THE LOVE MERCHANT

A novel by

JOHN T. POLK

COPYRIGHT © 2011 By John Polk

All International rights reserved

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO THE LOVING MEMORY OF

JAMES KNOX POLK, Jr.

A teacher of the heart,

who also happened to be my father.

Hey everyone, I just posted this and I promise I will have something up real nice for you soon. I decided I wanted to share this novel before it’s published. I have written several books and it’s finally time I start sharing all these years of work with the public. If you read any of this and you like it and you email me, I will send you a link to download the book so you can print it out. This book will be published and for a short period of time I am making this available.

I also have a wonderful little hard cover book I wrote called The Love Factor and it’s a beautiful little hard cover book that I will send to you for free if you just give me a small donation for the shipping. You could send just a dollar if you wanted and I will send you the book. I am building a website for all my work and for this short period I am doing some special things for people to get to know my work. I would love to hear back from you.

I wrote this book after some serious setbacks in my life and maybe this could help you whether you are doing well or you are on the bottom struggling to reach the top again.

I would love to hear from you and get to know you. Read some of this novel and I think it will open your heart.

I also write about business and marketing. I will tell you about that later.

Have a great day and hope you enjoy the book.

Remember, if you like it, i will send you copy of this manuscript. I am only leaving this up for a short period of time.

I will have a site up real soon for everything. Until then, my email is john@branddepotlab.com.

Send me an email!

Peace and love,

John Polk

Page down and my whole book is right there for you to read. I believe it’s going to put a big smile on your face.

Lenny never expected it. The past two years had been especially rough and at age twenty-five, he already had a lot of responsibility. He had rushed into marriage just as he had rushed into most things during his life. He had joined the Army on a whim when he was eighteen, served three years, met Donna and after only three months, asked her to marry him. She was twenty and he was twenty-two at the time. Well, who wouldn’t have fallen in love? Donna was fun, shapely and pretty. A perfect lover, a best friend! So they had married and a year and a half later the first baby arrived. A second baby followed a year later. Those great nights in the sack had consequences.

And like so many others, they were slipping deeply into credit card debt. He had been so “clean” getting out of the service and had gone to work for Puffer’s, a local trucking outfit that delivered shipments to the retailers in town. It was a no-thinking job but the first one offered him and so he had taken it. The credit card forms flew in and so furnishing the apartment was easy. Everything seemed easy: Cars. Dinner with friends; it was so easy to spend twenty or thirty miscellaneous bucks every now and then?

Now, they could hardly make ends meet and they began bickering a lot. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that when money is tight, so are the nerves. He wanted to do better and so he quit Puffer’s for a sales job. The ad had read, minimum wages but opportunity to earn more than $2,000.00 a week. Two thousand a week would be heaven, he thought, a road paved to a better life and the security Donna craved. She would be happy at last, things would get back to normal and maybe she would start turning over to face him in bed again at night like it had been in the beginning. Donna was outraged, however. He had quit his job without discussing it with her and taken minimum wage to sell pressure cookers. She began to scream.

As it turned out, “the screaming” became his inspiration and he was determined to do well. He would sell the hell out of those cookers and turn their lives around. As it turned out, he was soon back knocking on Puffer’s door, wanting his old job back. He got it!

But Puffer’s was not his ambition. And Puffer’s was not Donna’s idea of a career goal either. And anyway, she wanted to get a job and help get them out of debt but this was the one area where Lenny had put his foot down—their babies needed a mom at home until they were at least five and Donna had agreed. She had agreed because Lenny kept promising he’d find his niche and all would be, in his term, okay.

Things got increasingly tense between them; she was accusing him of being a dreamer. I don’t think things will ever be okay, she said. And that hurt Lenny a lot. Maybe the truth was he had fallen “in lust” in the beginning, but now he truly loved Donna and he loved his children. He realized the day was coming when he could lose them all.

For two months he put his application in at numerous places. Someone advertised for an ad executive. He didn’t know anything about advertising but he applied. He answered an ad for a stockbroker’s job. That sounded great to him and they would pay for any classes he needed. They never responded. The jobs he applied for all were no-goes, so there he remained at Puffer’s, making a fair wage, knowing he’d still be making a “fair wage” twenty years from then. He wanted more. He didn’t know how to get it.

Then a stranger in a coffee shop told him Mahoney’s Rent It was opening a new location and they were seeking a person to train for a managerial position. As it turned out, the stranger had worked for Mahoney’s for nearly twenty years. He said it was a great place to work and this was a great opportunity for somebody. Lenny was grateful and excited about the possibility. He knew it was a real shot in the dark but he decided to take it. What the hell; nothing ventured, nothing gained.

He arrived late at Puffer’s that Tuesday morning because he had gone to Mahoney’s main office and filled out an application. He actually felt good about it when he left. The person taking applications was the friendliest face he had greeted in a long time, including at home. Donna had been in such a depression he couldn’t remember the last time she had smiled. Tracy, the woman who had interviewed him, was in her mid-fifties, bright-eyed and enthusiastic. When he left Mahoney’s he felt better about his world. Even if he didn’t get the job, the lady had been so friendly that she had given him the uplift he had needed.

Mahoney’s Rent It already had three locations in town and now there would be a forth. People also franchised them all over the state and the company had truly become a large, successful business. This was one of the reasons Lenny didn’t think he had much of a chance at landing a manager’s position. He had little experience with only two years of business courses behind him and so he didn’t have a degree to back him up. One more trouble spot, he thought.

Three weeks later he got the call. The woman on the phone said he was among the top three candidates for the position and if he was still interested to call for a meeting with Mr. Mahoney himself. The news felt too good to be true. He and Donna celebrated that evening and it turned out to be the nicest time they had in over a year.

That night, before falling to sleep in each other’s arms, Lenny said, “Donna, what I want more than anything is to find some reason to celebrate life. I’m so tired of struggling against it all the time.”

Donna didn’t reply. She simply gave him a tender hug and fell into sleep.

Lenny felt anxiety in the pit of his stomach as he walked from his car looking up at the impressive MahoneyBuilding. He remembered reading in the newspaper years before about David Mahoney’s rags to riches story but he couldn’t remember much about it except that Mr. Mahoney had been born and raised inVirginia. Well, the “riches” part was apparent. TheMahoneyBuilding was modern and an impressive ten stories, not bad for someone who only rented tools and equipment. He loosened his tie a bit because he felt it was choking him and anyway, he wasn’t used to wearing one. He looked down at his brightly shined shoes and continued into the building. There was an African-American woman behind the reception desk who had a most welcoming smile. “Hello,” she said, “I’m Marsha and you must be Lenny.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Take the elevator to the seventh floor.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Don’t be nervous,” Marsha said. “David is a very nice man.”

“Thank you,” Lenny said, managing a smile.

The elevator door opened on the seventh floor to Mr. Mahoney’s office. Just outside the wide arch that led inside was Mr. Mahoney’s secretary. “Good morning, Lenny,” the woman said brightly.

“Good morning.” Lenny managed another smile.

In a moment David Mahoney entered extending his hand in greeting to Lenny. Lenny was a little shocked because Mr. Mahoney’s handshake was as strong as it was friendly. It was the strength in Mr. Mahoney’s hands that surprised Lenny because Mr. Mahoney was an older man. He had to be at least in his early seventies. “Nice meeting you, sir,” Lenny said politely.

“Call me David,” Mr. Mahoney smiled. “Come on Lenny, we’ll talk.”

Lenny glanced at the secretary who was smiling and gave him a positive wave. He followed Mr. Mahoney into his office. It was not what Lenny had expected although he didn’t quite know what to expect. There was a large desk with two armchairs on the client side but on the other side of the big room was a large fireplace with two large leather chairs sitting before it. The entire wall surrounding the fireplace was a library of books from floor to ceiling. “We’ll sit here,” Mr. Mahoney said, sitting down in one of the leather chairs; “it’s a lot nicer than trying to communicate over a desk.”

Lenny nodded and sat across from Mr. Mahoney. “Would you like coffee, tea, a donut, anything?” Mr. Mahoney inquired.

“Coffee would do it,” Lenny shrugged. Mr. Mahoney rose and walked across the room to a door that opened into a small area where coffee was perking. Lenny wished he hadn’t asked for anything. He thought the secretary would bring in the coffee and now there was Mr. Mahoney serving him and that made him feel all the more uncomfortable.

“Cream, sugar?” Mr. Mahoney asked.

“I’ll get it.” Lenny started up from his chair but Mr. Mahoney waved his hand as a signal to stay seated. “Just a little sugar,” Lenny said. “Thank you.”

They sat in silence sipping the hot coffee for a few minutes and Lenny was scanning the books before him. “Are you a reader?” Mr. Mahoney asked.

“Not as much as my wife is,” Lenny answered. The truth was he wasn’t much of a reader at all, but he felt a man with so many books would want him to be a reader and he didn’t want to screw up the interview on a technicality.

“I saw on your application that you’re married. Two children.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Everyone calls me David.”

“Yes, sir…David.” Lenny could hardly get the name out.

“So tell me about yourself.”

“Well…” Lenny was working hard at wanting to say the right thing. Donna would be disappointed if he didn’t get this job. “I was raised here in town and then I was in the service.”

“How’d you like it?”

“It was okay,” Lenny feigned a smile. “I took a college course in business while I was in.”

“That’s good.” Mr. Mahoney looked pleased. “You’re over at Puffer’s now?”

Lenny nodded.

“I’ve met Sal Puffer,” he said. “Kind of a gruff old boy, isn’t he?”

Lenny nodded again. The idea of Mr. Mahoney knowing his boss made him feel uncomfortable. Puffer had no idea he was looking for another job.

“So Lenny, what inspires you to join our team?”

Lenny took a moment to think. He kept feeling on the spot and that every word he muttered would either advance or harm his chances of getting the job. “To be honest with you, Puffer’s is a dead end job and well, I need to earn more and another thing…” Lenny changed his tone. “I always liked going to your place. When I was growing up my Dad and I used to rent a lot of stuff from your yard over onCarson Avenue.”

Mr. Mahoney smiled. “That was number one,” he said and his eyes sparkled at the memory. “It’s still going strong.”

“I haven’t been there for a while,” Lenny said, “but I remember all the tools and the equipment. I used to pass the forklift and I always wanted to take one out for a spin.” There was laughter in his voice. “I was around fourteen,” he added.

“So what kind of salesman are you?” Mr. Mahoney asked pleasantly.

Lenny was taken back by the question. He had never been very good at sales and that was the last thing he wanted Mr. Mahoney to know. “I’m probably best at organization and that sort of thing,” he admitted, but now he was very nervous hoping he had evaded the question without revealing the evading. “But I can sell!”

Mr. Mahoney chuckled a little. “Everybody is in sales one way or another,” he said. “Managers, secretaries, the people in the yard. Why, we’re trying to sell ourselves to each other right now, isn’t that right?”

Lenny felt embarrassed by the question, “Yes sir.”

“As long as you can sell, you’ll always make a good living,” Mr. Mahoney added with a friendly wink.

Lenny nodded. He didn’t know what to say.

The meeting lasted a few more minutes and Lenny left, uncertain about the impression he had made. He changed clothing in a service station men’s room and hurried to Puffer’s two hours late.

As soon as he arrived home that afternoon, Donna was anxious for him to tell her all about the meeting and his opinion of David Mahoney; what kind of person he was. After all, he was known by his reputation of success and wealth.

Lenny’s account was disappointing to Donna. “I don’t know,” he said. “He seemed like a real nice person but we just sort of talked. I mean it wasn’t very much about business or what the job was about.”

“Well, do you think you’ll get the job?” She asked hopefully.

“I don’t know, Donna,” he answered. “He thanked me and…I’ll tell you one thing, everyone who works over there is really nice. It’s like night and day compared to Puffer’s. I think I really want the job.”

“You think?” There was a surge of upset in Donna’s voice.

Lenny glanced at the floor, “I don’t know if I’m qualified,” he admitted. “I think you have to be a salesman type and I was hoping it was…I don’t know what I was hoping it was but one thing for sure, I was hoping it wasn’t another sales job.”

Donna burst into tears.

Lenny did not sleep well that night. The evening before going to bed had been spent in silence except for the babies and Donna’s unhappiness seemed to fill the entire apartment. There was no surprise when she turned her back to him as soon as they had gone to bed or when he had tried to snuggle against her and she moved away. The next morning, he was watching her from the kitchen table as she stood at the stove cooking breakfast. She seemed so distant he felt as if he were losing her. He looked at his son sitting across from him in his highchair. His second birthday was only a couple of months away and Lenny worried about what the future held.

Not a word was spoken between Lenny and Donna while they ate but then Lenny said, “I’m sorry I’ve ended up being someone you don’t want.” There was hurt in his voice.

Donna looked up at him. “I’m not angry at you,” she said. “I’m scared; don’t you get it? We both know there’s no future where you’re working now and we both want me home until the kids are a little older so I feel helpless. I’m going to have to get a job, Lenny, because we’re so far behind on everything.”

“We talked about that,” Lenny protested.

“We talked about all the things we were going to have, too, Lenny, and all we’ve ended up with is debt.”

“We’ll get out of debt. It takes time.”

Donna reached across the table and put her hand on Lenny’s. “I know you’re trying,” she said, “I know I’ve been moody but, look, Lenny, you’re very smart and you’re too smart for where you’re at right now. I don’t know why you haven’t gotten a better job—a job with a future. But you will.”

Lenny felt relieved. “Maybe the problem is I don’t know what I want. I know it’s not Puffer’s because I hate every day of it but…I can’t think of a job I do want.”

“Well, how about Mahoney’s manager job or whatever it is? You said you used to really enjoy going over there.”

“I was a kid with my Dad,” Lenny shrugged. “Every boy is intrigued by all those tools and trucks and things.” He paused and then added, “I would like to give it a try but there are a lot of guys out there with a lot more experience than I have and why would they want me? You should see David Mahoney’s office…I mean, we’d like to live in it.”

