you open the door.

In April of 2009 as I walked past that overstuffed dark closet, the door sprung open and I was knocked to the floor when my wife and best friend of 25 years was diagnosed with cancer.  I was flooded with memories held deep in the dark recesses of my mind of the battles my grandmothers had fought years ago.  Fear and anxiety take over and begin to steer you down a road of uncertainty.  You grip the wheel with all the strength you can muster as you try to keep from careening off the cliff.  Finding out someone so close to you has cancer is something I don’t wish upon anyone.  We were so lucky that through early detection, new techniques in cancer treatment that come from years of research, and the grace of God that Kim never had to go through what my grandmothers did, and will soon be celebrating her third year as a survivor.   As a survivor though you have to be ever vigilant not to let down your guard lest the beast will sneak up and attack when you least expect it.  Until there is finally a cure then no one is safe and we must all stand watch poised ready to fight back.

Kim’s victory over cancer is not the only successful battle that our family has to celebrate, there are many others in the ranks of our close and extended family and friends that have gone through their own battles and are still here to celebrate another year in their life.  But just as we celebrate victories, we again have to mourn loved ones lost until that day when cancer is but a memory and we can finally put down our swords.

We can’t bring loved ones lost to cancer back, but we can remember and celebrate their lives and the lives of everyone that is going through or has gone through the disease by doing what we can to bring awareness and help others to never have to go through what they went through.  In just three short weeks Kim and I along with 17 new found friends will begin a journey of remembrance and celebration as we do our part to fight back against cancer.   Follow along with us as we make this journey and help us to celebrate the lives of those who have battled cancer.

www.hopefloatsnc.com

It's all in the Details, but You've Got to Have Patience

Two of the greatest virtues that I learned from my dad were attention to detail and patience.  More often than not the two go hand in hand.  It took many lessons when I was younger to see how they both worked together but believe me, if you don’t learn from the lessons you will always have mountains of worry and headaches a whole bottle of aspirin won’t cure.

 There is no better way to teach someone the importance of patience and attention to detail than to put them to work laying a 1000 foot glue together waterline in the middle of a blazing hot summer in a ground as hard as concrete.   Every step of the process is a lesson in patience.  Imagine yourself sitting on top of a washing machine in the spin cycle with an unbalanced load.  Then put a couple of heat lamps over your head and a space heater turned on high at your feet.  Then grab a bucket full of dirt and throw a hand full of it in your face every few minutes and let it meld with the sweat running down your brow.  If all that isn’t bad enough, throw some silverware in the garbage disposal and turn it on.  Five minutes of that would be enough to drive you insane, but imagine 5 or 6 hours of it! 

Now sitting on top of a machine that is a kin to doing all that makes you want to get it done and get the hell out of Dodge as fast as you can, but you can’t rush it.  You have to take your time and have patience.  See that machine might be doing all the work but you still have to guide it along and keep it moving forward.  Being in a rush one might tend to try and accelerate it forward a little faster, but in doing that you lock up the drive chain and choke out the engine.  Once it knocks off, you have to disengage the chain, restart the machine, back it up a few feet and start it digging again.  It is like taking two steps forward and one step back.  You will eventually get there, but it will take you a lot longer than if you had the patience to take things a little slower. 

Once you get the ditch dug, then your lesson in attention to detail begins.  Putting together plastic pipe doesn’t take an engineering degree, but if you don’t do it right you are headed for trouble.  First you have to make sure you don’t get any dirt in the pipe.  Then you have to clean the bell of one section of pipe and the plain end of another section with a cleaning solvent that will eat the hide off a baseball and leave your hands stained purple.  That stuff won’t wash off in a week I don’t care how much you wash and scrub.  Once you get it cleaned you have to swab both ends with glue, slide them together while twisting, and hold it tight for a few seconds so it doesn’t slip apart.  Oh, don’t forget if you get dirt on it before you slide it together, you have to start the cleaning and gluing all over again.  Now multiply that process times 50 and you are ready to throw it in the ditch and cover it up.

