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I think our granddaughter was about nine years old when she came home from school and said, "Mommy, Daddy, my favorite holiday, I know what it is. It's Thanksgiving." And they asked her why that is. Well, her daddy is our son and her mommy is Native American, so she came in with a unique perspective on Turkey Day. She said, "I love Thanksgiving because I'm a Pilgrim and an Indian!"
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You've probably been speeding down the highway as I have at times, and all of a sudden you'll come to a construction area that says, "Slow down - 35 mph." So everyone, of course, slows down by two or three miles an hour. They're down to 57 now or something like that. And then you'll see as you get a little more into the construction area these words, "Be prepared to stop." Well, I don't want to be prepared to stop. I don't know if you're like me, but I calculate how many miles I've got to go, how long it's going to take. Let's see, "Sixty miles - sixty minutes." Something like that. I don't want to be prepared to stop. I'm prepared to do the speed limit. Sometimes we live our whole lives that way. We're speeding too fast to stop.
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Some of our most memorable vacation moments as a family have been spent on the beautiful Outer Banks of North Carolina. It hasn't always been beautiful for ships that were navigating those treacherous shoals that are off the shores of the Outer Banks. It's estimated that over 2,000 ships have gone down there over the centuries. But a lot more lives could have been lost if it hadn't been for the Cape Hatteras Light, one of the most famous lighthouses in America. Its octagonal tower rises massively above the beach and the sand hills, and it's been the guiding light that's kept many ships from going aground. It's stood there for nearly two centuries. Imagine the storms that she's weathered; including more than a hundred hurricanes! Storms that blew away so many other structures, but the lighthouse still stands.
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The Titanic couldn't miss that iceberg. These days, you can't miss the Titanic. Ever since they found the unsinkable ship where it sank two and a half miles beneath the sea, there's been a rekindled fascination with the Titanic. As they have studied the wreckage with the latest underwater technology, they've discovered some surprising new information about what happened to the grandest ocean liner in history. It was the equivalent of four city blocks in length! Now most people have probably pictured the Titanic plowing into this huge iceberg and opening up a gaping hole in it. But now we know that the Titanic basically just sideswiped that iceberg; in fact, many passengers didn't even know anything had happened. And it wasn't some gaping hole that sank the unsinkable ship. It was what one newspaper called, "small wounds that doomed the Titanic." There were six relatively small punctures in the hull - "pin pricks" according to a TV special on the subject. Here's a ship that was 95,000 square feet in size, and it was sunk by little leaks that one article said, all put together, would have been about 12 square feet - about the size of a door!
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Yeah, my wife was always this way, I'm this way. We're some of those psychos called marathon drivers. Now I know long-haul truckers have to do it for a living. But sometimes, you know, I've been known to choose to do it, just because, well, we wanted to get somewhere quickly. Of course, like most men, I like to be the one driving, sometimes for longer than I should. My wife would always tell me that our lives start to be in danger from the time I would start rubbing my right leg while I'm driving. Now, what does that have to do with it? Apparently, that's the first tip-off I'm going to sleep soon. So she would gently offer to drive and I would, of course, refuse. She'd offer several other times to drive, and then I would start doing a workout at the wheel. And then I would turn on some obnoxious radio station at full volume. Then I would open the window to let in the 20-below wind chill. Finally, just before we're just about to become a National Safety Council statistic, I would grudgingly pull over to the side of the road. We would change seats, and I would be out before we could start the car again.
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Motivation - that's the art of getting a person to do something. We're all in the motivating business. You may be motivating people to go somewhere, or to do a job, to correct a weakness in their life, to change their ways, to finish what they start, to do what you want them to do. Motivation comes in a lot of forms. You can inspire people to do it. You can threaten them if they don't do it. You can love them into doing it; put an arm around them and say, "Come on, Buddy." You can help them do it. You could pitch in and show them how and be willing to do your part.