“What does any of that have to do with you going to work for them?” Donna asked.

“I don’t know.” Frustration raised Lenny’s voice. “Maybe I should have stayed in the Army.”

“You sound like my father,” Donna shook her head. “You know what, Lenny? I think you’re scared.”

“Of what?” Lenny snapped. The accusation had angered him.

“I don’t know,” Donna answered in a concerned but caring tone.

Lenny drove to work feeling much better about his relationship with Donna but her last comment was bothering him a lot. Was he afraid of something? What? The truth was he did feel a secret fear and that was why he had failed selling those damned pressure cookers. He felt afraid sitting with Mr. Mahoney who was really as nice as anyone could be. What was it?

He had a miserable time at work that day. He kept questioning why he was keeping such a lousy, boring job he didn’t like at all. Was it because he felt safe and confident there, he wondered? Maybe he didn’t want to quit because he felt so overqualified and it was a big comfort zone. And Puffer himself was not difficult to work for in spite of the fact he never cracked a smile. No, it was something in him. He wanted more…much more.

He spent the next few days trying to figure himself out. He should have gone to college instead of the Army like his parents had wanted, he thought, and he began regretting a lot of decisions he had made. He should have been more prepared before he married Donna, before they had children, before a lot of things. He thought about his father; he was great in a lot of ways but a man who spent his life laying brick and pouring concrete and for what? To spend his retirement with hands and knees so arthritic he could barely drive to the supermarket? Lenny didn’t want to end up like that; he wanted to end up like David Mahoney. But who didn’t?

The weekend came and actually those two days were very pleasant. Donna seemed positive and he was grateful she hadn’t mentioned that no one had called from Mahoney’s office. He had no doubt been rejected and he surely didn’t want to get into a conversation on the subject. On Sunday afternoon he and Donna took the children to visit Donna’s parents and although there was a slight briskness in the fall air, they had a barbecue and a nice time. Lenny liked Donna’s parents; they were friendly and treated him as part of their family. But then, innocently, Donna’s mother asked Lenny if he had found a better job yet. Lenny shook his head but then Donna answered the question. “He will,” she said. “It takes time. Lenny is very smart and very talented; he can do anything he puts his mind to and he’ll be fine.”

“Donna,” her mother raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t mean anything negative, I was just curious is all.”

“I know, mama,” Donna said. “It’s just…”

“I need a better job,” Lenny interjected.

“They’re not always easy to get,” Donna’s father offered, popping open another can of beer. “I’ll tell you, sometimes I wish I’d stayed in the service and been done with it.”

The next morning Donna called out that breakfast was ready because Lenny had taken longer in the shower than usual. She was surprised when Lenny entered the kitchen in his dress pants and wearing a tie. The look on her face was enough to stir Lenny into an explanation. “I’m going to go see Mr. Mahoney again,” he said. “He’s probably hired someone but I’ve decided I really want that job and maybe I still have a chance at getting it.”

Donna beamed.

Lenny had told Puffer’s he wouldn’t be in on this Monday. He hadn’t told Donna this but he had decided to spend the entire day applying for work especially if Mr. Mahoney had already hired someone else for the manager’s position. He was very excited and enthusiastic as he drove away from the apartment parking lot. This wasn’t because he felt assured about getting a better job that day but because he was so determined to become more aggressive in the attempt. The truth was Donna’s accusation about him being afraid had struck him a lot harder than he had admitted to her. He was afraid. He didn’t know of what but whenever he was postured in a position of asking for anything—even a job—he felt a lot of anxiety. He recalled the day he had spent nearly an hour with Mr. Mahoney; his hands had sweated profusely and he didn’t like this about himself. There seemed to be such inner-conflict between how he thought and how he felt. He viewed himself as being confident and strongly motivated but when it came to facing such challenges he seemed to lose his courage.

He sat in his car for five minutes in the Mahoney parking lot trying to muster the courage to go inside and follow through with his plan. When he had decided this was what he was going to do on Friday and kept the thought in his mind over the entire weekend, it seemed such a simple thing. He’d try to see Mr. Mahoney again and if he did, that would be great; if not, he’d spend the day submitting applications at other places. No big deal! But now it felt like it was a far bigger deal than he had imagined. He could not bring himself to open the car door. That was fear and he knew it. And he was disappointed in himself for having it. He started the car.

He drove off wondering what he would tell Donna. He could never admit to her what had really happened, that he had just been too afraid. He would have to lie. He’d say the receptionist told him the job was taken and that would be it.

Yet, there was a tugging from deep within his psyche telling him to do what he had set out to do. And this caused a tug-of-war between the guilt of running away and the fear and desire of following through. He’d go tomorrow, he thought. But he knew he couldn’t do that. After taking this day off he didn’t dare show up late the next day. He would have to go see Mahoney now or forget it. He made a U-turn and headed back to theMahoneyBuilding.

As soon as he entered the lobby of the building, the receptionist gave him a friendly wave. “Don’t tell me,” she said, “Lenny, right? Hi, Lenny.”

Her friendliness relaxed him. How had she remembered his name?

“Nice to see you again. I…I was wondering if it would be possible to see Mr. Mahoney?”

“Oh,” her eyes widened, “you don’t have an appointment?”

Lenny shook his head. His expression reflected his uncertainty.

The receptionist smiled and picked up the telephone. “It’s alright.” Her voice remained open and pleasant. “David has an open door policy. If he’s not busy, I’m sure he’ll see you.” She spoke into the phone. “Linda,” she said to Mr. Mahoney’s secretary, “I have Lenny here at my desk and he wants to see David. No, he doesn’t have an appointment…okay, I’ll hold.” She looked up at Lenny and smiled brightly. “Yes, oh, okay, I’ll tell him. Thank you,” she said pleasantly.

Lenny has paid attention to the “oh” in her conversation and assumed Mr. Mahoney was busy or didn’t want to see him.

“Mr. Mahoney is on a long distance call,” she said. “But if you can wait, he’ll be happy to see you.”

Lenny’s heart drummed in his ears. He was relieved and not relieved at the same time. “Thank you…thank you a lot,” he said nervously.

The receptionist stopped him as he started to turn toward the elevator. “Lenny, there’s nothing to be nervous about. David is a wonderful man, and don’t be fooled by his age. He has a mind that’s sharp as a tack and a heart as big as this building.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Lenny said, relaxing.

“Marsha,” the receptionist reminded him.

“I’m sorry, I forgot. Thank you, Marsha.” Her attitude made him feel better and he was sincerely appreciative.

“And Lenny, if you really want to work here, that’s what you’ll do,” she said.

Lenny smiled.

He waited only a few minutes before Mr. Mahoney’s secretary invited him in. He thanked her, walked into Mr. Mahoney’s office and crossed to his desk saying, “Good morning, Mr. Mahoney; thank you for seeing me. I only need a minute or two.”

“Sit down.” Mr. Mahoney indicated the chairs across from his desk. “Coffee, soda, anything?”

“No, thank you.”

“What can I do for you, Lenny?”

Lenny hesitated. Then he began to talk. “Mr. Mahoney, I really want to work for you. Now the truth is I’m not the world’s greatest salesman. The truth is I don’t read as much as I should. And the truth is I don’t like my job very much over at Puffer’s because I want to have a better future. I mean, I’m not earning enough and I have Donna and we have…well, you know all of that already. The point is, Mr. Mahoney, I can learn. I know there are probably a million people more qualified than I am but…but, once I learn, once I have something down, I’m good at it.”

Mr. Mahoney didn’t respond because Lenny looked as if he wanted to say more.

Thoughts were racing through Lenny’s mind. He wasn’t quite sure what he had said and was hoping he hadn’t made a fool out of himself.

“Is that it?” Mr. Mahoney finally asked.

“Yes sir.”

Mr. Mahoney smiled. “Your fly is open.”

Lenny’s heart sank. He looked down.

“Joking,” Mr. Mahoney chuckled.

Lenny was grinning then. His face had flushed but now he felt fully at ease.

“What is it you want?” Mr. Mahoney asked. “What’s your vision?”

Lenny thought for a few moments. “I’d like to be out of debt,” he said and regretted it as soon as he did. An employer wouldn’t want a person who had too many personal problems, and he knew it. “I’d like to have a home of my own and…do well,” he added.

Mr. Mahoney nodded. He widened his eyes asking, what else?

“I’d like to have a career and, you know, do well,” he repeated. He could not think of anything that would make him sound as impressive as he wanted to sound. “To tell you the truth,” he shrugged, looking around the office, “I’d like to be like you.”

“Your wife work?”

“No sir. I mean she could but we want her home until the kids get a little older.”

“That’s probably why you’re in debt,” Mr. Mahoney said. “Easy thing to do if you’re not careful. On the other hand, I think it’s good to have a mama at home. I lost mine when I was ten years old.”

“I’m sorry,” Lenny said sincerely. “That’s too young to…”

“Well, let’s not get into it. That was a long time ago.”

Lenny nodded. “Mr. Mahoney, I want to ask you directly; is the job still open?”

“Yes,” Mr. Mahoney answered. “I’ve had thirty applications or so.”

“Hmmm,” Lenny nodded. “That’s good.” What else could he say?

“If for some reason you don’t get hired here, what are your plans?”

The reference to not being hired sank in the pit of Lenny’s stomach but he didn’t permit this to show. Nevertheless, he felt sure there was an underlying message in what Mr. Mahoney said. It had been a polite way of saying he probably was not the person for the job. This was relaxing really; as long as he didn’t have the job, it didn’t matter very much what he said. And this was precisely why Mr. Mahoney had made the comment. If Lenny no longer felt at risk, he would reveal more of his real self. As far as Mr. Mahoney was concerned, attitude was vital to his decision-making, and people always feigned a good one when they were after something. He wanted to create a situation where the truth of Lenny’s attitude would show through as much as possible. In fact, he tried to do this with everyone he interviewed, knowing people were seldom fully themselves when seeking employment.

“To find a better job, one with a future attached to it,” Lenny said wisely. He grinned. “I don’t know, Mr. Mahoney…David,” he corrected, remembering the powerful man across the desk had encouraged him to call him by his first name. “I think I have what it takes to be successful.”

“What does success mean to you?” Mr. Mahoney asked with real interest in knowing.

“Well,” Lenny began, “having enough money to secure my family and…the truth is, I’d like to be rich. I mean, I read the article that was in the newspaper about you. I don’t know, it was before I went into the Army, I think. And I remember it was all about how you went from rags to riches.”

Mr. Mahoney chuckled. “Yes, I’ve done well. I don’t know why I let them write that story; I guess my old ego needed a boost. They gave me the plaque on the wall over there from the Chamber of Commerce.”

“That’s good,” Lenny said. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure. I’m open!”

“How did you learn how to succeed?”

“Do you mean make lots of money or succeed? Because they are two different things, you know.”

“What do you mean? At bottom line, success is money and money is…”

“No, it isn’t,” Mr. Mahoney interrupted Lenny. “I know plenty of wealthy people who aren’t as successful as the people who work out in the Rent It yards or the clerks behind the counters.”

“I know, that’s true.” Lenny felt a little embarrassed again but he felt desperate to earn a lot of money at the moment. “I guess what I meant to ask is how you learned to accomplish so much. I think everyone would like to accomplish a lot but the truth is not very many people know how.”

“That’s right,” Mr. Mahoney responded, pleased. “Let me tell you something though; maybe you’ll get a kick out of it, but it’s the truth. I knew everything I had to know about success and succeeding by the time I was thirteen or fourteen years old.”

“You must have done well in school.”

“No, I didn’t,” Mr. Mahoney admitted. “Way back when I was a youngster, education wasn’t as important as it is today. On the other hand, I had the greatest teacher in the world. And that’s the Lord’s truth.” He pointed to a photograph on his wall.

Lenny followed the direction to a picture of an older woman standing with her hands relaxed at her side. She was smiling. Behind her was a forest of trees and an old shack of a house. She looked like anything but a teacher, Lenny thought. To him she looked like some poor old lady in a simple dress. “What did she teach?” Lenny asked politely.

Mr. Mahoney leaned back in his chair. “The secrets of the Universe, son,” he said. “The secrets of the Universe.”

The confused but curious look on Lenny’s face reminded Mr. Mahoney that most people at age twenty-five are still feeling their way in their lives. They don’t think much about the Universe but rather their own lives as if they were the center of it. He thought back to when he had been that young and had already earned his first million dollars. And that had been at a time when such an amount was a real payload. He glanced at the picture of the older woman and smiled at it. It was she, after all, whom he had to thank for so much of his success.

He looked at his watch. It was near ten in the morning and he had lots to accomplish that day. Yet, he knew the young man before him was struggling and was far more lost than found. It would be difficult having a wife and two children trying to make ends meet working for the wages Puffer’s paid. He admired Lenny for having the courage to return to his office but there was something else. Lenny wasn’t as qualified for the position as a number of other applicants and he didn’t want to get the young man’s hopes up in case he chose someone else for the training program.

Lenny smiled. But the silence continued.

Mr. Mahoney glanced at his watch again.

“I guess I’d better be going,” Lenny said.

Suddenly Mr. Mahoney was very enthusiastic. “Tell you what, if you have a little time, I’ll tell you the story,” he said; “maybe you’ll pick up a thing or two.”

“Sure.” Lenny perked up.

Mr. Mahoney stood and told Lenny to go take a chair by the fireplace. He made them both a cup of coffee and sat across from the young man just as he did on the day of their first meeting. “It’s quite a story,” Mr. Mahoney said; “you sure you have the time?”

He had the time. “Who’s the woman in the picture?” Lenny asked.