After you have it all hooked up and backfilled you get a brief lesson in faith.  Faith that you had the patience to pay attention to all the details so that when you turn the water on and the pipe starts filling and the pressure starts building water doesn’t start gushing out of the ground like a geyser.  If you didn’t learn the first two lessons your penance is to dig up the pipe by hand with a shovel, cursing every rock you hit on the way down, cut out the bad joint and repeat the lesson of attention to detail as you make the repair. 

Now I still sometimes overlook details and patience wears thin when you have a mound of work to accomplish, a short time to get it done in, and you get flooded with calls from people who didn’t learn their lessons in patience and want you to get something done yesterday.  But every time I forget the lessons I learned long ago on a hot summer day I still curse every rock I hit with the shovel as I dig back down to fix the problems I could have avoided if I had just slowed down, paid attention to the details and had a little patience.

There is No Place Like Home

I am not a world traveler.  In fact when it comes right down to it and you start listing the places I have been, it is a pretty short list.  A few nights ago Ladybug was doing something online at Trip Advisor and it was asking her all the places she had ever been.   Not long into what she was doing she turned to me and in a very disappointed voice she muttered that she had only been to about 25 places in her life.  Well I hated to see her disappointment so I asked her to name all the places.  When she got to the end of the list I started throwing out the names of some of the places I knew we had been that were not on her list.  I even started naming the obscure places that I knew she had not remembered and some I wasn’t even sure Trip Advisor had a clue where they were.  Names like Bat Cave, Luray, Abingdon, Damascus, White Top, Yemassee, McPhearsonville, Walterboro, Frisco, Waves, Salvo, and Rodanthe, just to name a few.  I went on for about half an hour throwing out places, more near than far but names all the same to add to her small list of where she had traveled in her life.  She finally got tired of typing them in somewhere after we past 120.  We came up with a lot of places, and could have added more but in retrospect we were just putting more stuffing in our pillow to make it look fatter.

We have some true world travelers that will be paddling with us on the Hope Floats NC 2012 Tour in April.  Some have even planted themselves for extended stays around the world due in part to very intimate relationships with good ole Uncle Sam’s armed forces.  The pillows they have rested their heads on are truly oversized, not just overstuffed.  In addition to the places they have been, they also have some pretty amazing stories to tell about adventures far and wide.  Some of their stories are even borderline on miraculous in the fact that they are still alive to tell the tales.  It really makes you take a look at what you have done and where you have been in your own life. 

In the great big scheme of things I have really not traveled that far from the small town where I grew up.  I have moved 6 times in my life that I know of and each and every move has been within a stone’s throw.  The last move I made we literally carried our stuff out the back door, across the back yard and into the front door of the where we presently live.  I can walk to the place previous to the last in less than two minutes and drive to the three previous that in about 15.   I have just never had the desire to pull up stakes and move any great distance.  The few places that I have traveled just don’t feel like home, although there are a few places we have been that I could very easily see myself getting comfortable in.

I have traveled north across the Mason Dixon Line only as far as Scranton Pennsylvania on a wonderful vacation with my parents when my children were really small.  Even though people associate the South with being backwoods sometimes, Scranton was our daughter’s first experience with no indoor plumbing and a real old time out house; it didn’t go over very well at all.  Headed back south I have been in every state along the Appalachians and east, although in Tennessee I have traveled in the east and west but skipped the middle altogether.  Just because you flew over a place in a plane it doesn’t count as actually visiting.  I didn’t cross the mighty Mississippi in Memphis, but I did cross it in Vicksburg and New Orleans.  The furthest point west I have driven in a car was Alexandria Louisiana.  Kim and I drove 2 ½ hours from Baton Rouge to England Airbase, was out of the car a total of 20 minutes, ate lunch in Alexandria and we were back in Baton Rouge for dinner.   I flew into Montgomery Alabama twice and have driven clear across the state north and south but never really seen anything there to write home about.  The first trip down during hurricane Ivan, I drove from Montgomery down to Pensacola Florida where I stayed for two weeks and the second trip down during hurricane Katrina, I drove from Montgomery to Tupelo Mississippi where I spent three weeks.  I have been to Florida so many times I have lost count; I should have stock in Disney as many times as I have been there.   Savannah Georgia has become one of our favorite places to visit, if I  ever had to pull up roots, move out of North Carolina and had the money to do so, I could very easily slip seamlessly into a life there, although I would definitely need a getaway retreat back close to home so I could visit family and friends often.  South Carolina was vacation central when I was growing up.  My parents “vacation home” was a small Apache popup camper and it was nothing to get off the bus after school on a Friday and see it in the driveway hooked to the car and ready to head down to Myrtle Beach for the weekend.  Some of the best and most memorable trips I had in my youth were spent in that little six person camper.  I think my dad paid about $500 for it used, and I wouldn’t take a million for the memories we made in it.  I truly feel sorry for kids whose parents kept them sheltered and were never exposed to the outdoors.  I owe the adventurous spirit I have totally to my parents, along with many other things too numerous to mention.  The furthest away from home I have ever been was San Diego California on a relief mission with the American Red Cross.  I flew out during the wildfires of 2008 and worked for a little over two weeks.  It was just long enough for me to decide Cali For Knee might be the place to be for Jed and Granny but it is definitely not for me.

