It was 1935 and we were a group of friends enjoying an after-dinner conversation. Because Thanksgiving was just around the corner and prosperity wasn’t, we fell to talking about what we had to be thankful for.

“Well I for one am grateful to Mrs. Wendt, an old school teacher, who 30 years ago in a little West Virginia town went out of her way to introduce me to the works of the poet, Tennyson.”

Then I launched into a colorful description of Mrs. Wendt, a lovely little old lady who had been my high school teacher and who had made a deep impression on my life.

“And does this Mrs. Wendt know that she made that contribution to your life?” one of my friends asked me.

“I’m afraid she doesn’t. I have been careless and have never, in all these years, told her either face-to-face or by letter.”

“Then why don’t you write her? It would make her happy if she is still living, and it might make you happier, too. The thing that most of us ought to do is to learn to develop the attitude of gratitude.”

That friend’s challenge made me see that I had received something very precious and hadn’t bothered to say thanks. That very evening, I tried to atone. On the chance that Mrs. Wendt, might still be living, I sat down and wrote her what I call a “Thanksgiving letter.”

In the letter I reminded her that it was she who had introduced my young mind to the works of Tennyson and Browning and others and that she had made a major difference in my life.

It took a couple of weeks for Mrs. Wendt’s letter to reach her after being forwarded from town to town. Finally it reached her, and this is the handwritten note I had in return. It began:

“My Dear Willie,” (The introduction itself was quite enough to warm my heart. Here I was, a man of 50, fat and bald, and to be addressed as “Willie.”)

“I remember well your enthusiasm for Tennyson and the Idylls of the Kings when I read them to you for you were so beautifully responsive. My reward for telling you about Tennyson did not have to wait until your belated note of thanks came to me in my old age. I received my best reward your eager response to the lyrical beauty and the idealism of Tennyson.”

“But in spite of the fact that I got much of my reward at that time, I want you to know what your note meant to me. I am now an old lady in my 80’s, living alone in a small room, cooking my own meals, lonely and seemingly like the last leaf of fall left behind.”

“You will be interested to know, Willie, that I taught school for 50 years and, in all that time, yours is the first note of appreciation I ever received. It came on a blue, cold morning, and it cheered my lonely old heart as nothing has cheered me in many years.”

I wept over that simple, sincere note from my teacher of long ago. I read it to a dozen friends. One of them said, “I believe I’m going to write Miss Mary Scott a letter. She did something similar to that for my boyhood.”

That first Thanksgiving letter was so successful and satisfying that I made a list of people who had contributed something definite and lasting to my life and decided to write at least one “Thanksgiving letter” every month.

For 10 years, I have kept up this exciting game of writing Thanksgiving month letters. I have a special file for answers, and now I have more than 500 of the most beautiful letters anyone has ever received.

A Thanksgiving letter isn’t much. Only a few lines and a stamp to mail it. But the rewards are so great that only eternity can estimate them.

Thanks to the challenge of a friend, I have learned a little, at least, about gratitude.

There is a Cherokee legend that defines how a Cherokee boy is to become a man.

His father must take him deep into the forest at night, blindfold him, and leave him there alone. The boy must sit on a stump the entire night and not remove his blindfold until the rays of the morning sun shine through. He cannot cry out for help.

Once he survives the night, he is a MAN. He cannot tell the other boys of this experience, because each must come into manhood on his own.

The boy is naturally terrified. He hears the wind blow and the many strange noises of the night. Wild beasts must surely be around him . Maybe even a human will do him harm but he must sit stoically, never removing the blindfold. It is the only way he can become a man!

Finally, after a horrific night the sun appears and he removs his blindfold.

It is then that he discovers his father sitting on the stump next to him. He had been at watch the entire night, protecting his son from harm.

~  Cherokee Legend  ~

A 10 year old boy decided to study Judo despite the fact that he had lost his left arm in a devastating car accident. The boy began lessons with an old Japanese judo master. The boy was doing well, so he couldn’t understand why, after three months of training, the master had taught him only one move.

“Sensei,” the boy finally said, “Shouldn’t I be learning more moves?”

“This is the only move you know, but this is the only move you’ll ever need to know,” the sensei replied.

Not quite understanding, but believing in his teacher, the boy kept training.

Several months later, the sensei took the boy to his first tournament. Surprising himself, the boy easily won his first two matches. The third match proved to be more difficult, but after some time, his opponent became impatient and charged; the boy deftly used his one move to win the match.

Still amazed by his success, the boy was now in the finals. This time, his opponent was bigger, stronger, and more experienced. For a while, the boy appeared to be overmatched. Concerned that the boy might get hurt, the referee called a time-out. He was about to stop the match when the sensei intervened.