“She was my grandmother,” Mr. Mahoney answered with affection in his voice. “And I wasn’t exaggerating when I said she taught me all I needed to know by the time I was thirteen or so. That doesn’t mean I haven’t learned anything since, only that long before I was old enough to shave, I was educated in ways maybe most people never are. I am thankful for that.”

“My grandmother lives out West,” Lenny volunteered.

“Nice lady, I’ll bet.”

Lenny nodded his head.

Mr. Mahoney took a sip of his coffee and sat it down on the table before him. “You ready?” he asked.

“I’m ready,” Lenny said lightly; he sincerely wanted to hear the tale.

Mr. Mahoney took a few moments to reminisce and then began his story…

I’d just had my tenth birthday and the whole world had been pretty good up until then. Then, about two weeks later my mama took sick and I guess it was a month or so after when she died. I was the youngest of the children. My brother was seventeen and my sister a year older than that. I suspect I was an accident of one of my daddy’s drinking sprees, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, it wasn’t but a few days after the funeral when Dad told me I was too young for him to take care of and so I was going to live with my grandmother. My sister was engaged so she’d be leaving and I can’t remember what my brother was up to but I sure felt like odd man out.

I loved my grandmother, of course, but I was hurt because I felt like I wasn’t wanted at home anymore. I realize now Dad did the right thing but I was too young and too sad at the time to know it. So my big sister packed my clothes and a toy or two into a cardboard box and off I went.

I’ll always remember crossing old Pasture Creek that spring day sitting next to my father in the Ford truck he owned at the time. I don’t think I ever felt so alone. And I was angry, too! I was mad at the world, mad at God, mad at my dad, mad that I was being sent away and mad that I wasn’t ever going to see my mother again. And that’s a lot of anger for a ten-year-old boy.

My grandmother lived in a little, brown shingle house about two miles out of town and on the edge of the backwoods. There were a few neighbors but not many and none closer than maybe fifty acres away so the house was pretty isolated. I used to love to go visit there but I hated it on this day. It wasn’t that I didn’t love my grandmother; I just wanted things to be like they were.

My daddy left me in the truck and he went inside the house and stayed quite a long time. At least it seemed like a long time to me. When he finally came out of the house with my grandmother at his side, he was angry I hadn’t stayed in the truck like he had told me to. I don’t know why, but I had climbed up the apple tree that grew at the side of the house and sat on the highest limb I could get to. I can still remember looking up at a brisk, blue sky with tears rolling down my cheeks and talking to my mother as if she were up there and could hear me. But then there was my dad’s voice hollering at me from below and telling me to get myself down because he had to go.

Next thing I knew I was standing on the porch next to my grandmother waving goodbye to my dad and watching the dust rise as he drove away on the dirt road that led back to the highway and home.

“Time to go inside now,” my grandmother said, taking my hand.

“I don’t want to go in,” I whimpered, breaking free from her and so she said, “That’ll be fine,” and walked inside. I think I sat on the porch step almost to dusk.

My grandmother was good as gold to me from the first day I arrived. For one thing she gave me the time and space to be by myself as much as I wanted and that’s about all I did want for the first week or two. You know, I just moped around or spent time up in the old apple tree trying to make sense out of the world.

I don’t recall how long it took me to come around but I remember one evening when we were having supper—back then we always used to call the evening meal supper—I asked her why things had to die. She thought for a minute and then gave me one of those smiles I’ve kept in my heart forever. I will always remember what she taught me that evening. She said, “Honey, lots of people wonder about that but the answer is as clear as the nose on their face. You know what a caterpillar is, don’t you?” I told her I did.

“Well, the caterpillar lives life eating leaves and wandering about the tree branches in his great adventure of being simply what he is. And all his life he thinks his world is all there is to it and that he’s the most important thing in it. Then one day he ripens on the vine like everything else and he passes on just like people do. Just like your mama did. But then, all of sudden, he awakens as this beautiful butterfly. And he can fly! And he’s happier than he ever was when he was just a furry old worm because he’s freer than he ever was before.

“You see,” she added, “nothing that lives can ever die. And if we didn’t call the process death and called it change instead, we wouldn’t worry so much about it or feel so bad when someone we love goes away.”

Mr. Mahoney relaxed back into his leather chair. Lenny did the same as he continued his story…

I felt better after she said that but it wasn’t just the caterpillar metaphor. I guess I had thought about it after I had gone to bed or maybe somewhere in my subconscious or what have you. But early the next morning when I was helping her feed the chickens she kept back of the house, I asked how she knew for sure that when people die, they just “change.” I wanted to be reassured that my mother was really okay.

She gave me a wisdom I have carried with me all my life and I’ll share it with you to accept or reject for yourself. She asked me if I ever wondered about how ancient people like the Native Americans discovered herbs and other plants were healing and good for them. I didn’t have an idea of course and so she pointed to a wild violet patch growing a few yards from us. They were nice little purple and yellow flowers already in bloom. My grandmother said the roots of the yellow ones were used by Native Americans to cure heart problems and teas were made out of the entire plant to heal headaches, sore throats and all kinds of things. And I did, indeed, want to know how they knew those flowers could do all that. You know how a ten-year-old is always filled with questions.

Here’s what she said: “David, the shamans and medicine people of old times knew that all the secrets of the Universe are revealed by Nature herself. You see, Nature speaks to us in symbols and signs and people like the Native Americans knew how to read those symbols and signs like the cave people did and all those who live with Nature do. Of course, these days, people are too busy in city life to pay attention to the big world. They get all wrapped up in their little worlds and, like the caterpillar, tend to believe they’re the center of it all.”

I didn’t really understand everything my grandmother told me but from that day forward I began to recover from my loss. I realize now that somehow she had returned meaning and purpose to my young life and I’m sure that was her intention. I’d been an awful sad sack before then! And you know what—I’ve never lost those two precious commodities since that time and I want you to pay attention to this: meaning and purpose are the greatest forms of wealth anyone can ever have in their life. The rest is mere whims and passing fancies, labels, titles and concepts.

“Your grandmother sounds like she was quite a character,” Lenny remarked, smiling.

“She was old by then,” Mr. Mahoney reflected. “Her face was wrinkled and her hands were callused but I’ve yet to find a person with such a twinkle in their eye or with a smile so warm and loving.”

“You loved her a lot,” Lenny said.

“Oh yes, indeed I did.” Mr. Mahoney’s eyes deepened. “Still do,” he added.

“So, do you think it’s true? I mean, what she told you about Nature?”

Mr. Mahoney smiled and continued telling his story.

I remember going back in the house later that day and telling my grandmother I had the worst headache! I moaned and groaned with pain. And she rushed right out of the house, picked flowers from the violet patch and made me a hot cup of tea from the petals and roots. I drank it down and told her my headache had gone away. That pleased her but, of course, she knew I hadn’t had a headache at all, that I just wanted to taste the tea ancient people used to drink.

One day, a week or so later, we took a hike together up in the hills. I had always wanted to explore the woods behind the house but whenever my parents took me to visit I always had to stay in sight so I’d never wandered too far away. Actually I nearly always minded my parents because my father had a temper, especially when he was drinking, which was most of the time.

I was excited to get deeper into those hills and my grandmother was quite the hiker. She had packed us a lunch so we were off to have a nice day for ourselves. We walked a long way and finally we reached the river that turned into Pasture Creek, which ran through my grandmother’s property. It was June and the wild grass was high along the bank and everything was green and in full blossom. ThoseVirginiahills are a fairyland that time of year. I need to get back there one of these days…

Anyway, we were both a little winded by the time we reached the river so we sat down to rest. I think we salted a hard-boiled egg or two even though it wasn’t lunchtime yet. Mostly we sat together enjoying the shade and listening to the river. My grandmother said the river had lots to tell me if I paid attention to it. You can imagine how a ten-year-old would respond to being told a river had lots to say to him! My young ears perked up right away and I listened as intensely as I could, hoping to hear the river’s voice. I expected something magical to happen; I gave that river all my attention. And, of course, it just kept on its way.

But you know what? That was the very message my grandmother wanted me to catch hold of. She wanted me to read the symbols and signs it was offering but of course I didn’t realize that at the time. She said, “The river is very smart; watch it and you’ll see it never tries to go up hill and if something stands in its way, it moves around it and keeps on going. Most people aren’t that smart,” she said with a wink. “They run into a brick wall and they butt their heads against it and want to climb over it or go through it. And by the time they do, they think they’ve really done something. Your Uncle Pete was a whole lot like that. He was one who truly had it pretty rough and he took such pride in how he’d gone over all the obstacles and hurdles in his life. He had all these big dreams but none of them ever worked out. I guess by the time he climbed over all those brick walls, he was too tired to make something out of himself.

“This river knows better. If we built a brick wall right in the middle of it, what do you think it would do? It would simply change direction and keep on until it reached its destination.”

We sat for a long time without talking and then she turned to me. “David, I want to see you do well in life and not end up like your Uncle Pete, so I want you to make me a promise.”

I told her I would.

“When you’re a grown man,” she continued, “there will be times when life won’t go exactly like you want it to. There may be times when you feel like you’re up against a circumstance or problem you can’t overcome. These things happen to all grown ups from time to time: people get themselves deep into debt or they lose their jobs or the bank turns them down—all kinds of obstacles get in their way. Some people just give up. Some people push ahead doing their best to get over the mountain that stands before them. And they get all crazy and worried and pretty soon they’re talking about all the things they should have done and all the reasons why they didn’t do them.

“That was your Uncle Pete in a nutshell and I don’t want you to ever not reach your goals. And so if the time ever comes when you think you can’t or something is blocking your way, don’t retreat and let your dreams fade away and don’t waste your time trying to climb mountains that are too steep. What I want you to do, if you ever feel like you’re stuck by some condition in your life, is to go find yourself a river and be reminded of what you should do. And if you just do that much, why, you’ll be on your way again and soon enough you’ll get to the place you want to be! Promise me you’ll always take the time to find yourself a river. If you do this,” she said, “you’ll always be given a little more than what you came for.”

I promised her I would. And I always have.

For a summer that began in such deep despair, those first few months I spent living at my grandmother’s house ended up being some of the happiest memories of my entire life. I began to believe my mother was just fine, especially when I’d see one of those big, beautiful butterflies so peaceful in the world. And there were a lot of them! My grandmother said she’d never seen so many. Maybe she said that to put the thought in my mind or maybe it was truly so, but anyway…

Lenny interrupted out of curiosity. “Did your father visit very much?”

“My father picked up my grandmother and me when my sister got married and drove us to the wedding. After that my sister moved out of town because her new husband was in the military. And, my father and brother took a job together hauling coal at the far end of the state so I didn’t see any of them for quite a long time,” Mr. Mahoney answered honestly. “Now where was I? Oh, yes, that first summer!”

I remember going to my grandmother on another day asking if I could go hike alone in the woods and she told me that would be fine as long as I came home long before dark and wouldn’t climb on the rocks where I might hurt myself. I told her I’d be careful and I’d be home early so sometimes she’d pack me a lunch and finally she bought me a little water canteen like soldiers used and I thought that was about the most important thing I’d ever had.

I don’t think there is anything I’ve ever done that I like better than hiking up in the hills. And I mean that as much now as I ever did. Of course, as a boy it was a real adventure. Especially those first few mornings I’d leave and start out exploring. I think I told you my parents never let me stray but my grandmother was different and I never had such a sense of pure freedom.

I didn’t go very far the first time. Not even to the river. I don’t think I was scared or anything; there was just so much to do and see. Oh, that reminds me; I left out the most important part. There was another condition to my being allowed to go in the woods by myself. Every day when I returned home, I had to tell my grandmother what I had learned. She told me that when a boy reached my age in the Native American villages—she called them Indians at the time—they were sent out into the woods alone to seek truth and find their vision. Now, I didn’t have the slightest idea what she meant but as I grew older I realized how important that concept was going to be to the rest of my life. And I’ll get to it in a minute. But first, I’ll stray from my story here to make a comment and I want you to think about it since you have little children at home, Lenny.

In our society we give our children rules and we twist up their minds with morals and mores of the culture. Everything we do is focused on making children “mind.” But you know what? Teach a child to mind and you teach that child how to be mindless.

Think on that for minute…

Anyway, whenever I came home after romping about in the woods, my grandmother would ask me what I learned that day. And I’d tell her I didn’t know! And she’d just smile and say, “You always learn something, don’t you worry about it.” One night she went on, saying, “Honey, you’re just new at it and so you may not recognize what you’re being taught. Why, you’ve already learned one of the most important lessons of all, one that some people never figure out in all their lives.”

I, of course, wanted to know what that was but before she would tell me, she asked if I’d seen any animals during my explorations. I told her I’d watched a squirrel having the greatest time jumping from one branch to another and sometimes even one tree to another. My grandmother just smiled and smiled as I talked about that squirrel. And finally she said, “You see? He was a good teacher because the lesson he gave you was a reminder of what you had already learned.”

My eyes widened; I couldn’t wait to find out what I already knew!

She said by going into the woods, by climbing the hills, I had been learning how to have a wonderful time all by myself. And this, she exclaimed, was the best education a person might ever get.

Now if you think about it, there was a lot of truth in what she was telling me. Just look at so many people today who don’t know how to make their own fun in the world. They have to throw a party or they have to go somewhere and more, they often want someone else to play in their sandbox, so to speak, or they don’t know what to do with themselves. I mean, watching television is not to really enjoy your own self because mostly it’s about escaping your self and your world for that matter! Look at parents today; after they eat dinner what’s the first thing they say to their children? Let’s go watch TV. Well, I was lucky as a boy because my grandmother, old as she was, would take me outside and we’d play catch together or we’d just sit out on the porch to listen to the crickets.

And I’ll always remember her telling me that human beings were the only creatures on the face of the earth who forget how to enjoy simply being alive. My grandmother never forgot and her life was a wonderful example of this.

Sometime during that first summer we hiked up in the woods together again. I think it was in mid-July because it was very hot.

