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When your life moves as fast as mine does, your food has to often move pretty fast too. As in those drive-thru orders at fast food restaurants. Now, I know the menu pretty well, and this particular day my order was pretty predictable, including my drink, which was usually an iced tea.
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Patty's true love, Tom, was coming to visit in a few days. She was excited, but not excited enough to clean her room of course. See, Tom lives in Ohio. Patty's a friend of ours who lived down the street from us in New Jersey. All week long Mom had gotten on to Patty for not cleaning her room, at least so she could find the floor.
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I was going through the all too frequent ritual of standing by an airport luggage carousel waiting for Big Bertha. (No, that's not someone I was traveling with. That's what I've named my suitcase because we've spent so much time together.) And suddenly the monotony was broken for all of us by this really cute scene. Here comes one of those luggage carts that look sort of like a big grocery cart without the big basket. Pushing it was this very little boy, barely able to walk and about one-fourth the size of the cart.
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Back in the good old days my wife and I would go camping with our kids when they were young. We did some camping after they were grown up too. But it was actually easier without the kids. You know the routine. We'd get the three little Hutchcrafts ready for bed, make sure no bears were going to eat them during the night, and then we would snap all the snaps and tuck them into their sleeping bags, tied up all the flaps and zipped all the zippers on the tent door. Finally, able to settle into our sleeping bags, having found the most comfortable piece of ground underneath that we could.
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The longer I drive on given days the heavier my eyelids get. Like 99% of the men in the world, I like to do the driving. And once in a while I drive past my primetime alertness shall we say. That's when my wife starts to think of things to keep me awake longer, like turning on the radio.
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Some 16 million people saw Christopher Jones' skydive on YouTube. He bails out of the plane. Everything's going great...until the seizure. After four years of being seizure-free, he was cleared to jump.
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I know about tornadoes. We had one go through our backyard when I was a kid. And then we moved to the East Coast, so I also got the opportunity to get acquainted with hurricanes. But there's one natural disaster I don't know too much about, and that's just fine - earthquakes! What I do know, I've learned from people who have been through them. Like Mike, for example, the man in the seat next to me on a long airplane flight. He had lived in Northridge, California until recently. You might remember that was the epicenter of a major earthquake in 1994.
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When our oldest son was little he started a hobby that really helped him pay his way through college eventually - collecting baseball cards. He was doing pretty well collecting, when he asked me to start taking him to these shows on the baseball circuit. One summer I was scheduled to speak at Ocean City, New Jersey, and he wanted to go down a day early so we could catch the last day of this huge card show. He walked into a large hall with all the money the little guy could have saved from recent chores and allowances.
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At one time our offices were on the third floor of an old factory building. There were a lot of stairs, and they had a pretty steep pitch. One of our team members dropped by one day with her beautiful four-month-old daughter, Katie. Mom was tired. And needless to say, the child wasn't able to climb up the stairs to the third floor on her own. Sometimes adults could barely make it. Mom needed to carry Katie in her arms the whole way. The sight of her carrying her daughter? I hate to say it was almost amusing. Mom was out of breath as she tried to recover. But not Katie! No, she was all cute and wide-eyed. She's not sweating; she's not panting. No, she's totally relaxed, totally cool. Of course she didn't have to do any of the work.
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When I was a kid, someone came up with a new idea for entertainment. No, not hieroglyphics! It's called 3-D movies. They've actually made a comeback in recent years and they might even be more popular than they were back then. Back then, we put on these cardboard sunglasses. Boy, what a fashion statement! Now they are at least plastic. And just like then, things begin walking toward the screen, and then they walk right out of the screen and they walk practically into your face. Of course, when you take those glasses off, it's just a flat old screen again. But when you have those glasses on, you see things you otherwise would never have seen.
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One of the more lovable guys on TV, I think, is the weatherman named Al Roker. You've seen him on The Today Show or The Weather Channel maybe in the morning, or hosting, or covering special events, or he's even got a book about his battle with losing weight.
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My daughter and I had not been back to that camp in the Tetons since she was a little girl, like five years old. We stayed there as a family way back then, because our good friends from college ran the camp. There she struck up a friendship with their five-year-old who's named Holly. Well, the camp has grown a lot over the years, and so have our daughters who are speeding through their lives.