“No,” the sensei insisted, “Let him continue.”

Soon after the match resumed, his opponent made a critical mistake: He dropped his guard. Instantly, the boy used his move to pin him. The boy had won the match and the tournament. He was the champion.

On the way home, the boy and the sensei reviewed every move in each and every match. Then the boy summoned the courage to ask what was really on his mind:

“Sensei, how did I win the tournament with only one move?”

“You won for two reasons,” the sensei answered. “First, you’ve almost mastered one of the most difficult throws in all of judo. And second, the only known defense for that move is for your opponent to grab your left arm.”

The boy’s biggest weakness had become his biggest strength

~ Author Unknown ~

We are sitting at lunch when my daughter casually mentions that she and her husband are thinking of “starting a family.”

“We’re taking a survey,” she says, half-joking. “Do you think I should have a baby?”

“It will change your life,” I say, carefully keeping my tone neutral.

“I know,” she says, “no more sleeping in on weekends, no more spontaneous vacations….”

But that is not what I meant at all. I look at my daughter, trying to decide what to tell her. I want her to know what she will never learn in childbirth classes. I want to tell her that the physical wounds of child bearing will heal, but that becoming a mother will leave her with an emotional wound so raw that she will forever be vulnerable.

I consider warning her that she will never again read a newspaper without asking “What if that had been MY child?” That every plane crash, every house fire will haunt her. That when she sees pictures of starving children, she will wonder if anything could be worse than watching your child die.

I look at her carefully manicured nails and stylish suit and think that no matter how sophisticated she is, becoming a mother will reduce her to the primitive level of a bear protecting her cub.

That an urgent call of “Mom!” will cause her to drop a soufflé or her best crystal without a moment’s hesitation. I feel I should warn her that no matter how many years she has invested in her career, she will be professionally derailed by motherhood.

She might arrange for childcare, but one day she will be going into an important business meeting and she will think of her baby’s sweet smell. She will have to use every ounce of her discipline to keep from running home, just to make sure her baby is all right.

I want my daughter to know that everyday decisions will no longer be routine. That a five year old boy’s desire to go to the men’s room rather than the women’s at McDonald’s will become a major dilemma. However decisive she may be at the office, she will second-guess herself constantly

as a mother.

Looking at my attractive daughter, I want to assure her that eventually she will shed the pounds of pregnancy, but she will never feel the same about herself. That her life, now so important, will be of less value to her once she has a child.

That she would give it up in a moment to save her offspring, but will also begin to hope for more years-not to accomplish her own dreams, but to watch her child accomplish theirs. I want her to know that a cesarean scar or shiny stretch marks will become badges of honor.

My daughter’s relationship with her husband will change, but not in the way she thinks. I wish she could understand how much more you can love a man who is careful to powder the baby or who never hesitates to play with his child. I think she should know him again for reasons she would now find very unromantic.

I wish my daughter could sense the bond she will feel with women throughout history who have tried to stop war, prejudice and drunk driving. I hope she will understand why I can think rationally about most issues, but become temporarily insane when I discuss the threat of nuclear war to my children’s future.

I want to describe to my daughter the exhilaration of seeing your child learn to ride a bike. I want to capture for her the belly laugh of a baby who is touching the soft fur of a dog or a cat for the first time. I want her to taste the joy that is so real, it actually hurts. My daughter’s quizzical look makes me realize that tears have formed in my eyes.

“You’ll never regret it,” I finally say.

Then I reach across the table, squeeze my daughter’s hand and offer a silent prayer for her, and for me, and for all of the mere mortal women who stumble their way into this most wonderful of callings.

This blessed gift from God … that of being a Mother.

Author Unknown

I have many memories about my father and about growing up with him in our apartment next to the elevated train tracks. For 20 years we listened to the roar of the train as it passed by our bedroom window.

Late at night he would wait alone on the tracks for the train that would take him to his job at a factory where he worked the midnight shift.

On one particular night, I waited with him to say good-bye. His face was grim. I had been drafted and would be sworn in at six the next morning. At that time he would be at his paper-cutting machine in the factory.

My father had talked about his anger. He didn’t want them to take his child, only 19 years old, who had never had a drink or smoked a cigarette to fight a war in Europe. He placed his hands on my slim shoulders.

“You be careful, and if you ever need anything, write to me and I’ll see that you get it.”

Suddenly, he heard the roar of the approaching train. He held me tightly in his arms and gently kissed me on the cheek. With tear-filled eyes, he murmured,

“I love you, my son.”

Then the train arrived, the doors closed him inside, and he disappeared into the night.