My grandmother packed a picnic basket and off we went. She wanted to go all the way to the river again. I knew she loved the river because she always watched it with such joy. I mean, she’d look at it with real affection in her eyes and it always kept a smile on her face. Sometimes she’d take me by the hand without saying a word but I felt her happiness and I’d give her a big hug.

She talked to things, too. You know, she’d tell the flowers how pretty they were and things like that. She had such an appreciation for everything and she taught me to be the same way. I learned from watching her and it was well worth the learning. When you appreciate what you have, you never do without.

My grandmother knew a lot in her simple ways. For one thing, she knew how to listen to the silence. She knew how to really see things, too. I mean, most people just look at the scenery but she saw it in a way that was…I don’t know, deep and profound. Like the way she’d look at the river. It was like she was speaking to it. I don’t mean in words, but in thought. I’d watch her sometimes and I’d see her expression change like people’s do when they’re having a conversation. I always wondered what she was thinking but I never asked because it seemed so private somehow. On this particular day when we went on the picnic, she told me that one day I’d discover the greatest truth of all. I wanted to know right away what that would be but she said it was something I had to discover for myself.

I remind you, I was ten years old and so the idea of discovering the greatest truth of all was a little above my head. But my grandmother never talked to me like I was a little kid. And she never made me feel like I wasn’t smart enough to understand. And on those times when I told her I didn’t understand something, she’d always say that when the time was right, I would. I would if I wanted to!

And that reminds me of something else that happened while we were sitting by the river eating our picnic lunch. I asked her where I should look to find the greatest truth of all and she told me to go and stand by the riverbank and look down into the water. I did as she instructed and she called to me and asked what I saw. I said, “I just see me, Grandma,” thinking I hadn’t seen what she had wanted me to, but my answer pleased her. And when I came back and sat down beside her again, she said, “All the truth is in you, David, all the wisdom of the Universe; and all you have to do is tap into it.”

“What did she mean by that?” Lenny asked.

“Just what she said.” Mr. Mahoney stood from his chair, stretched and walked across the room to refill their coffee cups.

“Was that the greatest truth?”

“No,” Mr. Mahoney answered from across the room, “but it was about the greatest insight I’ve ever been given and I’ve known some very brilliant people over the years.” He handed Lenny his refill and sat down again. “You know, this is quite a story and so if it’s taking too much time we can finish it later.”

“No way! I’d like to hear it all,” Lenny said, “if you don’t mind.”

“Okay. She explained exactly what she meant by tapping into the wisdom of the Universe some time later and so we’ll get to that part of the story soon enough. Right now, I want to tell you how I discovered the greatest truth she always said I’d find, if I looked for it long and hard enough.”

“I’d sure be interested in knowing,” Lenny said enthusiastically. “I guess everyone would be.”

“The truth is, Lenny, we all know it; we just tend to forget, that’s all.”

My grandmother had what people call a green thumb. She grew a big vegetable garden and she had flowers everywhere. Whenever she weeded or planted she always talked to her plants, telling them she loved them. If she transplanted something she’d always say to it, “Don’t be afraid” or “You don’t have to worry, because I’m going to take good care of you.” In fact, now and then one of her houseplants would look sickly, as if it were going to wilt and she’d actually touch the plant and talk to it much like a mother to a child. And you know what? Most of the time that plant would recover. I mean, by the next day you’d see it all firm and looking healthy again. I’m not saying this was the case a hundred percent of the time because everything has its time, but her plants were happy and you could just feel it. You could see it! You might believe this or not but I swear it’s the truth.

Now and then she’d call me over and had me tell a plant I loved it and I would do it, even though at first I felt a little silly. You know how it is: a boy telling a flower he loves it doesn’t exactly fit the image of the superman he wants to grow up to be. But my grandmother would say that everything in the world responds to love and as I’ve looked back over the years, I’ve realized the little house we lived in was filled with love. And that made me one fortunate little boy.

Mr. Mahoney paused in telling his story. “You know, Lenny, you can walk into someone’s house or office or store and know right away if it’s a loving or unloving place. You feel it. People can smile and act nice as can be but they can’t keep the truth of it concealed. There’s a vibration about the place that says either, I’m happy and I’m loving or, I’m unhappy and unloving and you respond to whatever the environment is because it becomes a cosmos onto itself.”

“I know what you mean,” Lenny said. “You can walk into a room of strangers and know if they are upset or having a good time. I can go home and my wife might be sitting on the couch reading or something. And if she’s upset, she doesn’t have to say a word but I’ll know and I’ll ask right away, what’s wrong?”

“That’s right,” Mr. Mahoney agreed. “And why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know,” Lenny answered; “maybe it’s like what they call a sixth sense. My wife can tell if the babies aren’t feeling well or if they need something even if we’re not in the same room with them. She also has a talent for knowing people a lot better than I do. I mean, I can introduce her to someone and she’ll say, you can never trust him or, he’s a very nice person and it always ends up that she’s right. At least she hasn’t been wrong yet. I suppose that’s women’s intuition.”

Mr. Mahoney smiled. “Yes, it seems women do have an edge in the intuitive department. Truth is, they are, in general, more in tune with the world and themselves in it. Most men are so busy fulfilling images, they lose touch not only with others but with themselves, as well.”

“What do you mean?”

“Traditionally, boys were raised to think they have to live up to all the male myths. When I was growing up this was all but exclusively a boy problem but these days, girls are starting to be impacted with the same nonsense of living up to images and losing themselves in the process just like males have done. When some of the women who work for me first started, they had this big persona…you know what a persona is?”

“Well, uh…” Lenny thought he did but didn’t know how to express it.

“It means creating an image of how we want others to see us or comprehend us. I always try to get people to be natural and not fulfill some role. Life is too short for such a waste of time, don’t you think?”

Lenny shrugged and half-nodded. He felt a little uncomfortable because a part of him had been “acting” for Mr. Mahoney in the hope he would better his chances of getting the job. “What did your grandmother have to say about what we’re talking about?” he wondered.

“Well, good and timely question, Lenny,” Mr. Mahoney said, “because it takes us directly back to the story.”

As the summer came to an end that year, my grandmother gave me a bit of news I absolutely did not want to hear. She told me I had to start thinking about going to school and after all the freedom I’d had, that was the last thing I wanted to do.

Plus, I’d be starting a new school and that’s a challenge for most children, I think. But she tried to ease my anxiety by explaining I’d be making new friends and I should enjoy that since I spent the summer by myself. I told her I’d like to have life go on just as it had, but she said everything in life was about change and we had to learn to change with it. And she reminded me of what I’d learned from the river. And I felt bad I hadn’t thought about it myself.

I remember two things that happened the night before she took me to town to register for school. I’d been out by the chicken coop and fell down, getting a deep cut on my wrist from a nail sticking out of one of the old boards. I ran into the house and my grandmother held my arm under cold water from the faucet. Now, this was a time before Band-Aids or antiseptics but I think she did have some Iodine in the house. Anyway, the first thing she did was grab a plate and crumple up some brown paper on it. The kind they make paper bags out of. She lit a match and burned the paper to ash and she poured the ash on the wound to stop it from bleeding. That’s how they did it way back when and it worked

Then, later that evening we sat out on the porch; the weather was turning a little chilly at the time but we sat on the porch anyway wearing coats. She said that when she was a little girl and got cut on something, the way her grandmother closed the wound was to go down in the cellar and find a big, thick cobweb. And she’d stretch the cobweb over the cut to hold it together. I always thought that was interesting. You know, about how people used to do things before all the modern conveniences? Anyway, she knew I was reluctant to face the next day and she told me all I needed to do was be myself and I’d be just fine. She said, “You always want to be yourself so you’ll never have anything to hide.” And then she made me laugh so hard I almost peed in my pants. She said that I didn’t want to end up like the preacher’s wife, Mrs. Morrison, who walked around for so many years pretending she was holier than everybody else that now she always looked like she was sucking lemons. And Grandma made all these funny faces making me laugh so hard my ribs hurt.

By the time I went to bed I’d forgotten about the next day but the next day came around in spite of that and so we harnessed up the old mare and headed into town. There were lots of cars around at the time, of course, but I guess she never learned how to drive and thought the wagon fit all of her needs anyway. She wasn’t alone in this. Down in that part of the country there were quite a few who didn’t have cars and paved roads hadn’t made their way to that part ofVirginiaeither. Grandma went into the schoolhouse with me to sign me up and then she gave me a kiss goodbye, telling me to walk straight home after school so she didn’t worry.

I promised I would.

My teacher’s name was Mrs. Welsh and the first thing she did was give us a test of arithmetic and spelling. I wasn’t good at either at the time so all during lunchtime, I worried about passing.

That first lunch hour I had at the new school was terrible. I guess some of the boys had noticed who brought me to school and they gathered around me to make fun of my grandmother. They called her all kinds of names like, the crazy old woman who talks to trees and that kind of thing, poking fun at her in all kinds of ways. I don’t know if it hurt my feelings more than made me mad or if it was the other way around, but I was about ready to fight when we had to go back into the classroom.

To put the fly deeper into the ointment that day, Mrs. Welsh separated the students into rows based on the results of the test. The children who did well were put together, the students who did okay were put in the next rows and finally those who didn’t do well at all were put in rows together. So there I was in the row with all the stupid kids, and at the mercy of the others who were “better.

It took me nearly an hour to walk home and I cried all the way. Well, I tried not to but those tears kept coming whether I wanted them to or not.

“I can’t believe they used to separate kids like that,” Lenny said, feeling sorry for the young David. “I mean, that would be called segregation now and parents wouldn’t stand for it.”

“That’s true,” Mr. Mahoney answered, “but everything was pretty much segregated in those days. You need a refill on the coffee?”

“No thanks.”

The phone rang and Mr. Mahoney crossed to answer it at his desk. He told his secretary to hold his calls and returned to his chair. He looked about his office, smiling. “I guess I did okay for a kid who started out in the ranks of the dumb,” he said. “But you know, I wouldn’t have done this well if I hadn’t had the real education given to me by my grandmother.”

He returned to the story.

I must have worn my feelings like a costume because the following Saturday morning, my grandmother kept asking me what the matter was. I didn’t want to tell her about the kids making fun of her or that I’d been put in the dumb row at school. So I told her I was fine. She knew better, of course, but she didn’t push to find out why I was so depressed.

I didn’t do much that day and when I went to bed, I couldn’t fall asleep. After a while I turned on the light because I didn’t like laying there in the dark. I guess my grandmother must have seen it because she came into my room to check on me. I told her I couldn’t sleep. And she said, “David, the reason people can’t fall asleep is because they take their worries to bed with them.” It always gives me a grin when I think about what she said next: “Worry is like sitting in a rocking chair; you’re on the move but you’re not getting anywhere.”

She told me to close my eyes and give myself nice thoughts. She said to imagine myself out in the woods or having a great time at something. So I did. I saw myself up in the hills as a grown man with a cabin and my own canoe, and…well, before I knew it, it was Sunday morning and I’d had a good night’s sleep. But, by the time we sat down for breakfast, the depression had returned and Grandma saw I was still in a funk because she wanted us to walk up in the hills again. She said it was such a nice day and it would soon be turning cold so we might as well take advantage of the good weather.

I told her I didn’t want to go.

“You know what I do when I get down in the dumps?” she asked, giving me one of those smiles of hers. “I share those feelings with the river or sometimes with the grass and flowers or the whole big sky. I say, I feel lowly today and I need some cheering up. And, sure enough, it always works. So, why don’t we walk up to the old river and I’ll make us a nice little lunch to take with us. How would you like that?”

“I don’t want to,” I snapped at her. And then I blurted, “People think you’re crazy because you do those things.” As soon as I said it, I felt terrible. I never wanted to tell her that and I hated myself for opening my big mouth.

“Honey,” she said, “you never, ever want to worry about what people think or say about you. As long as you follow your own heart you’ll be on the right course, so it doesn’t mean diddily damn what anybody says. The problem is most people want you to be like they are and if you’re not, they feel challenged and sometimes they resent you. It’s like those religious folks who congregate in church and then gossip about each other”

I asked why people were like that and she said, “From the time they’re little they learn to judge others by themselves and themselves by others and that makes fools out of them for the rest of their lives. When people do that,” she added, “they never have any peace of mind within themselves. It’s exactly why Mrs. Morrison always looks like she’s sucking lemons,” and she made a face wanting to make me laugh again. I didn’t.

Suddenly I burst into tears and confessed that I was put in the dumb section of my classroom. I told her I couldn’t catch on to how to divide numbers and I couldn’t remember how to spell words. All I wanted to do was stay home like I had all summer. “I hate school!” I told her. “I can’t stand it and I never want to go back.” I told her it was the same at my old school but my mother and father would not hear a word of it; I had to go whether I liked it or not.My grandmother thought for a few moments and then she said, “I’ll tell you what, let’s take advantage of the sunshine before the weather turns and go up to the river. We’ll talk everything out and see how we feel about things when we get back.”

While we were sitting by the riverbank, I leaned over, kissed my grandmother on the cheek and told her I was sorry I’d snapped at her. I told her I wasn’t mad at her and she said she already knew that, explaining people get angry for only three reasons. The first was they see in somebody else their own faults or shortcomings, and they’re really mad at themselves for these faults or shortcomings. The second reason was they had their feelings hurt and so they expressed it in anger. She said that was why I snapped at her. And the third, she said, was people like to control other people and when they can’t, they get angry even though they never admit that’s really what’s bothering them.

“And people don’t get angry just with other people. When your grandfather was doing something like trying to screw two pieces of wood together and those pieces weren’t going together like he wanted, he would cuss a blue streak. The problem was he couldn’t control the situation the way he wanted to, and so he’d get enraged.”

