Hi, Everybody. Sorry I’ve been away a few days. I hope everything with all of you and the site updates have been going as well as can be. I’m just sitting here with a cup of hot peppermint tea and my feet up typing — like a slob — and I both love and need it! I came home a bit earlier today than usual from a work seminar in Cape Cod — and it gave me some unfettered time to get on the phone and have a nice conversation with my mom. I try to help encourage her enjoying planting in the garden and putzing around the outer house, like dad did, because she likes to do this as it reminds her of him. I remind her that now everything’s blooming, it looks so great because of her talents, and she can now look forward to the time of the year where for the next five months or so we’ll have nice weather to sit outside and she can be surrounded by beautiful flowers and things she helped make happen.
I liked this blog’s title I made, not just as a favorite song of mine by The Supremes!, but also because I like the image of “reflecting.” The seminar speaker today was a man who described a very tired, angry, stressed day in September 2001 — the 11th — when he left Logan Airport early in the a.m. and almost missed his speaking engagement in Atlanta; he was so pissed, until he turned on his hotel’s TV and realized he’d missed, by one-half hour early, another American Airlines flight that ended up plowing into one of NYC’s Twin Towers — and how when he returned to Boston to get his car, the FBI had towed all his lot’s cars as “evidence” — the cars on either side of him, it later turned out, belonged respectively to 2 different women who died on one or another of the hijacked planes. He said he stopped feeling so bitter and angry at that point, and recalled that when people die, all their tombstones don’t list “I made the quota today!”, or “My title is Director!”, or “I could’ve taken a $90,000 job!”, or “I loved to travel in my life!” — they all read the same, don’t you notice? Just a person’s name and their lifespan.. His point was, we are all feeling like we’re missing out on our lives or the times of our lives very often these days, in our caregiver roles.. But how are we gonna all get to where we wanna dream of going, if we don’t start on the road TOWARDS the dreams we have? — Not far. We need not to forget whom WE are, too. To be good leaders, parents, children, or whatever, it’s about having a degree of The Heart and knowing who and what’s important — and not worrying about what people think or say about the choices we think are right to make.
Have some tapioca pudding on me tonight! Heck, I”LL have some pudding on me tonight, while you’re at it! 
) – Happy Friday evening – Gary.
Hi Gary!
Wow–what an incredible experience for the seminar speaker. I just can’t imagine! Knowing he parked his car next to two victims; he was surrounded by tragedy but yet survived by it. As you say, it reminds us that we are never promised the future, only our present. We have to make the most of it!
I had rice pudding last night.
Quite tasty. !!!
Thanks for sharing your encouraging words to your mom. You’ve reminded me of how I can do that for others in my life today.
Enjoy!!!