But, they are not forgotten.  Nor are they any different on the inside from the drivers of small, large, compact, luxury, inexpensive, or ridiculously expensive cars.  We are all the same.  We ALL matter.  We may LOOK different on the outside, but on the inside, we are ALL THE SAME.  At least I think so.  And because I am car-less tomorrow too, I will walk to the bus, and take it to the train to my office.  And I will appreciate everyone with whom I come in contact for their human-kind-ness.  Even though the drivers will drive by, seemingly without a care in the world for the walkers.

And that is exactly what it felt like today.  People zooming by way too fast for us walkers.  And when I do get my car back, I will have a new-found appreciation for my fellow pedestrians.  I will drive with care around them.  I will NOT forget this pledge two days (0r two hours) after getting my car back.  My fellow human walkers are too important for that.  We are all God’s children.  And we need to remember that.  ALL of us.

As I headed South on the parkway

and got off at your old exit on the way to an early morning appointment…

and my thoughts returned to thoughts of you.

As Sigourney Weaver came on the radio

at the very same moment…

from the New York Botanical Gardens

And she told of their Spring Orchid show and invited

listeners to come and enjoy their beauty.

She said, “It’s the perfect place to bring a date,”

and the memory of the very first romantic gift I ever gave you

all those years ago, came flooding back …

I thought of you…

A beautiful white and magenta orchid plant…

The look in your eyes…

The light of your smile…

They swelled my heart…

The flowers bloomed beautifully, for a time

Like our love

and then in time, began to fade

and end their stay…

And, as the memory flooded my heart and mind,

I thought of you.

As I do every day…

Not with a gun, or drugs, or a razor blade to the wrists.  But, with his own mind.

Last December, Andy went for a colonoscopy.  The doctor found and removed a cancerous polyp and two pre-cancerous ones.  They also found one more growth that they couldn’t get to.  And so, did not know one way or the other whether it was cancerous…or not.  It was that one that festered not only inside Andy’s colon, but also inside his mind.

A follow-up colonoscopy revealed the need for surgery.  It was scheduled for later on this morning, Thursday, March 17th.  But, that surgery was never to take place.  Andy got himself so worked up and overwrought about the surgery and what it might reveal, that he suffered a fatal heart attack.

Saturday night, he and his wife finished dinner and were sitting on the couch about to rent a movie, when Andy told his wife that something wasn’t right…and he collapsed.  With 911 called, his wife could only wait for the paramedics to arrive.  They worked on him at the house and in the ambulance en route to the hospital.  And the ER docs worked heroically for nearly an hour before pronouncing Andy.

Andy’s heart,  as big as a house, as he hugged those he loved and shared his life with…his family, his friends…even those he greeted on a daily basis as he lived his life, turned against him this past Saturday night because of his own thoughts!

The mind is truly the most powerful part of the human spirit.  It can heal, or it can hurt.  Create, or destroy.  And it destroyed Andy on Saturday, March 12, 2011. 

And it didn’t have to. 

None of us knows precisely how we would react given those same circumstances.  We can however choose thoughts of life…or of death.  Faced with the same situation, which ones will you choose?

 After all, God allows U-turns.

And then this morning, after only about five hours of longed for, much needed sleep, I awoke with a start and found myself writing down the poem that you are about to read. Of course, being a writer, it did suffer at the hands of my editing pen (yes, I often still write long-hand before sitting in front of my computer screen. And in the wee small hours, I was not about to fire up my computer. I barely made it to a pad and pen!)

And I just edited a bit here. I had written a whole pre-explanation for how the poem came about. But, it doesn’t matter how, just that it did. The poem explains itself:

      It was lovely. 

      A  yearning brief encounter with nothingness
          A dance.  A glance that led to nowhere…

      And now, with thousands of miles in between…

      We will never know what might have been.

The first day of school, our professor introduced himself and challenged us to get to know someone we didn’t already know.  I stood up to look around when a gentle hand touched my shoulder.  I turned around to find a wrinkled, little old lady beaming up at me with a smile that lit up her entire being.

She said, “Hi handsome.   My name is Rose.  I’m eighty-seven years old.  Can I give you a hug?”

I laughed and enthusiastically responded, “Of course you may,” and she gave me a giant squeeze.

“Why are you in college at such a young, innocent age?” I asked.

“I’m here to meet a rich husband, get married, and have a couple of children, and then retire and travel.”

“No, seriously,” I asked.  I was curious what may have motivated her to be taking on this challenge at her age.

“I always dreamed of having a college education, and now I’m getting one!”

After class, we walked to the student union building and shared a chocolate milkshake.  We became instant friends.  Every day for the next three months, we would leave class together and talk nonstop.  I was always mesmerized listening to this “time machine” as she shared her wisdom and experience with me.

Over the course of the year, Rose became a campus icon, and she easily made friends wherever she went.  She loved to dress up, and she reveled in the attention bestowed upon her from the other students.  She was living it up.

At the end of the semester, we invited Rose to speak at our football banquet.  I’ll never forget what she taught us.  She was introduced and stepped up to the podium.  As she began to deliver her prepared speech, she dropped her notecards on the floor.  Frustrated and a little embarrassed, she leaned into the microphone and simply said, “I’m sorry.  I’m so jittery.  I gave up beer for Lent, and this whiskey is killing me!  I’ll never get my speech back in order, so let me just tell you what I know.”