I never knew my grandfather very well. He passed over when I was very young. My mother told me he was a stern, solemn but good man. I don’t know much more than this about him although my grandmother told me he tended to take life too seriously and she believed this is why his physical health was always on the wane. From all accounts, I guess he had one hell of a temper but Grandma told me he was always nice to her and gentle as could be. I remember telling her I’d bet he never learned much from the river and she agreed he never did.

Anyway, while we were talking about all this, we saw a snake curling through the grass. She had seen it first, her eyes were so keen even at her age, and she pointed it out to me. She said we were fortunate to see it at that time of year and we watched it until it disappeared. I’ll always remember how she turned to me with such a spark in her eyes. She told me I should always remember how a snake sheds its skin, and that snakes give us a great message of wisdom if our minds are open to what they have to say. I, of course, wanted to know what that wisdom was. My grandmother told me that most people create their own misery because they live in regret or anger about things that have happened to them along their way. She said it was like wearing one’s yesterdays in the fool notion they were something to hang on to. She said if a person wanted to be happy he had to leave those memories behind like the snake does with his skin. She told me she had seen snakes shed their skin and she had noticed they never look back at it; they just crawl out and leave it behind. I wondered how a snake felt after he crawled out of his own skin. My grandmother smiled and said, “Just like it feels to put on a new pair of underwear,” she giggled, “all fresh and raring to go.”

And, finally, I admitted to myself and to her that sometimes I felt sorry that I didn’t give my mother more hugs or talk with her as much as I could have. And I said that sometimes I felt all this anger in me because my father moved away and left me like he never even cared about me at all. As I told her this, I had to fight back the tears so she wouldn’t see them. I suppose she did thoug.

Grandma said, “Honey, I’ve seen people waste most of their lives crying in their beer because of what they did and shouldn’t have, or what they should have and didn’t do. They get locked into their old memories and they use them to either blame others for their misery or, they blame themselves for not doing their best at one thing or another. And, all that produces is more misery and more blame. Your Uncle Pete was that way. He was always saying how much better he would have done in life if only his daddy had taught him more or given him more encouragement. I guess it never dawned on your uncle that this good old world of ours is what you make it, but to do that, you have to leave the past behind just like the old snake does with his skin.”

I told her that sometimes those kinds of thoughts pop into my mind, too. I mean, maybe I wouldn’t be thinking anything at all about my father but then, I’d get this angry feeling and see him driving away like he did. So, I wanted to know how people shed their old skins. And she knew exactly what I meant. She told me that whenever those thoughts came into my head and I felt them twisting in my belly, I just had to tell them to go away and never come back! She said anger and regret are stubborn as can be and they like to torment and wallow about inside a person but if every time they try, you tell them to go away and never come back, one day they are gone forever. I remember asking her if they keep trying to come back, even the

She said, “Yes they do…but, by invitation only.”

“I wish I could have known your grandmother,” Lenny said. He was enjoying the story and the time spent with both the young and the old David.

“Yes, she was just a sweet, old hill woman but she had a Ph.D. from Heaven, I guess,” Mr. Mahoney smiled.

“Do you think that telling bad feelings to just go away really works? A lot of things bother me way down deep. Some old memories can be pretty upsetting.”

“Oh, I promise you, it works.” Mr. Mahoney replied. “You have the pure power within you to be in charge of your own life. Just try it; next time some thought comes into your mind that makes you unhappy, angry or regretful, tell it to go away—and mean it—and you’ll see what happens.”

Lenny shook his head. His mind had drifted to a memory of his own. After a few moments, he said, “You know, there are some things you just wish you could undo. The truth is, Mr. Mahoney—I mean, David—I’ve not done everything right in my life. I’ve hurt people who love me and…well, there are some things I really do regret and I guess, if I’m honest, I have some deep-seated anger in me, too.”

“That’s life for all of us, Lenny.” Mr. Mahoney smiled. “But I’m glad you said that because I forgot to tell you that there’s another step to get rid of all the regret and anger people tend to hold onto in their lives. Now, I want you to pay attention to this…”

My grandmother asked me to think of the worst thing I thought I’d ever done. Something I really regretted doing.

I had to think about it but then I told her that someone had given my dad a hunting dog, actually a puppy that he was excited about having. He said if he had to pay for such a dog it would take a lot of money because it was a special breed and there were only a few in the whole state. He built a little house for it and a pen and told us we could look at it but to leave it alone. But one day when I was in the backyard looking at the puppy, it was wagging its tail and looking so sad about being locked up, I decided I’d play with it for a little while. So I let it out of its pen.

After a few minutes I put the dog back but I guess I didn’t lock the gate because after dinner that night my dad went out to feed the puppy and it was gone. He came back in the house mad as a hornet and he blamed my older brother because it was his job to water the dog during the day. My brother, of course, rightfully denied that he had anything to do with it. But he more my brother denied he’d let the gate unlocked, the more enraged my dad became. Once my father had an idea in his head there was little chance of changing his mind. Anyway, he gave my brother an awful beating and all the while I knew I was the guilty one. I told my grandmother I had always felt awful about that. That I had known I should have been honest but I just couldn’t bring myself to admitting it. I told her that every now and then the memory jumped in my head at night when I went to bed and it haunted me in the darkness.

“Well,” she said, “everyone has something like that in his or her past. Maybe not as bad and maybe worse, but you can’t undo what has happened no matter how much you wish you can. Now, here’s the thing: whenever you have something eating away at you, forgive yourself…and mean it. Say it out loud. I forgive myself. Because for the bad memory to go away, you have to forgive yourself. I’m going to show you how this works. I want you to think about your father driving away and leaving you because I know that’s something that bothers you. Okay? Put a picture in your mind about that first day you came to live with me, and how you watched your father leave. Can you do that?” Unfortunately, I could.

“Now then, say to your father, I love you and I forgive you. Can you do that?”

That wasn’t so easy. In my mind, I could see my dad driving away just like he had in real life and it hurt just as much. But, I did as my grandmother asked me to do. I said out loud, “I love you, Dad and I forgive you.” And then I told all my anger and hurt to go away. And you know what? I felt better right on the spot. Now, those old feelings came back every now and then for a while but whenever they did, I’d say the words again and after awhile they never returned. In fact, I wouldn’t be thinking of it now except to make my point and share the story.

Next my grandmother told me to picture in my head the day I let the puppy out and my brother took the whipping for it. She said to forgive myself with all my heart and mind and then tell the regret to leave and not come back. And you know, slowly I did forgive myself and when I did, all the pain and guilt left me, too.

That was a great and wonderful lesson to learn. But there’s one more thing my grandmother told me. It’s so important to learn how to forgive yourself because, she said, “No one can give what they don’t have.”

“I’ll tell you something, Lenny,” Mr. Mahoney remarked, taking a last sip of his coffee, “being able to forgive yourself is the key to your peace of mind and happiness. Only when you have forgiven yourself for whatever you’ve done wrong can you ever truly forgive others. And until a person does both, he or she will always be enslaved inside themselves.

“That simple wisdom has truly made a wonderful difference in my life and it will in yours, too, if you let it.”

Grandma and I returned home from the woods in the late afternoon and I felt relieved. We hadn’t talked about school at all and so I thought for sure I was off the hook. But after supper she wanted to go sit out on the porch even though there was a real nip in the air. So we went outside and she put a shawl around her shoulders while I wore my coat. It wasn’t that cold but theVirginiawinter was in the air and there was a real chill to be felt.

I don’t know what time it was but sometime after dark my grandmother pointed up to the sky and remarked how beautiful it was. And it was! Before there were so many street and city lights, you could see millions of stars back then and they looked like diamonds spread out on black velvet.

It was that Sunday night when my grandmother really began my education…

Mr. Mahoney stopped and left his story again, turning to Lenny. “Lenny,” he said, “what I’m about to share with you is important and so if you don’t grasp it, be sure to ask me because it can be complex if you’ve never thought in these terms.”

Lenny smiled and nodded. Mr. Mahoney was pleased to see he was ready and willing. And so he began again.

I had been looking up at the night sky for quite awhile because it was so magnificent and so mysterious. I finally turned back to my grandmother and said how beautiful I thought the sky was. My grandmother said, “Honey, that’s you, too.” I looked at her a little dumbfounded because I had no idea what she was talking about.

She smiled, reached over and took my hand in hers. “David,” she began, looking as kind and happy as I’d ever seen anyone before, then, or since. “If you look through the silhouette of the big tree you’ll see the Universe in between the branches as they sway in the breeze. Can you see?” I could. “Well, you’ve been taught that here you are, and there’s the tree over there and the sky is way up there in what we call the heavens. This is why we think we are separate from everything else, but we’re not. We are all simply, and beautifully, energy. This understanding is why ancient people such as the Native Americans talked about being in spirit with the sky and the earth and all that’s in the world. This is why they called the animals and even the trees their brothers and sisters. They understood that each of us is connected to everything else, to the stars and even past the Milky Way to all the distant galaxies.”

Now, I thought my grandmother had to be the smartest person in the world because she was telling me things you’d think would be way beyond an old hill woman like she was but, as they used say, she was smart as a whip. I asked how she knew all these things and she gave me an answer I’ve carried with me since. She very quietly, very subtly brought our conversation around to schooling again.

She told me people imagined that the world was outside them. She told me to empty all my thoughts and to open my eyes as wide as I could and to look out through the tree again into the night sky and I did. Then she asked if I could tell where I left off and the world “out there” began. I told her I knew I was on the porch and the tree was out in the yard. “You’re thinking,” she said. “I want you to see the world for a change instead of just looking at it.”

I tried again. I emptied my head of all thought and looked out into the Universe through the branches of that old tree. And you know, it was a lot like she said. It was like everything was woven into one fabric. I tried to explain this to my grandmother but of course at ten years old I didn’t have the vocabulary to express such unique thoughts or feelings. I think I might have said something to the effect that it did seem like I was part of it all. Whatever I said pleased her. She told me this was the way I saw the world and me in it when I was younger. She said this was the way ancient people saw the world, too and that’s why they could speak with Nature and seek their answers from it. She said little children do it, and the very wise do it but most people forget they ever did it at all. That was a sad thing, she said.

I asked if Nature knew everything there was to know. And she gave me one of the brightest answers I’ve ever heard and I want you to remind me to tell you what it was a little later. Right now, I want to tell you the answer she gave me that I’ve always carried with me. As I said, she brought the subject around to school, to the problem I was having in arithmetic and English. She told me that when most people wanted to learn something, they concentrated on it and tried to figure it out using their brains. She said that’s how people are forever trying to work out their problems. She told me I needed to relax and open up and soon enough I’d understand how to spell and divide, along with everything else.

I fought her on that one. I told her I had tried and tried and I just couldn’t catch onto it. And she said, “That’s what I just told you! Don’t make work out of it; you want to make fun out of it and pretty soon it’ll all seem so easy, you’ll think you knew everything all along. And you know what? Inside, you do know everything in the sense that you have the potential to do and be whatever you decide to do or be.

“Whatever you tell yourself you can do or be, you can. Whatever you tell yourself you can’t do or be, you can’t. And that’s all there is to it.”

“Was she saying that even I already know everything there is to know?” Lenny inquired. “I mean, let’s say I wanted to be a brain surgeon or…I don’t know, a salesman? I already know how to do that?”

“Not exactly,” Mr. Mahoney answered. “What she was talking about was our potential. There are no limits or restraints to what can be, except those we create. What you have within is your potential. And your potential belongs to the Universe itself. Everything you can dream of is inside your psyche. And your psyche is a cosmos onto itself—everything that is out there, is in here,” he said, pointing to his forehead, his mind. “Your potential is your Universe of endless possibilities. If you truly want to be a brain surgeon, you have it in you to become a brain surgeon. If you truly want to be a plumber, mechanic or…a salesman, it’s the same thing. You are free, son,” Mr. Mahoney smiled, “to choose your own fate. Whatever you decide you’re capable of being, you are. In fact, every single time you change your mind, you change your world. All you have to do is reach inside and open yourself up to whatever you want because whatever you ask for, you’ll always get.

“It’s the same thing with your home life. If you tell yourself that you have a difficult, unhappy marriage, well that’s your message to the Universe and the Universe delivers it to you. Are you following me?”

“I think so,” Lenny answered.

“Some people can paint beautiful pictures and some can’t, right?”

Lenny agreed.

“Some people can write books and some can’t, right?”

Lenny nodded again.

“Well, everyone has it in them to paint or write or build whatever bridges they want to create for themselves. Everything we want to know how to do is already in us, as our potential! The problem is the person who wants to paint pretty pictures, let’s say, has been taught they have to learn how from the outside, so they take all these classes. And, some people excel from what they are taught but others never quite learn how to capture their art. And what do people say about this? They say, well, Mary has the talent, but Susan doesn’t.

“This is not the case. Mary’s talent comes from seeking the knowledge within. She is telling herself she can paint whatever she wants to and from telling herself this her potential opens up and gives her all the tools she needs to accomplish her goals. Susan, on the other hand, is telling herself that if she can follow the teacher’s instructions, then she’ll discover how to paint. She won’t though. That is, she’ll never paint as wonderfully as Mary will.

“You may have to toss this around in your own mind awhile to understand it. But once you do understand it, it’s yours forever. Everything Mary paints on her canvas is coming from within herself. What Susan is trying to draw comes from the outside, from others. She is, in fact, closing the door to her own potential because she believes the art instructor gives her what she needs. The art instructor can’t, though. All the instructor can do is give her the technology of perspective, shading and so on but he can never paint for her, you see, and he can never create her into the artist she wants to be.

“Take a fascinating musician and composer like Mozart or Marian Anderson. By the time they were eight years old they were revealing genius, unexplained and overwhelming talent. Oh my, people would say, they have been blessed by God, or, how lucky are they to be born with such fruitful brilliance! But none of this is applicable. They were children and nothing was impossible for them. No one had told them they couldn’t learn to play without a teacher or that suffering and sacrifice were necessary for their art. They were open and they had decided consciously or unconsciously that they wanted to make wonderful music and so they did. They learned these things from releasing their imaginations and becoming and doing the very thing they wanted to do and become.