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You may not remember much of your World History class, but you probably at least remember the nations of Europe fought it out for a long time to see who was going to be Number One. For many years, their biggest way to fight it out was with their big navies. So, if a ship from England saw a ship from France, you could expect some fireworks. Of course, the way you knew what country a ship was from was that flag they flew from the top of the mast - their colors. When they would see a ship approaching on the horizon, they usually lowered their colors until they could see whether that other guy was a friend or an enemy. But occasionally there was a ship that approached those encounters in a radically different way. There were a few courageous captains who would give a simple six-word order to their crew, "Nail our colors to the mast!" But you could just hear the first mate saying, "Captain, that means we can't lower our colors, no matter what." To which the captain would say something like this. "That's right."
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My friend Margaret had just been to a family gathering in the Midwest, and she saw many loved ones there, including her deputy sheriff nephew. Now, as she started heading home, her foot got, shall we say, a little heavy. Or at least that's what the officer who pulled her over seemed to think. As he turned to go back to his car with her license and registration in hand, Margaret said, "Do you know Deputy _________?" and she mentioned her nephew's name. The officer did know him. After a few minutes of record checking and paperwork in his squad car, the officer returned to Margaret's car and said, "I'm just going to give you a warning," followed by, "I checked with your nephew."
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I have an inspiring view out of my office window. I look out at a mountain with this rolling field in between me and the mountain. The field dips down into a hollow, or a "holler" as they call it in the South. In the spring, some of the trees in the hollow start to bloom in living color. The redbud, the dogwood, they just start setting out their blossoms in all their glory. Well, one spring, someone walked into my office, glanced out that window, and said, "Well, look at those beautiful trees down there." They are beautiful, but you know what? They're in a spot where very few people ever see that beauty.
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Hollywood really missed this one. It was a movie no one was willing to distribute; a movie most thought would have a limited audience. But from its midweek opening, Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" a few years ago took off like a rocket. Soon it became apparent this movie portraying the agonizing last twelve hours of Jesus' life was going to be a blockbuster, whose box office numbers were up there with the record-breakers. But according to Director, Mel Gibson, this movie ultimately wasn't about commercial success. It was, for him, a deeply personal project, portraying what he described as "Christ's wounds that healed my wounds." The personalness of Jesus' death to him surfaced vividly on the day they were filming the driving of the nails into Christ's hands. It's a not-to-be forgotten moment. The director himself grabbed the mallet and spikes from the actor who was supposed to be nailing Jesus to the cross. The cameras kept rolling, and in the movie it is Mel Gibson's hands we see, wielding the hammer and driving the nails into Jesus' hands.
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It's one of the ugly words of our time - hostage. I mean, look, we've all seen our share of hostage situations on the news. Right? Some right here in the United States. When someone has taken a hostage or several hostages, the first thing they do is bring in the hostage negotiating team and the police do their very best to use their psychology and their human relations to talk that person, of course, into releasing their hostages.
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My son-in-law had to fight a battle that's all too familiar to frequent flyers - it's called Baggage Wars. That's when your suitcase goes somewhere other than where you're going. He fought a four-week battle, calling almost daily to see if the airline had located a missing bag with some pretty valuable items in it. Hooray! They finally found it! It had been checked to Chicago. Of course, it went to Portland, Oregon. It was checked on one airline and ended up tagged by a different airline. It started with his name on it, and it ended up with someone else's name on it. I don't know how this happened. Somehow his valuables did not end up where he thought they would. They were tagged for another destination.
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Well, it's sad, but we, like a lot of people, have had to institute a lot of safety precautions to protect our computers. There's lots of hacking today, and that dreaded word "virus." Yeah. Now, this is not "take two aspirin and call me in the morning" stuff. No, we're talking technical viruses that can get into your system, wreak havoc with your data and your equipment. That's why the first display I see when I turn on my computer says, "Virus Scan." You know, there are plenty of horror stories of what happened when one of these little alien invaders got into a computer system. We're talking like total meltdown in some cases. It really does pay to go to extra effort to keep those invaders out!