As we laughed, she cleared her throat and began:

“We do not stop playing because we are old; we grow old because we stop playing.  There are only four secrets to staying young, being happy and achieving success:

1.  You have to laugh and find humor every day.

2.  You have to have a dream.  When you lose your dreams, you die.  We have so many people walking around who are dead and don’t even know it!

3.  There’s a huge difference between growing older and growing up.  If you are nineteen years old and lie in bed for one full year, and don’t do a productive thing, you will turn twenty.  Anybody can grow older.  That doesn’t take any talent or ability.  The idea is to grow up by always finding opportunity in change.

4.  Have no regrets.  The elderly don’t usually have regrets for what we did, but rather for things we did not do.  The only people who fear death are those with regrets.”

She concluded her speech by courageously singing “The Rose.”  She challenged each of us to study the lyrics and live them out in our daily lives.

At the year’s end, Rose finished the college degree she had begun all those years ago.  One week after graduation, Rose died peacefully in her sleep.  Over two thousand college students attended her funeral, in tribute to the wonderful woman who taught by example that it’s never too late to be all you can possibly be.

My entrepreneurial “spirit” only reaches back to when I began teaching neigborhood kids in New York City how to ride two wheelers for 50 cents an hour.  Not bad for a kid without a high school diploma…I was only 9 years old.

It was an innovative idea, because most Moms either didn’t know how to ride themselves, or were too busy with younger siblings.  When Dads came home from a “hard day at the office,” they were too tired to think about teaching Johnny or Suzie to ride a bicycle.

An answer to the problem was born out of my own dilemma.  My own Dad was always too busy, too tired, too something.  I was lucky.  My older brother taught me to ride.

Since I was teaching brothers and sisters to be teachers, what would happen when the younger siblings were ready to learn?  I would be out of a job.

I received my first major lesson in planning and forecasting by the tender age of 11.

To read the whole story, email me @ gerry.laytin@gmail.com  or contact me here to be placed on the advance sale list for Killer Secrets of Successful Entrepreneurs due out next month.

It strikes me as odd that we tend to do most of our communicating these days in cyberspace.  Even when we have a person just around the corner from us in the workplace, we would, for the most part, prefer to send off a quick one or two line email and then await the reply instead of calling our colleague on the phone or…DARE I say it?  Walking over to the other person’s office/cube/desk and speaking with her/him face-to-face.  We have become interpersonal communications challenged.  And it seems to become more pervasive day-by-day.   I was at a local college two months ago, for a full-day of seminars and workshops on social media.  And a woman in the back of the classroom in the “newbies” session asked this question:  “When do you stop texting, emailing and tweeting (dm’s)  and call the person you need to speak with?”  The more senior of the two instructors looked at her (she was serious,)  then looked at me and asked, “Gerry, when would you call?”  My answer:  “As soon as the thought pops into your head that “Hmmm, maybe I should just pick up the phone.”   Pick up the phone and CALL!

Too many nuances of person-to-person conversation, voice inflection, instant response, ability to correct a mistaken impression (how many text messages or emails were interpreted incorrectly?  How often have you needed to apologize, or have someone apologize to you because their text was taken in the wrong way?)  For me, it has happened way too often.  And it doesn’t have to be that way.

We all have phones.  Some of us have several.  So, here’s my challenge to you:  For the next 24 hours, every time you are tempted to text, tweet (dm’s only,) bbm or email when you know that a personal phone call would be far better, make the call.  I was going to say for the next 30 days, or even the next 7…but I know that in today’s supercharged, fast-paced age, 24 hours is long enough.

Think you can do it? I do, and  I want to hear from you about how you made out.  Answers are due 24 hours from the time that you read this.  Here, or join my fanpage on facebook:  Fans of Gerry Laytin and send me a message.  When we get to know one another better, you can even call me.

I have faith that everyone who sets out to do this will do it.  This  change in communications behavior will impact much more than your ability to communicate more effectively.  It will impact your entire life.

I need to share it with you here. Merlin said:
“The best thing for being sad,” replies Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it.  That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn—pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a million lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics, why you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to beat your adversary at fencling. After that you can start again on mathematics until it is time to learn to plough.” This quote is taken from Terence White’s: “The Once and Future King” New York, C.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1958
Many ask, “Did Merlin really exist?” and “Did King Arthur exist?” In fiction only,  as far as I can tell. Yet,  the lessons taught by this mystical character ring as true today as they did some 52 years ago, or even 952 years ago in 12th Century Wales, when Geoffrey of Monmouth penned the very first Merlin stories.
Learning, growing in mind and heart are the only things that no one can take away from us. The only salvation in the face of seemingly hopeless situations. With learning, there is hope. And in spite of what you may think of the world, and all it’s corruption and evil, the Monsantos of the world and their systematic approach to annihilating farming and REAL food as we have known it, in spite of the politicians in Washington or in your own hometown, or state’s capitol and what little they really seem to be accomplishing, continue your quest for knowledge.
It will make all the difference.