One month later while I was in Europe, my father died.

It is now 57 years later as I sit and write this. I once heard that memories are our greatest inheritance and I have to agree.

I lived through four invasions in World War II. I’ve had a life full of all kinds of experiences. But the memory that lingers is of the night when my Dad said,

“I love you, my son.”

by Ted Kruger

When the young man appeared at the hospital room door, an overworked nurse came and quickly escorted him to the patient’s bedside. Leaning over and speaking loudly to the elderly patient, she said,

“Your son is here.”

With great effort, the patient’s unfocussed eyes opened, then flickered shut again. The young man squeezed the aged hand in his and sat beside the bed. Throughout the night he sat there, holding the old man’s hand and whispering words of comfort.

Early in the morning the patient died. In moments, hospital staff swarmed into the room to turn off machines and remove needles. The nurse stepped over to the young man’s side and began to offer sympathy, but he interrupted her.

“Who was that man?” he asked. The startled nurse replied,

“I thought he was your father!”

“No, he was not my father,” he answered. “I never saw him before.”

“Then why didn’t you say something when I took you to him?”

“I realized he needed his son and his son wasn’t here,” the man explained. “And since he was too sick to recognize that I was not his son, I knew he needed me.”

Mother Teresa used to remind us that nobody should have to die alone. Likewise, nobody should have to grieve alone or cry alone either. Nor should anyone laugh alone or celebrate alone. We are made to travel life’s journey hand in hand.

There is someone ready to grasp your hand today.

And someone is hoping you will take theirs.

Want a new and fresh start in life?

It can be possible…

Where would you go after you die?

When I got home that night as my wife served dinner, I held her hand and said, “I’ve got something to tell you.”

She sat down and ate quietly. Again I observed the hurt in her eyes. Suddenly I didn’t know how to open my mouth. But I had to let her know what I was thinking.

“I want a divorce.” I raised the topic calmly.

She didn’t seem to be annoyed by my words, instead she asked me softly, “Why?”

I avoided her question. This made her angry. She threw away the chopsticks and shouted at me, “You are not a man!”

That night, we didn’t talk to each other. She was weeping. I knew she wanted to find out what had happened to our marriage. But I could hardly give her a satisfactory answer; I had lost my heart to a lovely girl called Dew, a woman at my work that I had developed feelings for. I didn’t love my wife anymore. I only pitied her!

With a deep sense of guilt, I drafted a divorce agreement, which stated that she could own our house, 30% shares of my company and the car. She glanced at it and then tore it into pieces. The woman who had spent ten years of her life with me had become a stranger. I felt sorry for her wasted time, resources and energy but I could not take back what I had said for I loved Dew so dearly.

Finally she cried loudly in front of me, which was what I had expected to see. To me her cry was actually a kind of release. The idea of divorce that had obsessed me for several weeks seemed to be firmer and clearer now. The next day, I came back home very late and found her writing something at the table. I didn’t have supper but went straight to sleep and fell asleep very fast because I was tired after an eventful day with Dew. When I woke up, she was still there at the table writing. I just did not care so I turned over and was asleep again.

In the morning she presented her divorce conditions: she didn’t want anything from me, but needed a month’s notice before the divorce. She requested that for that one month we both struggle to live as normal a life as possible. Her reasons were simple: our son had his exams in a month’s time and she didn’t want to disrupt him with our broken marriage. This was agreeable to me. But she had something more, she asked me to recall how I had carried her into our bridal room on our wedding day. She requested that every day for the month’s duration I carry her out of our bedroom to the front door each morning. I thought she was going crazy. Just to make our last days together bearable I accepted her odd request.

I told Dew about my wife’s divorce conditions. She laughed loudly and thought it was absurd. “No matter what tricks she tries, she has to face the divorce,” she said scornfully.

My wife and I hadn’t had any body contact since my divorce intention was explicitly expressed. So when I carried her out on the first day, we both appeared clumsy. Our son clapped behind us, saying, “Baba is holding Mama in his arms!” His words brought me a sense of pain. From the bedroom to the sitting room, then to the door, I walked over ten meters with her in my arms.

She closed her eyes and said softly; “Don’t tell our son about the divorce.”

I nodded, feeling somewhat upset. I put her down outside the door. She went to wait for the bus to work. I drove alone to the office.

On the second day, both of us acted much more easily. She leaned on my chest.. I could smell the fragrance of her blouse. I realized that I hadn’t looked at this woman carefully for a long time. I realized she was not young any more. There were fine wrinkles on her face, her hair was graying! Our marriage had taken its toll on her. For a minute I wondered what I had done to her.