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Little Jessica became America's child that day she fell down that narrow shaft in a backyard in Texas. Here was a toddler, wedged nearly upside down, in a shaft far too narrow for any man to navigate, and unable to help herself in any way. It didn't take long for the press to descend on that little hole in the ground to cover this valiant effort to try to save little Jessica's life. Pretty soon countless people across the country and around the world, including me, were rooting and praying for her life. I was one of them. At first, there appeared to be no way out of this deadly situation, but the rescuers weren't about to give up. No, they began to build a wider shaft parallel to the one Jessica was trapped in. She'd been in there for nearly three days when a rescuer finally went down that new shaft and through the tunnel they had dug to Jessica. Minutes later – a scene many of us will never forget. In the glare of the press's massive lights, a battered but breathing little girl emerged from that hole with her arms tightly wrapped around her rescuer.
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When I was new to this business of wearing glasses, it took me a while to adjust to those new things on my face. But I had to get them. It was easier to get glasses than to get longer arms, and the glasses were cheaper. Sometimes when I'm real busy, I start noticing clouds developing between me and what I'm trying to read, and I see strange little spots. Then I remember I'm wearing my glasses which I have neglected to clean for a few days. When I hold them up to the light, I can see the source of the fog and the spots: dirty glasses. It's amazing how much better you can see when you clean your glasses! The world looks so much clearer!
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I have fond memories of family trips when the kids were younger; the adventure, the togetherness, the planning, the brochures. Did I say "and the waiting"? Oh yeah, there were times when our kids would be waiting in the car and waiting and waiting. They would ask Mom, "Where is Dad? Why doesn't he come out of that tourist center there?" She would respond with, "Oh, you know he's getting brochures."
Yep, I'm the great brochure collector! I would write ahead - that's right! In the days before the internet this all was. I would write ahead to an area that we hoped to travel through or visit at least and find out what and where the nice places were, and maybe a place to stay. We didn't have a lot of money; we didn't have a lot of time. So we wanted to do the best with what we had.
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Every World Series has its memorable moments, but the 1989 World Series will always have a distinctive claim to fame. The game was being played in Candlestick Park in San Francisco. And you might remember, in the third inning, the ground suddenly started shaking - an earthquake hit the stadium! People began to flee, the players quickly left the field, and many suddenly only cared about one thing - whether the people they loved were safe. The Giants catcher, Terry Kennedy, was living his dream that day. He was playing in the World Series. But suddenly, in one redefining moment, that changed. When a sportscaster inquired about his reaction to the quake, that catcher summed it up pretty well. He said, "Sure does change your priorities, doesn't it?"
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Often it was the highlight of my day, and my wife led me to believe that it might have been the highlight of our toddler son's day, too. She told me that the little guy heard my car pull into the driveway each night and that was his signal to go running for the door that I always used. As I opened that door, I was often greeted by a cute little guy charging my direction and calling out one word at the top of his lungs, actually one syllable, "DA!" He couldn't manage "Daddy" or "Dada" yet, but I knew he was calling my name.
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I was on a mission in England and Ireland, and I had a day to spend in the beautiful city of York. What a place! I mean, it's surrounded by a medieval wall actually and it's dominated by this cathedral that might be second only to Westminster Abbey in London. There was an unusual scene out in front. There was an artist actually on his knees, and he's working painstakingly on this chalk drawing on the sidewalk right in front of the cathedral. When I got closer, I looked at it. It was really easy to recognize it. He actually had drawn the Mona Lisa. He had to be working on it all day, and it was really beautifully done. Well, I went inside a restaurant, and while I was there, I saw that the artist had left. Within minutes, this little boy came up, and he intentionally ran over the artwork, stomped back and forth and made footprints all over it. Other kids followed what he had done. They had just trampled all over the work of an artist who had worked very hard on it. I'll tell you what, it hurts to see someone doing that.
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Columnist Bob Greene told a story that touched my heart. It's about a newspaperman in a small Midwestern town and the call he got from a school teacher. She wanted to tell him about something that had happened to a child on the playground. He was braced for bad news. Well, it wasn't. During a lunch break, most of the 8th graders were gathered in groups, talking and playing. This one boy - a student who actually suffered from severe physical disabilities and was new to the school - was off by himself as usual. He was, like, painfully shy.