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One day my oldest son and I wandered into this huge memorabilia store. And in the cases were all kinds of artifacts of his childhood, and even mine. Like there was a Brachiosaurus... No, but I was looking at baseball cards that I once owned, thanks to the pop bottle deposits I collected many years ago. Notice I said I once owned. When we were moving, my Mother threw them away. And so I found myself looking at what might have been. Those same cards are now worth hundreds of dollars.
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Stranded on the highest mountain on earth. Or buried beneath the rubble of a shattered hotel.
After the earthquake that rocked that mountain kingdom of Nepal, thousands of people lost their lives. Many more found their world, their homes, actually their lives wiped away.
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When our daughter got married there was one song I told her I did not want to hear at the wedding. You know, "Where is that little girl I carried, where is that little boy at play?" Okay, I'm not going to sing it for you, but you know the song. Well, the time really did fly, like the song says, "Sunrise, sunset, swiftly pass the years." It's a song that taps into some very deep feelings about the mystery of life, and I don't think I could have handled it at my daughter's wedding. It points out how that parade of Saturdays and Tuesdays and Thursdays just sort of seem to flow together into years-so just yesterday my daughter is a bouncy little girl cuddling on my lap. And then she's a poised bride on the arm of her new husband. But that song also captures the real practical essence of this massive entity we call "my life"- it boils down to those bite-size chunks called days. It's almost as if we die each night when we hit the bed and we get resurrected each new morning to a fresh new day.
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Now it's always been my impression that the police like to have the element of surprise in their favor. Suddenly there's a police car coming up behind you, or appearing out of nowhere. That's why I was surprised by something I saw when I was meeting with some staff we had in Latin America in Guadalajara, Mexico. At night we were driving around with our Director, Timothy, and we saw a police car in front of us. Now, he was in no particular hurry, but his lights were flashing. Timothy said, "You know, the police cars here do that all the time. They leave their lights on whether they are on call or not." Now, that's an interesting approach to law enforcement - let them know you're coming.
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If my wife and I ever happen to be at your house for a meal, don't bother offering my wife milk. She will probably politely decline. You can tell her how good it is for her. It won't help. "No" is always the answer when it comes to milk. It has been that way since she was a girl, and it's all this cow's fault; the one who gave the milk with the bitter taste.
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Onions taste great on a hamburger, and they keep tasting long after the burger. Garlic tastes great on pizza, and it will be there for you for the rest of the night. In fact, the onions and garlic will be there not only for you, but for anybody who gets close to you - which probably won't be very many. Many teenagers have discovered the interesting aftermath of a scrumptious hot fudge sundae or a chocolate bar; acne tomorrow morning - front and center. The chocolate was great - briefly. The acne is ugly - not briefly. And what about that ancient wisdom "a moment on the lips, forever on the hips"? Those super-size fries or that creamy milk shake will taste wonderful - briefly. And possibly enlarge your body for months or years to come! Here is Science for the Simple, just in case you haven't figured this out already: What you eat affects you later.
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Sometimes you see hitchhikers by the side of the road. What are they usually holding? A sign, usually crudely lettered, and it doesn't have the name of the car they want to ride in. No, it has the name of a place on it; the place they want to go. On Indian reservations, hitchhiking is a way of life. I asked one of our Native American friends recently about her hitchhiking experiences. She told me she asked only one question before she got in a car. She didn't care about the make of the car, the driver's IQ, or where the driver was from. She had one question, "Where are you headed?"
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Fettuccini Alfredo! It's that great Italian dish that has buttered noodles served in a rich, creamy cheese sauce. Unfortunately, it's not recommended as health food. It's more like "heart attack on a plate." Maybe that's a bit of an overstatement, but the fact is that a lot of foods do contribute to the slow shutdown of the valves that happen to carry the blood and oxygen into your heart. I love what one commercial called it - blood sludge. Medical people refer to the hardening of the arteries - the process in which foods that are high in cholesterol and fat start building up these hard deposits in your arteries. If this hardening in your heart is allowed to continue long enough, it's no laughing matter. It can threaten your life.