On the fourth day, when I lifted her up, I felt a sense of intimacy returning. This was the woman who had given ten years of her life to me. On the fifth and sixth day, I realized that our sense of intimacy was growing again. I didn’t tell Dew about this. It became easier to carry her as the month slipped by. Perhaps the every day workout made me stronger.

“Our son came in at the moment and said, ‘Dad, its time to carry mum out.’”

She was choosing what to wear one morning. She tried on quite a few dresses but could not find a suitable one. Then she sighed, all my dresses have grown bigger. I suddenly realized that she had grown so thin, that was the reason why I could carry her more easily. Suddenly it hit me; she had buried so much pain and bitterness in her heart. Subconsciously I reached out and touched her head.

Our son came in at that moment and said, “Dad, its time to carry mum out.” To him, seeing his father carrying his mother out had become an essential part of his life. My wife gestured to our son to come closer and hugged him tightly. I turned my face away because I was afraid I might change my mind at this last minute. I then held her in my arms, walking from the bedroom, through the sitting room, to the hallway. Her hand surrounded my neck softly and naturally. I held her body tightly; it was just like our wedding day. But her much lighter weight made me sad.

On the last day, when I held her in my arms I could hardly move a step. Our son had gone to school. I held her tightly and said, “I hadn’t noticed that our life lacked intimacy.”

I drove to the office and jumped out of the car swiftly without locking the door. I was afraid any delay would make me change my mind… I walked upstairs. Dew opened the door and I said to her, “Sorry, Dew, I do not want the divorce anymore.”

She looked at me, astonished. Then touched my forehead. “Do you have a fever?” She said.

I moved her hand off my head. “Sorry, Dew,” I said, “I won’t divorce. My marriage life was boring probably because she and I didn’t value the details of our lives, not because we didn’t love each other any more. Now I realize that since I carried her into my home on our wedding day I am supposed to hold her until death does us apart.”

Dew seemed to suddenly wake up. She gave me a loud slap and then slammed the door and burst into tears. I walked downstairs and drove away. At the floral shop on the way, I ordered a bouquet of flowers for my wife. The salesgirl asked me what to write on the card. I smiled and wrote: “I’ll carry you out every morning until deaths do us apart.”

I have a child with disabilities and have been often asked to describe what the experience is like of raising such child. To try to help people to better understand this unique experience I say it is like this:

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of Italian guide books and make your wonderful plans to fly to Rome. You want to visit the Coliseum. See Michelangelo’s statute of David. Ride the Gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.

After nine months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says,

“Welcome to Holland.”

“Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean, Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”

You are told that there’s been a change in plans. The plane has landed in Holland and there you must stay. The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease.

It’s not Italy, you are in Holland.

So you must go out and buy new guide books on Holland. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met. It’s just a different place.

It’s slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around… and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills…and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy…and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say,

“Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”

And the pain of that will never go away… because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss.

But… if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to go to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very very lovely things… about Holland.

By Emily Perl Kingsley

“SO, when is the last leaf falling?” asked Lee Kuan Yew, the man who made Singapore in his own stern and unsentimental image, nearing his 87th birthday and contemplating age, infirmity and loss.

“I can feel the gradual decline of energy and vitality,” said Mr. Lee, whose “Singapore model” of economic growth and tight social control made him one of the most influential political figures of Asia. “And I mean generally, every year, when you know you are not on the same level as last year. But that’s life.”

In a long, unusually reflective interview last week, he talked about the aches and pains of age and the solace of meditation, about his struggle to build a thriving nation on this resource-poor island, and his concern that the next generation might take his achievements for granted and let them slip away.

He was dressed informally in a windbreaker and running shoes in his big, bright office, still sharp of mind but visibly older and a little stooped, no longer in day-to-day control but, for as long as he lives, the dominant figure of the nation he created.

But in these final years, he said, his life has been darkened by the illness of his wife and companion of 61 years, bedridden and mute after a series of strokes.

“I try to busy myself,” he said, “but from time to time in idle moments, my mind goes back to the happy days we were up and about together.” Agnostic and pragmatic in his approach to life, he spoke with something like envy of people who find strength and solace in religion. “How do I comfort myself?” he asked. “Well, I say, ‘Life is just like that.’ ”

“What is next, I do not know,” he said. “Nobody has ever come back.”

The prime minister of Singapore from its founding in 1965 until he stepped aside in 1990, Mr. Lee built what he called “a first-world oasis in a third-world region” — praised for the efficiency and incorruptibility of his rule but accused by human rights groups of limiting political freedoms and intimidating opponents through libel suits.

His title now is minister mentor, a powerful presence within the current government led by his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. The question that hovers over Singapore today is how long and in what form his model may endure once he is gone.