“This is what my grandmother wanted me to know. And this is what I want you to know, Lenny. I want you to understand that you have within you the potential of all possibilities. Failure belongs to those possibilities but so does success. A life of poverty and struggle or a life of wealth and freedom is already within you. And I am not saying that if you did decide to become a brain surgeon you could just start operating. I am saying it is within your potential to know how if you decide that this is what you truly want.

“Look at others as part of Nature’s teachings as well—not just animals and rivers; everyone you see or meet or will ever know will also be your teachers. Those who hurt you and those who help you—all your teachers! You see a man who is a priest and a woman who is a prostitute. Another woman might be a top executive of a big corporation and another a housewife. You see a man driving a truck for a living, and another is me, sitting here with most of what anyone would ever want in this world and none of us has ever been the subject of chance, but rather choice. And this, too, is what my grandmother wanted me to know. We choose who and what we are every single moment of every single day.

“My grandmother talked to me a few times about potential and there was one cold, winter day after the preacher came to visit that I haven’t gotten to yet. She shared some profound thoughts with me that I will get to, unless you’d rather I tell you the rest of the story some other time? It’s already pastnoon.”

“If you don’t mind,” Lenny said, “I’d like to hear it all right now.”

Mr. Mahoney nodded.

By the time we went inside after sitting on the porch that night, I had agreed to give school another try. I don’t think I wanted to but I knew my grandmother wanted me to and so I did. But, wait, that is not altogether the truth. I actually connected to what she had told me the best that I could at my age and the thought of making learning fun and relaxing with it was appealing to me. I had always worked so hard at school and all that had gotten me was a seat in the dumb section of the classroom.

Anyway…

“I’m sorry to interrupt you,” Lenny said, “but you said to remind you about asking your grandmother if Nature knows everything…”

“Right.” Mr. Mahoney was pleased Lenny had remembered. “You see, even only a few hundred years ago, people believed there was intelligence in all things. That’s why there were wood nymphs and such. Everyone believed trees, plants and animals had spirits and we were all spiritually connected. And this is what my grandmother believed, as well. But then science began telling people no, this was wrong. There was nothing spiritual and nothing intelligent in the entire Universe. They began telling people that the French idea of a mechanical world was true, that the brain was our thinking machine—that we possessed no soul, no spirit, no self except for the physical body.

“They even went as far as to question consciousness. They taught us that we lived in a deterministic world, that the luck of the draw belonged to our heritage, and that we were more like robots following the dictates of our genes. And some even said genes predisposed our ability to learn or do certain things, like paint pictures or perform brain surgery. And so, according to this so-called modern view, we were all basically Mozarts or morons by accident, saints or sinners, plumbers or brain surgeons all by mere accident. In the deterministic world of classical science, there is no free will. It is all predetermined for you. Do you understand what I am saying?”

“Yes, sir,” Lenny nodded.

“Good,” Mr. Mahoney said pleasantly. “But this was not my grandmother’s view,” he continued. “My grandmother said all knowledge and information was in Nature. In Eastern thought, the Universe is sometimes called the Mind of God. The Mind of God is everywhere, they say. And this is what my grandmother thought, too, only she put it in a different way. So, being a curious little kid, I asked my grandmother if Nature knew everything and she said it did. Of course I wanted to know how she knew for sure, and this was the bright and wonderful answer she gave me: “Well, you can observe intelligence in everything but, I suppose, mostly in human beings. Now, since Nature gives us everything from our toes to our heads, it has to have intelligence to give, too. Remember what I told you? You can’t give what you do not have. Well, if Nature didn’t have intelligence, we wouldn’t have it either, and that’s as clear as the nose on anybody’s face.”

“So did you ever do better in school?” Lenny asked.

Mr. Mahoney stood to stretch his legs and continued with that part of his story.

When I returned to school the next morning, I was all fired up to dip into my potential and know all the answers but it didn’t work out like that. Well, not right away at least. But let me tell you what did work. I had decided to make school and learning fun and as soon as I did, I didn’t hate school anymore.

It wasn’t very long until something changed and I began to grasp my lessons better. And one day the teacher moved me over to the middle of the room and I stayed there for a month or so and by the end of the year, I was sitting with all the smart kids. So you can see, I had the potential all along. But I’m getting ahead of the story now.

Sometime in late October of that year—right after Halloween—my grandmother took me to the little store where we shopped. It was primarily a grocery store but it was a general store, too …well, it seemed it had a little bit of everything. My grandmother and I went to town in the wagon. We walked down the sidewalk and I remember she stopped and stared at a necklace in the window of a small shop. This was unusual for her because she wasn’t one who wanted much but she just loved this necklace. It was a cameo and they wanted ninety-nine dollars for it. Well, that was a fortune in those days so we kept walking until we got to the grocery store. But all along our way, my grandmother kept saying how beautiful she thought the necklace was. She said her mother had one a lot like it and she had admired it as a child. I decided right then and there that I wanted to buy that necklace for my grandmother and surprise her at Christmas time but, of course, I didn’t have two pennies to rub together.

By then I had made some friends in school and my best friends were two nice kids by the names of James Berry and Edward—Eddie—Noel. James was a stout, good-natured lad of my same age and Eddie was skinny as a rail with big buckteeth. But he always had a smile on his face and I liked him a whole lot. I had told my friends I wanted to make some money and so did they, so we made a plan. We’d go from house to house on the weekend and ask people if they needed anything done. We’d do it and charge accordingly. We figured we could make a quarter or more for chopping wood and everybody needed wood for their fires back then. There were gas stoves in the bigger cities but everyone in our town cooked on coal stoves and they used paper and wood to start them.

When I told my grandmother about our plan she thought it was a good idea and so off I went on the following Saturday to meet my two buddies so we could start our business. It was bitter cold out because we’d just had a big snow. The kind of cold that makes your ears burn and your nose sting! In any case, we found work right away. There was an older couple that lived a farm down from us—Mr. and Mrs. Gill—and they seemed thankful for boys who were willing to chop wood. They told us to chop as much as we wanted and to pile it in the woodshed so that’s what we did.

They only had one ax and so the three of us took turns using it. I guess we worked for a good three hours or so and we nearly filled half the shed with what we had cut. They gave each of us fifteen cents and we thought we made a nice day’s wage. I couldn’t wait to get home to show my grandmother but we decided to go to a few more houses to offer our labor. It took a lot of time to walk from one farm to the next and no one else wanted their kindling cut so we went home. The next day, we would decide to go into town where the houses were closer.

It didn’t seem cold while we were chopping wood but by the time I walked into the door at home I was freezing. My grandmother had a fire in the coal stove and so she left the oven door open and put some paper on it. I took off my shoes and socks and put my feet on the paper to warm them. My grandmother seemed very impressed to see the fifteen cents I earned. I didn’t tell her of course that I was going to save it to buy her the necklace she liked so much and I also didn’t realize how far fifteen cents was behind a hundred dollars. But I was happy with myself nevertheless and Grandma was happy for me. We had a nice night.

My friends didn’t show up to meet me the next morning because their parents had made them go to church, which I should have expected. My folks used to make me go but my grandmother never did. She always used to say church was where the heart is and her heart was at home. I was soon to learn that a lot of people in town gossiped about her for not being a “good Christian” and I asked her about that once. She said church people were always talking about the good and wicked and the good were always the ones who agreed with them. She said church people found sin no matter where they looked except in their own mirrors. She was pretty opinionated when it came to religious people, especially Mrs. Morrison, the preacher’s wife.

During the next week, James, Eddie and I knocked on doors after school hoping to line up work for Saturday and pretty soon we had work every night after school too, and so we had started quite a little business for ourselves. There were two problems, though. For one thing, we couldn’t play ball with the rest of the kids and chopping wood was hard. Worse, it was boring. Eddie was first to stop showing up. James and I worked a lot into November but then he quit, too. That left me and I wanted to quit but we had promised a lot of people that we’d chop their wood. I admitted to my grandmother that I was tired and bored with it all and, anyway, it was hard work. And, of course, by then I had spent most of my money although I had managed to save two dollars. I wondered if it would be wrong of me to quit like James and Eddie had. We went into the kitchen where it was warm so we could talk. She told me something that evening that has helped me succeed and make the right decisions my whole life. And I want to share it with you right now.

She said, “Everybody in the world is always making up what is right and wrong for everybody else. But if you want to do the wise and kind thing, always follow your heart. Your heart is connected to the Universe and knows more about life and living it than your brain ever will. Our old brains think they know it all,” she chuckled, “but they don’t.”

My grandmother talked a lot about following one’s heart after that. And I decided to listen to my own so I chopped wood all winter by myself. And now and then someone would give me more than I charged, a quarter maybe and one time I was paid a silver dollar! By the time that first winter was over, I had saved nearly fifteen dollars and I had spent a few hard-earned bucks, too, so I’d done well.

One day my grandmother and I were talking about how much money I’d made and she said that was exactly how it worked. Whenever a person follows their heart, they never make mistakes. And, I can tell you the only time I’ve made mistakes in my life is when I listened to the voice in my head instead of the whisper from my heart. And that’s the truth!

“I don’t know about that,” Lenny grinned. “I’ve followed my heart a few times and ended up on the wrong end of the stick.”

“No, you haven’t,” Mr. Mahoney said with authority in his voice. “But maybe you misinterpreted your emotions as messages from your heart and, for sure, this can get us all in muddy waters.”

“Emotions are of the heart!”

“No, they’re not. People are raised to believe they are but emotions are of the brain. They arrive with lust, with greed, with fear, with selfish intent, anger and upset. Emotions are a product of ego and we all have them.”

“I don’t know,” Lenny repeated. “I know I felt a lot of emotion when I was falling in love with Donna. I mean we both had a lot of emotion.” There was innuendo in his grin.

“Love and lust creates a great mixture in that context,” Mr. Mahoney winked. Lenny smiled, agreeing. “We could talk a lot about that,” Mr. Mahoney added, laughing a little. “But right now I want to make sure you know the difference between emotion and the way your heart talks to you. And, I assure you that it does every day of your life. In fact, let me tell you how my grandmother explained it to me…”

I had chopped a lot of wood by midwinter and after around three months of it I was stuck between two emotions. The first was I was physically tired and I wanted to play with my friends after school and especially on Saturdays. I think it would have been more fun if my two friends had stuck with it but with them gone I was taking on a big responsibility for a boy. I’d turned out to be a pretty steady worker and chopping and stacking wood was no easy chore. The second thing was, I liked having my own money in my pocket and the only way I knew how to do that was to keep at it. I had this dilemma for a good month when the boys at school started a football team. I wanted on that team but the players had been chosen while I was swinging an ax.

One late afternoon when I was dragging myself home, I saw Grandma outside chopping our wood and this reminded me I hadn’t kept up our own kindling. She was good-natured about it though and when I offered to take the ax from her hand she wouldn’t let me. She said the exercise was good for her. I did help her stack it and we both carried armfuls into the house. We had hot milk and while we were sitting in the kitchen drinking it, I told her I was thinking about telling people I wouldn’t be chopping their wood anymore. She said if I felt in my heart I ought to quit then I ought to quit. I was thankful she was supportive and wanted me to make up my own mind. My trouble was I knew that a lot of the old folks I worked for really needed me and this made me feel guilty in a lot of ways for wanting to quit. The truth is I was over a barrel in an emotional way! I mean, some people just thanked me to death and I could see they were so old and crippled up, they needed someone to help out. I finally owned up to it and told my grandmother the truth. I wanted to have time to play and at the same time I wanted to earn some money. I didn’t tell her that most of this was because I wanted to buy her the cameo necklace she liked so well. Grandma was the love of my life and I wanted to do something really nice for her.

She listened to my tale of woe and finally she asked what I really wanted to do in my heart. I started to tell her what I thought and she shook her head. “David,” she said in a serious tone, “I didn’t ask you what you think; I asked you what you felt in your heart.”

I wanted to do both. You know, I wanted my cake and to eat it too. Well, what the hell, I had turned eleven along about then. But that didn’t matter because my grandmother never talked to me like I was a kid—she always talked to me like she would any grownup and I think that’s important somehow. In fact, I was the same with my own children and they all turned out just fine. So she asked me again what I wanted to do in my heart. I told her I didn’t know. Not for sure! She told me to empty my head and not think about anything at all, to push thoughts out of myself and open up. She said by doing this I would open the door and windows of my heart and it would always tell me what to do.

I don’t know exactly why I said what I did but I told her that what I really wanted in my heart was to work at the grocery store. It had nothing to do with what we were talking about. On the other hand, there was something about the atmosphere in that little store that I liked. I wanted to work behind the counter and wear a white apron like Mr. Hanson and his wife. I don’t know what it was but every time we went in, I had this feeling that it was what I wanted to do. I would watch Mr. Hanson stack the fruit or ring up the cash register and I thought it was the ultimate job. Maybe it was because of all the things he sold in the store; whatever it was, I wanted to work there. That was my first vision or dream, you might say.

My grandmother thought for a minute and then she said that maybe this was something I could accomplish when I was a little older but I was putting the horse before the cart. She reminded me I was either going to keep chopping wood for people or I wasn’t. It didn’t matter to her what I decided to do so she refused to sway me one way or another although, secretly, I wanted her to tell me to quit and go play baseball with the other boys. With that in mind, I tried to squeeze an answer out of her in a tricky sort of way. I asked if she were me what she would do?

She knew what I was up to, of course.

She said, “Honey, you see the snow falling outside the window? It all looks the same but it isn’t. Every snowflake is different and when we think on that, it tells us a fascinating secret about the entire Universe—everything in it is special and unique. Why, every flower in the garden and every tree in the forest and every little animal has its own personality and make up. And, so do we! So what I would do may not be what you should do because, just like the river, everything is on its own path.”