North Carolina is home for me and I honestly can say in all my travels there is no other place I would rather be.  If you made a list of the good and the bad, the scales here would always tip toward the sunny side of life.  You can always find a quiet place to relax and rejuvenate that is just around the corner from adventure and excitement.  Although some of the transplants that haven’t lived here for long are still grumpy and gruff, the exposure to polite and easy going native North Carolinians will rub off on them soon enough, or we will kick them back whenceover they came.  From the mountains to the sea and everywhere in between it is filled with places warm and inviting full of friendly people who have never met a stranger.   Though I have lived here all my life there are still places yet to be discovered that once I visit will only reinforce the feelings I have for where I live.   Dorothy can close her eyes and click her heals and be back in Kansas all she wants but my Oz is here and there is no place like home.

P.S.  Lady Bug and I set out on our biggest trip of all times an spent 19 days on the road through 13 states.  We drove over 6,000 miles round trip to Montana.  It was the best adventure we have ever had to date.  We can't wait to do it again.

Everything I Know I Learned From TV?

Everything that we know we learned from somewhere or someone.  As we get older we sometimes forget from where or who we learned everything we know, but usually the biggest lessons in life or the most valuable things that shape our character we tend to never forget from who or where they came.  I recently came across an article entitled “Everything I know, I learned from Andy Griffith” that gave an insight into some of the lessons that the writer had learned from the Andy Griffith Show.   Now this article was not saying that the author learned everything in life from a television sit com, and neither am I by writing this myself, but it did point out that there were some valuable life lessons that could be found between the colorful characters and the humor and that some of those lessons we remember all our life.  Reading the article made me really ponder where I learned some of the things that shaped me as a person and has guided me along my path in life.

Let me preface this by saying that I don’t believe any parent should intentionally plop their kids down in front of the television and leave them to learn everything important in life from a group of paid writers who are only out to make money and get higher ratings.  Not everything on TV has value beyond entertainment or selling a product.  As children we learn from what we see and what we are exposed to and as parents it is our duty to make sure that what our children are watching on TV has some value.  The television can’t replace the touch of a caring hand or the spoken words given at just the right time, but it can open up a learning mind to things you yourself might not ever imagine.   I didn’t grow up entirely in front of a TV, but there were times when the television was my babysitter and as such I can attribute some of my lessons learned from the shows I watched in the 70’s. 

I learned the importance of friendship from Captain Kangaroo.  He taught me that friends didn’t all have to look the same or believe the same things and being different was an important part of who we were.  He also taught me that even when friends did things to annoy you, like dropping a bucket load of ping pong balls on your head, you just laughed it off and loved them all the same even knowing they would do it again sometime down the road.  Though I preferred to find adventure in the real world and didn’t like to burry my head in a book, he did teach me that when you couldn’t get outside you could find adventure in a book.  Most of what I learned about animals and how to care for them I learned from the Captains good friend Mr. Green Jeans.  He was always bringing in a new animal to add to his zoo and he explained things about them in ways that little children could understand.  What most people don’t know about both the Capt. (Bob Keeshan) and Green Jeans (Frank Brannum) is before they were both television stars they were both Marines.