Always physically vigorous, Mr. Lee combats the decline of age with a regimen of swimming, cycling and massage and, perhaps more important, an hour-by-hour daily schedule of meetings, speeches and conferences both in Singapore and overseas. “I know if I rest, I’ll slide downhill fast,” he said. When, after an hour, talk shifted from introspection to geopolitics, the years seemed to slip away and he grew vigorous and forceful, his worldview still wide ranging, detailed and commanding.

And yet, he said, he sometimes takes an oblique look at these struggles against age and sees what he calls “the absurdity of it.”

“I’m reaching 87, trying to keep fit, presenting a vigorous figure, and it’s an effort, and is it worth the effort?” he said. “I laugh at myself trying to keep a bold front. It’s become my habit. I just carry on.”

HIS most difficult moments come at the end of each day, he said, as he sits by the bedside of his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, 89, who has been unable to move or speak for more than two years. She had been by his side, a confidante and counselor, since they were law students in London.

“She understands when I talk to her, which I do every night,” he said. “She keeps awake for me; I tell her about my day’s work, read her favorite poems.” He opened a big spreadsheet to show his reading list, books by Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling and Lewis Carroll as well as the sonnets of Shakespeare.

Lately, he said, he had been looking at Christian marriage vows and was drawn to the words: “To love, to hold and to cherish, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse till death do us part.”

“I told her, ‘I would try and keep you company for as long as I can.’ That’s life. She understood.” But he also said: “I’m not sure who’s going first, whether she or me.”

At night, hearing the sounds of his wife’s discomfort in the next room, he said, he calms himself with 20 minutes of meditation, reciting a mantra he was taught by a Christian friend: “Ma-Ra-Na-Tha.”

The phrase, which is Aramaic, comes at the end of St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, and can be translated in several ways. Mr. Lee said that he was told it means “Come to me, O Lord Jesus,” and that although he is not a believer, he finds the sounds soothing.

“The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off into all kinds of thoughts,” he said. “A certain tranquillity settles over you. The day’s pressures and worries are pushed out. Then there’s less problem sleeping.”

He brushed aside the words of a prominent Singaporean writer and social critic, Catherine Lim, who described him as having “an authoritarian, no-nonsense manner that has little use for sentiment.”

“She’s a novelist!” he cried. “Therefore, she simplifies a person’s character,” making what he called a “graphic caricature of me.” “But is anybody that simple or simplistic?”

The stress of his wife’s illness is constant, he said, harder on him than stresses he faced for years in the political arena. But repeatedly, in looking back over his life, he returns to his moment of greatest anguish, the expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia in 1965, when he wept in public.

That trauma presented him with the challenge that has defined his life, the creation and development of a stable and prosperous nation, always on guard against conflict within its mixed population of Chinese, Malays and Indians.

“We don’t have the ingredients of a nation, the elementary factors,” he said three years ago in an interview with the International Herald Tribune, “a homogeneous population, common language, common culture and common destiny.”

Younger people worry him, with their demands for more political openness and a free exchange of ideas, secure in their well-being in modern Singapore. “They have come to believe that this is a natural state of affairs, and they can take liberties with it,” he said. “They think you can put it on auto-pilot. I know that is never so.”

The kind of open political combat they demand would inevitably open the door to race-based politics, he said, and “our society will be ripped apart.”

A political street fighter, by his own account, he has often taken on his opponents through ruinous libel suits.

He defended the suits as necessary to protect his good name, and he dismissed criticisms by Western reporters who “hop in and hop out” of Singapore as “absolute rubbish.”

In any case, it is not these reporters or the obituaries they may write that will offer the final verdict on his actions, he said, but future scholars who will study them in the context of their day.

“I’m not saying that everything I did was right,” he said, “but everything I did was for an honorable purpose. I had to do some nasty things, locking fellows up without trial.”

And although the leaves are already falling from the tree, he said, the Lee Kuan Yew story may not be over yet.

He quoted a Chinese proverb: Do not judge a man until his coffin is closed.

“Close the coffin, then decide,” he said. “Then you assess him. I may still do something foolish before the lid is closed on me.”

I got this from an email and though it was kind of cute.

If you can start the day without caffeine,

If you can always be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains, 

If you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles, 

If you can eat the same food every day and be grateful for it, 

If you can understand when your loved ones are too busy to give you any time, 

If you can take criticism and blame without resentment ,

If you can conquer tension without medical help,

If you can relax without liquor,  

If you can sleep without the aid of drugs,   

…Then You Are  Probably  ………

 The Family Dog!    

And you thought I was going to get all spiritual.