I wanted to know how people knew what path to choose. And she said, “This is where the heart comes in. Your heart knows what is best for you and on which path you belong. And it tells you everything that’s good and right if you listen to it. Take your Uncle Pete. He loved to build things and he was good at it. You know the rocker in the front room? He made that when he was just seventeen years old and it’s as pretty and nice as any rocker could be. But your Uncle Pete broke from Nature, so to speak. He never thought he could make enough money building things so he put on a suit and tie and decided he was going to go off and make a fortune in business. He always swore he wanted to become a ‘somebody’ in his life and of course he already was a somebody—he was his self, just like you might say all of those snowflakes coming down are themselves.

“Well, poor old Pete died almost broke and filled with frustration and disappointment because he never succeeded in the way he wanted to. In fact, while he was on his deathbed he told me what he should have done was build things and maybe he could have turned that into a big business. He said, ‘through it all, all I ever wanted to do was make things out of wood. But you know, my father and his father were carpenters and I felt I had to be something more than that.’

“You see, your Uncle Pete never learned to flow with the messages from his own heart. He thought he was smarter than that, so he listened to his brain and his brain told him he could make all this money and show the world how important he was. The truth is if he’d done what made him happy, he might have owned a big furniture factory now or maybe not. But that’s not the point. The point is that he would have had a life of joy and peace of mind. And that’s what we’re all born to have! And we always know in our heart where to find that joy and peace.”

I wanted to know how a person knew when their heart talked to them because I’d been trying to listen to my own heart and I hadn’t heard a thing.

My grandmother told me that, unlike other things in Nature, people were the only ones who took the rivers of their own lives and tried to make them flow up a hill. The thought of this put a kind of sad chuckle in her voice. “You see people like your Uncle Pete every day. You see the banker who always wanted to be a fisherman, fishermen who always wanted to be farmers, doctors who would rather be artists and it goes on and on. It is no wonder people always look so sour all the time.

“But you don’t have to follow the herd,” she said. “You can follow your heart and this is the way you do it. There’s a thing call intuition and this is how the Universe points the way for you, keeps you on your path. Every living thing follows their intuition—that’s why the birds sing, you might say—except for human beings. We follow our brains. And, so, people cry a lot, for example, when they marry the wrong person. Well, there was a time when their intuition told them they shouldn’t, but they closed their heart and fell into the trappings of their brain. You see, our brain always tells us what we want to hear—don’t listen to your heart, the brain says, you can make the marriage work. And after a year or so the unhappy couple is saying, ‘we don’t know how we got into this mess.’ But, of course, they got into this mess by not following their intuition or, in other words, the voice of their heart. I want you to remember this when some day you are grownup and want to marry someone. Close your mind and open up your heart and you’ll know if your young lady is right for you.

“This is how it works in everything you do. In life you’ll come upon one crossroad after another, just like where you are right now between playing and working. Well, you can stand at that crossroad for a hundred years and never really know which way to go if you try to think on it. But your heart will always tell you the right path to take and you’ll feel its intuition saying, go back, go forward, turn left or right. And you will either do it or you won’t. You’re free, you see, to make your own choices. And no matter where you are at any given moment, you are always exactly where your own choices have taken you. If you’ve followed your heart, you’ll be in a nice place but if you haven’t, you might be in a place where one problem simply follows the other.

“So there are only two choices, no matter who you are or where you are at any time in your life: You either follow your heart or you don’t. But there’s something else to know about all this. Your intuition won’t nag at you or try to convince you; it’ll simply give you a whisper and if you choose not to listen to it, it goes away.”

I wanted to know why that was. And my grandmother said, “Because you’re free, honey, because you’re free.”

“Your grandmother had her own ideas, didn’t she,” Lenny said approvingly.

“She was her own person, that’s for sure,” Mr. Mahoney agreed.

“Do you really think everything is different?” Lenny asked, as he had been thinking hard about this. “I mean, look at the grove of elm trees out there. One looks exactly like the other.”

“My grandmother was way ahead of her time in her own way,” Mr. Mahoney said. “Today we know she is right because every living thing has its uniqueDNAexcept for, I guess, identical twins and that might make the difference.”

“You’re kidding. How’d your grandmother know that?”

“Don’t you remember?” Mr. Mahoney asked kindly. “We already know everything we want to know. It’s in our potential.”

“So what did you decide to do? Did you keep chopping wood or did you give it up?”

“I followed my heart,” Mr. Mahoney answered. “I had this feeling that I should keep chopping wood for the older people and that’s what I did for the rest of winter. And you know, after I made up my mind to do it, I felt good inside and I didn’t think much about football. And speaking of winter, we had some surprise visitors and from their visit I learned another secret that would change my life forever.”

I don’t remember what month it was but it was in the dead of winter and we’d had one of those snows that lasted a week or more. My grandmother and I had been sitting in the living room—in those days we called it the front room—watching the snow falling outside the window like we so often did. I remember this particular day was dark and gray and so being in the house felt cozy and lazy. One thing for sure, it was a Sunday because in the winter we almost always stayed in the house on Sundays.

My grandmother had pinned my latest arithmetic test on the kitchen wall because my teacher had stuck a big gold star at the top of it for not missing any of the questions. As soon as I’d shown the paper to my grandmother, she beamed. “You see,” she told me that Friday afternoon when I got home and showed her how well I’d done. “You had it in you all the time. And, if you want to, you’ll keep getting better at it.” She gave me one of those smiles of hers. She always had a word of encouragement no matter how well I did at something or if I didn’t do something very well at all. As I think about it, she was always saying that encouragement was the key to greatness and if no one else gives it to you, you have to give it to yourself.

Anyway, there we were relaxing in the house when sometime in the early afternoon we saw a car driving down the road toward us. We both hurried to the window to see who might be coming to visit because we never had a whole lot of company living way out in the sticks like we did. I thought maybe it was my father and I was excited for a few minutes but of all people, it was Mrs. Morrison and her husband the preacher. My grandmother shook her head as they walked toward the porch. They said they drove out to see how we were since they never saw us at church. And Preacher Morrison added with a broad smile that if people didn’t come to the church, he was always willing to bring the church to them. Grandma made everyone tea because the preacher thought coffee was sinful.

They asked all kinds of questions about me and seemed to know more than they should have. They knew I was doing better in school, for one thing, and for another they knew my mother had died and my father had gone to work for the mines. And that was a mystery to me since my grandmother never shared much about her private life at all with anyone. All the same it was difficult for me to keep a straight face because it was absolutely true. Mrs. Morrison looked like she had taken a bite out of a big old lemon even when she smiled.

I kept glancing at my grandmother with puckered lips. I was doing my best to get her to laugh but she would not pay any attention to me. There was more judgment on the Morrisons’ faces than a room full of Superior Court judges and I thought they were awful people; neither of them seemed to be able to talk above a whisper. We sat there for more than an hour listening to how the congregation prayed for us and hoped we’d come to the church and join in. In a town as small as this just about everyone belonged to the same church except for the Catholics, who, according to the preacher, belonged to the devil. Finally, Mrs. Morrison actually told my grandmother that she was getting up in years and she would surely go to hell if she didn’t start coming to the Lord’s Church.

And my grandmother asked them which church that was.

Preacher Morrison told her the Lord’s Church was The Lord’s Church. And this just happened to be the actual name of his church, of course. There was a big sign out front of the old redbrick building that read, Welcome to The Lord’s Church. So he knew my grandmother was giving him a little challenge. Grandma liked to do that to people every now and then. She said it kept them on their toes. He started quoting Scripture and Grandma finally told him that maybe he was right, maybe she and I ought to start going to church on Sundays. The preacher and his wife got all bright-eyed when she said this. But then she said she was thinking about going to the blackBaptistChurch that was also in town because she liked the music. Well, that truly insulted the Morrisons and they left, as my grandmother said, on their high horses. And as soon as they drove away, I told my grandmother that I hated those people; they were so stupid. She said, “Well, I guess I was a little rough on them but they didn’t come to visit, they were here to make a sale and I wasn’t about to buy any of their goods.”

I remember looking up at her in a distant kind of way, asking if she believed in God.

“God is the spirit of all things, and that includes black Baptists and that’s why I said what I did. But now, that brings up something else I think it’s time for you know.” She took me by the hand and walked me to the window. “Tell me what you see.”

I told her I saw the snow falling and the gray sky and that was about all a person could see that day.

“And what can you learn from it?” she asked.

I thought for sure I knew how to answer the question, because I remembered what we talked about before. Proudly I said, “I can learn that every single snowflake is different, just like the preacher and his wife are different and we’re different and everything else is different.” I was sure I had pleased my grandmother with what I had said. I should have known I was in for a surprise.

“There’s something else,” she replied, coaxing me to seek another answer.

I thought and thought. Finally I admitted, “I don’t know what else, Grandma, ‘cause it all looks the same to me even if I know it’s all different.”

“That’s it,” she applauded, giving my hand a squeeze. “What you learned from the falling snow is while everything is different in one view, everything is the same in another. And that goes for people just as it does for everything else.”

I’m sure I gave her a confused look.

“Like the snowflakes, every one of us is different from everyone else. We have different languages, different colored skin and a lot of different ideas about what life is all about. Some people are mean and cranky and others are as nice as they can be. One person is poor in attitude and another rich; some fat and some skinny.” Grandma puffed up her cheeks when she said “fat” and sucked in her cheeks when she said “skinny.” She always liked to make me laugh when she could. She reminded me that some people had strong and healthy bodies and others didn’t. And finally she said, “So you can see, there are no two people exactly alike and most are as different as they can be. And this is not to mention how different the genders are. I mean boys and girls!

“Now then,” she added with the sweetest smile, “I want you to open up your heart so you can grasp what I’m about to tell you. All those differences are apparent because like the falling snow, we are, at the same time, all the same. Take the preacher and his wife. They are the same as you, only responding to the different circumstances of their own lives. They were both raised by different parents than you were; they both are responding to the experiences in their own lives and in lots of ways they’ve become those experiences just like you have in your little life. And so they live in different realities than you. But, honey, when they cry, their tears are as salty as yours and their hearts feel just as broken as yours does. When they’re afraid, they feel just as scared. And when they’re lonely, they feel as lost as everybody else. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

“I guess so,” I answered.

“When they get sick or hurt, they feel pain like you do; they have their dreams and their sorrows. And so whenever you see someone—the hobo or the richest person inVirginia—know that he or she is you only in a different body responding to different challenges.” Then she added, “Everyone has lessons to learn in their own way.”

That was a lot to comprehend for a young boy but finally I understood what she most wanted me to realize. She said, “David, you can never hate anyone because when you do, you are hating a subtle part of you. The preacher and his wife think they know what is best for everyone else and if we’re not careful, we have the potential to be as stiff-necked and narrow minded. It just depends on what we choose. We’ve talked about potential before,” she said, “but I want you to know this also. We ordinarily think potential is all about the wonderful things we might do and accomplish and each person has his own. But this is not case. We are all fishermen in the same sea of potential. Everything in the Universe is information and energy and when we reach into what we think is our special potential, we are reaching into a creative cosmos where everything is possible for all of us. And so when you think you’re tapping into your potential, it’s the same endless ocean of possibilities that the Morrisons tap into, the Hansons at the store tap into and everyone else taps into, including me.

“But potential is not guaranteed positive. We can all reach into those possibilities and become hateful and destructive just as easily as we can become helpful and constructive. We have within us the potential of ignorance just as we do wisdom. We have the potential to become thieves or theologians, plumbers or philosophers, doctors or derelicts. It’s all there for the choosing. Oh, David,” she said so intently. “It’s so important that you know these things. There is no condition that cannot be overcome by choice.”

Spring arrived and I was anxious for summer vacation from school. And also, I was relieved to know I could quit chopping wood because I wanted my freedom more than anything in the world. I wanted to be back up in the woods, which is the greatest playground on the face of the earth.

My grandmother was anxious for the warm weather too and I think she liked those back hills ever as much as I did. I had a problem though. I started getting real headaches and sometimes they got so bad I had to lie down; I felt like I couldn’t move. They were awful things and they made me cry. Now I wouldn’t swear this was true but I think it was the pressure of telling people I wasn’t going to work for them anymore. I mean, I told this older lady I was going to do other things in the summer and she gave me the saddest look. She lived alone and I think she liked having me around from time to time. Sometimes when I’d go to the door to collect my dime or quarter—I forget what she paid me—she’d talk and talk and always invite me in for cookies and milk and I could hardly leave.

Anyway, Grandma cured the headaches. You won’t believe the remedy. It wasn’t the violet flower one of the Native Americans; this one was quite different! She’d chop up a big old onion, salt it and add some olive oil. She made a kind of paste out of it, spread it on a piece of cloth and put it on the spot where the pain was. Then she’d put hot water in a pan, add some peppermint tea to it and have me put my feet into the water. I have no idea why, but it never took long for those headaches to go away. You know, people today scoff at the old ways. There was one other thing. Every night before I went to bed and every morning when I woke, she’d make me drink a cup of peppermint tea. I guess I had to do that for a month or so but the headaches went away and I don’t think I’ve had but one or two since then and never as bad as when I was a youngster.

Oh yes, my grandmother did remind me of that time after I first arrived when I had pretended to have a headache; she told me I shouldn’t have done that because it sent a message out and whatever you send out, always comes home to you. She said people think life happens to them but she said the ancient people knew nothing happens by pure accident. She said that what we say and what we think works like a boomerang…it goes way out beyond time and space and then comes right back to you.

She had to explain what a boomerang was because I didn’t know back then.

“Your grandmother talked about things then that most people never think about now. She had a lot of sophisticated thoughts for a woman who had been raised in the backwaters,” Lenny noted.

“She did for a fact,” Mr. Mahoney agreed. “She was the greatest teacher in my life and I am convinced I am sitting here because of what she taught me. I knew everything about succeeding while I was still no more than a puppy and of course, that gave me a real edge in life.” He returned to his story.