Gilligan’s Island taught me that even if you’re only going on a three hour tour, make sure your prepared and bring along things for the unexpected.  A steamer trunk full of money won’t help you much in the middle of nowhere, but a suitcase full of encyclopedias and scientific journals can help you figure out what is safe to eat and how to ward off savage headhunters.  Through their unbelievable misadventures and personal interactions the castaways taught me that whether we live on a deserted island in the middle of the Pacific or a penthouse on Wall Street, we all live on a big blue marble floating in the universe, and we are all in this thing together.  No matter who we are or where we are at, what we do affects everyone around us in some way.  It takes all of us working together to make sure that we have what we need to survive.  I learned that necessity is the mother of invention and you can build anything from nothing, although until I was an adult I never figured out why they could build pedal cars, washing machines, musical instruments and put on productions of Shakespeare but they couldn’t patch a few holes in an old wooden boat.   Living on a deserted island with no sign of rescue was stressful and sometimes when we lose things or don’t seem to have control in our lives you tend to throw yourself into projects to cope.  We sometimes feel like we need to be doing something, even if what we are doing doesn’t help the situation it makes us feel productive.

Batman, the original 60’s TV series, taught me that heroes didn’t need far-fetched super powers to save the world.  When someone throws up the Batsignal, calls you on the Batphone or screams from the dark abyss, don’t hesitate to jump right in and help them out.  Never forget though to be vigilant and help those who don’t quite know how to ask you for it but need your help.  Bruce Wayne was a very successful business man and a philanthropist who was always raising money for the Wayne Foundation that gave to many charitable causes.   Sometimes there is more to being a hero than just fighting crime.  You don’t need to be wealthy, wear armor plated suits with cool gadgets on a belt, or drive a superfast car with a rocket engine in it to make a difference in the world; you just have to do the best with what you have and share it with others.  Batman also taught me the importance of having a “Plan B”.  The best laid plans can always be thwarted by a prickly bush, a devious thug or some poisonous lipstick so be prepared with a backup plan. “BIFF, BOOM, POW!”

Albert Einstein said; “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”   Einstein died in 1955 and never got a chance to see Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, which first aired in 1968, but I can only imagine that if he had seen it he would have approved of the message that Fred Rogers was sending to children.  Mr. Rogers taught me that imagination was the key that held everything together.   Without imagination you only see the world in black and white and miss all the other colors of the rainbow.  He showed me how whole new worlds could open up to you just by jumping on a trolley and going through a hole in the wall.  How something as lifeless as a picture on the wall could magically transport you to destinations unknown and frontiers unimagined.  He also taught me that no dream was too small and small dreams can turn into big things. Imagination is the way you bring dreams to reality.   After all if we can dream it then we can do it!  Mr. Rogers taught me to be honest with myself and others.   He said it was ok to be who I was and to be the best I could be.  There was no one like me before me and there will be no one like me after I am gone.  Fred Rogers had an impact on everyone around him and his message was simple; “If only you could sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.”  Mr. Rogers taught me that you don’t measure your success in life by the big job you have, the huge house you live in, the fancy clothes you wear, the fast car you drive or the huge roll of money you flaunt around.  You measure the success you have in life by the impact you have on people around you.  Just one more reason that I think ole Einstein would have loved Fred Rogers after all wasn’t it Einstein that said “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile”?

When I was a little boy sitting in front of the TV watching all these shows and the dozens of others like them, I only saw them as entertainment, not thinking they were teaching me lessons I would remember throughout my life.  My parents and grandparents probably never realized when they let me sit there for hours watching those shows that they would ever do anything but keep me entertained while they cooked meals, cleaned house or did the multitude of other things they had to do to provide for our family and my well-being.   They also probably never knew that the lessons that I learn from those shows went hand in hand with the most valuable lessons and gifts of learning in life that they themselves gave me, but that is a story for another day.