By the time summer came, I had forgotten I’d ever had headaches at all. And you guessed it, the first thing my grandmother wanted to do was pack a picnic basket and hike up to the river and so that’s what we did. Well, I’d taken to playing baseball with the other children by then and so I wasn’t as anxious to go up into hills like I was the year before. But Grandma wanted to go and whenever she did, I always went with her even if it meant I couldn’t play ball or be with my friends. She was my best friend, and I knew that even when I was eleven. And of course I loved her with all of my heart.

So there we were sitting on the riverbank again with the sun shining and everything turning green. There were still a few patches of snow on the ground though; they never went away until at least mid-June. The river was high and crystal clear. It was so clear we were able to watch two fish having the time of their lives. They must have been playing or mating or something because they were having a great time and we were very entertained by it all. But finally my grandmother said, “There’s a lesson to be learned here. What do you think it is?”

I thought a long time about how to answer her but I had no idea what she was talking about. She said, “You have to remember to put fun in what you do just as those fish do. Take your Uncle Pete. He spent all his days on this earth waiting to enjoy his life and you know what, he up and died before he ever did.”

“He never had fun?”

“Well, I guess now and then he did but mostly he was always living in a time when he would have more money and more success. He was a man filled with many ambitions and big dreams. He always wanted to be rich so he lived a life of never enjoying himself. He used to talk a lot about having a big swimming pool on a big piece of property in back of a big house. None of which he ever obtained! He used to say that when he built this wonderful swimming pool for himself he would swim every day because that was his favorite thing to do. He was forever talking about how healthy swimming was for a person and he did swim a lot when he was around your age.

“I told him to walk up here in the summer and swim in the river like he used to but he never did. He always said he was too busy and had too much on his mind. The problem was, what he had on his mind was what he didn’t have. That’s an awful sad way for a person to live but people do it all the time, so I suspect most people don’t know as much as the fish do when it comes to a lot of things. Do you know where those fish are right now?”

The question made me laugh. I told her, of course I did. They were in the river!

Grandma smiled. “Honey,” she said, “they are in the present moment and if you look all around the woods you won’t find anything that isn’t, except perhaps another human being. That human is probably like your Uncle Pete; instead of just enjoying where he’s at, he’s probably thinking about what he has to do tomorrow and what he didn’t do today and should have done yesterday. Doesn’t make much sense does it?”

Nope, it didn’t.

One thing for sure, my grandmother always seemed to enjoy doing things and she made just about everything fun. Back then we had linoleum floors except for the bedrooms which were bare wood and she’d have a good time even mopping her floors. The truth is, I never heard a complaint out of her. Well, now and then she’d admit her back hurt but even then she’d smile and say things like well, the old gray mare ain’t what she used to be. I guess she took things as they were and there was a lesson in that, too.

You know as I look back, that little house of ours was such a wonderful place. Oh, it wasn’t much more than a shack but it was so cozy and kept up so nice, I still call it home. And that’s exactly what it was. I mean, it was a place where you always felt safe and at peace with yourself.

My grandmother said a person could always tell if a house was happy or not. She said as soon as you walk into any place at all, you know if it’s friendly and joyful or unhappy. And you know, after all these years, I’ve learned it’s the same for everything else, including an office or store. You can have the best furniture and the fanciest everything but you can’t hide the atmosphere. If people aren’t having a good time and don’t feel safe and at peace, the environment is filled with feelings of uncertainty. And even if you paint the walls bright and cheery, you can’t hide the frustration and upset after the paint dries.

“You know,” Lenny said, “that’s one of the major reasons I want to leave Puffer’s. That warehouse is like a dungeon most of the time. I don’t know what it is but it’s not me. Everyone who works there is just getting through each day by waiting to go home and leave it behind. That’s not the only reason,” he added; “I want a job where there’s a better future, too.”

Mr. Mahoney understood Lenny was making a pitch for himself and he appreciated it. He liked Lenny but in the back of his mind he thought there were people far more qualified for the job he was offering.

He continued telling his story. “That reminds me of my desire to work in the little store in town.”

One day about midway through the summer, I took a bath, put on my best clothes and walked into town. I had decided to ask Mr. Hanson for a job. I’d told my grandmother my intentions and of course she had encouraged me. She told me I would never know unless I asked and so off I went to apply for my first real job.

Mr. Hansom seemed to enjoy the fact that I wanted to work in the store but he told me I was too young and anyway, he and his wife had always managed to do all the work themselves. I went home disappointed, as you can imagine. When I shared my defeat with my grandmother, she reminded me that not everything worked out like we think they should or the way we want them to. That’s a harsh lesson for a little kid, you know. But that evening she took me outside to sit on the porch again saying she wanted to watch the sun go down.

As we watched a glorious sunset, she reminded me of the river and how it always reaches its destination, no matter how many obstacles get into its way. She said everything including animals follows the path that is right for them, except for people who think they are separated from Nature and know more than it does. And, she told me that’s why people end up in so many messes. “Do you know what causes the most problems and troubles in the world?” She didn’t give me time to respond and answered the question herself. “People want to control everything. Not just Nature but everything, especially other people! That’s because they think their way is the best way,” she said. “How many times have you heard someone say something like ‘this is the way it is and the way things work’ as if they know the world better, and what is right and what is wrong more than everyone else?”

I told her my father was like that. He was always telling my mother and me the ways things were and how people were supposed to be. “Yes, I know, ” she smiled; “I’ve seen that bullheadedness of his lots of times. Well, he is no different from your Uncle Pete, the preacher and his wife and most others. They get these ideas in their head and they build their world around them. Do you know what a concept is?” I shrugged. It was a pretty big word for me at the time.

“It’s an idea made up. Mostly we get concepts from others but we make them up for ourselves as well. Unless people think about it, they live out their lives building one concept on another. Here’s another big word—ideology. Ideology is a bunch of concepts put together, so if you know what one means you know what they both mean. And both are the cause of hatefulness and trouble in the world and, for that matter, in our private lives more than anything else. When I was about twice the age you are right now we had a world war—that was around 1918—and all it was about was the greed of ideologies. It caused so much death and suffering. But, on the other hand, that was the way civilization began. It seems our kind stepped out of Nature and began building an us and them world and anybody that wasn’t like us became the enemy. It makes you sick to think about. I mean, the plain ignorance of it all. Look,” she said, pointing upwards. “What’s the old sun doing right now?”

I told her it was going down.

“You see how it works? The sun is not going anyplace; we are! This old earth is following its natural path around the sun and the idea that the sun goes down—or rises—is a concept. And this is why I brought you out on the porch tonight. I wanted you to realize that we get an idea in our head and we think that idea is the truth. Well, the truth is what sets you free, honey, and the truth is always in your heart. But from the time we’re babies, our heads are filled with all these ideas about ourselves, about others and what the world is supposed to be all about. And we are enslaved by all those ideas and the more we’re enslaved by them the farther and farther from the truth we get.

“David, always know that concepts and ideologies are illusions. And so if you ever get confused between what is and what isn’t, take yourself outside in the evening and visit with the sun and you’ll remember what we talked about tonight. Or, find yourself a Catholic, a Lutheran and a Mormon and listen to what they have to say to each other…” The thought actually made her giggle. “‘I’m right. No, I’m right,’ they’ll carry on. And ask them where God is in all this and you know what they’ll do? They’ll answer with dogma, concepts and ideologies like the politicians and the rest of the bureaucrats do.”

I asked her where God was. “God is in our heart and in the spirit of all things. God is life, honey, and God is love. And now I want to talk about what happened to you today,” she said, changing the subject. “I know you feel a little broken hearted because you didn’t get the job you wanted. Well, I think it’s wonderful for a young boy like you to want a job at all. But, nevertheless, you ended up with the concept that you lost something by not getting it. Grownup people do the same thing and many of them live their lives in the concept of losing what they never had in the first place. Now doesn’t that sound silly? Why, you don’t know what is up ahead waiting for you. It might be a better job, so learn to take your ups and downs with a grain of salt.”

I told her that was difficult to do because I wanted that job more than anything else in the world and it put a spark in her eyes. She looked at me with such a sweet smile and said, “You want that job more than anything else because you didn’t get it. And it’s a very good example of living in concept. Tomorrow you’ll be playing baseball and having a good time at it and you might even be glad you’re not stacking apples at the store. For all you know, maybe it’s time for you to play because you sure didn’t do much of that last winter.

“Now, before we go inside, I want you to sit here for a minute and look at the world and open your heart to it. Say ‘I love you, world’ and you’ll find out that the Universe loves you, too.”

It appeared Lenny had quit listening and so Mr. Mahoney buzzed his secretary to ask if she would mind ordering them a pizza. It was nearlytwo o’clockand he thought they had better eat something.

Lenny had been listening, of course, but he had permitted his mind to drift into interpreting what Mr. Mahoney had been saying. Why was he talking so much about wanting a job and not getting it? Was this a subtle message telling him he wasn’t going to get the job he wanted? Mr. Mahoney was smart and obviously a nice person, so maybe this was his way of letting Lenny down easily. He didn’t know, but he felt he was never going to get this job. He did not let these apprehensions show, however. He smiled and said he hadn’t had pizza for a long time.

Mr. Mahoney returned to the chair across from Lenny and sat down. “I’m a pizza fanatic,” he said. “I have Coke in the fridge or a couple cans of beer; you can have what you want.”

Lenny wanted a beer but he thought this might be a test of some kind and so he said a Coke would be fine. As it turned out, Mr. Mahoney drank Coke as well and Lenny thought he had made the right decision. He was feeling nervous again and the feeling was twirling in the pit of his stomach. He thought it might be hunger and he did feel better as they ate. “Was your grandmother a religious woman?” Lenny asked as they continued to share the pizza.

“Yes, very much so, in her way,” Mr. Mahoney answered thoughtfully. “But her church was Nature and her God was in the heart. Not just her heart but at least metaphorically in the heart of everything. And she really would talk to things and tell them they were pretty or handsome, that kind of thing. I told you how the school kids poked fun of her that first year I moved into town. They stopped doing so after they got to know me better but she was still the target of a lot of small town gossip. And you can bet the school children repeated things about her that they had heard at home.”

“It seems she was such a nice lady. And, smart! It’s difficult to believe people didn’t respond to those qualities.”

“That was a lot of her teaching, if you paid close attention. Most people do not seek truth, they seek affirmation—and this is especially true of a lot of well-meaning churchgoers. This not only applies to fundamentalists, but to everyone. People become enslaved by concepts and live their lives as extensions of them. Let’s face it; sexism, racism, hatred for other cultures, war itself, man’s inhumanity to man are the results of people acting out of the concepts given them. What is the difference between a black Baptist and a white Protestant except their concepts? What is the difference between the Chinese and Americans, Jews and Muslims except for their concepts? Don’t we all have love in our hearts? Don’t we all love our children? Don’t we all want to have peaceful, happy lives? What keeps these simple attributes from the world? Concepts, ideologies and the grim face of dogma,” Mr. Mahoney said. He had a serious expression on his face as he shared this with Lenny but then, he was smiling and the smile quickly turned into a chuckle.

Lenny wanted to know what made him laugh.

“I was thinking about my grandmother,” Mr. Mahoney answered. “She always used to say that if God ever did go to church he’d probably go to a black one. Well, she said a ‘Negro’ church because that’s what African-Americans were called back then. Nevertheless, she said God would go there to join in the singing and dancing. To her, that was religion because it celebrated life and made worship fun.

“Did your grandmother really believe that?” Lenny inquired.

“She always used to say the world was a song, forever in a symphony that could be seen, felt and heard if a person truly opened their heart to it.”

“It would be nice if the world really was like that.”

“It is,” Mr. Mahoney said; “we just get out of tune with it. And of course, the human being is the only species that does,” he added.

“Why do you think that is?”

“Because we’re free to choose.” And he returned to his story.

Around the end of July during that second summer, my two best friends, James and Eddie and I, well, we had ourselves a plan. I guess playing baseball wore itself out because we were all set to go way up to what people around town called the falls and prospect for gold. I think somebody had told us thatPastureRiver used to be packed with gold nuggets and of course we kids believed that. It stirred our imaginations on getting rich quick! We planned on hiking up there and spending three days at it. I was very excited because I had never camped out all night before and so this was a big adventure for me. What worried us was getting our parents’ permission. I told my grandmother the plan and she said it would be fine as long as I promised to be careful. I made that promise right away. James said his parents would let him go to but Eddie’s parents didn’t think it was a good idea for the three of us to be out of sight for three whole days. He said he was going anyway.

Grandma was really helpful. As soon as I told her what we wanted to do, she took me out to the shed behind the house. She kept a lot of things stored inside and she managed to unlock a lock that hadn’t been touched for, well, I wouldn’t want to guess how long. But it was rusty and she had to jimmy the key for a long time to get it to work. There were all kinds of things in there—boxes, old clothing, harnesses, tools and stuff that looked like treasures to me. The biggest surprise was Grandma had a tent and a sleeping bag like the kind used in World War I. What she didn’t have was anything like the backpacks we use today and she said I’d need something, so we drove the wagon into town and bought an old hunter’s pack at Hanson’s store. Mr. Hanson was very friendly to me and thanked me again for wanting to work there. He told my grandmother he thought I was a swell boy and my grandmother agreed with him.

As we were walking back to the wagon with our arms filled with everything we’d bought at the store, Grandma stopped to look at the cameo necklace again. She really loved that necklace and said she wondered why no one had purchased it yet. Well, I knew the answer to that but I wasn’t about to share it. The winter before when I was chopping wood for people, I had managed to give the shop owner seven or eight dollars and I promised I’d pay for the whole necklace if she’d promise not to sell it to anyone else. The truth is I felt bad because I was supposed to pay her at least two dollars a month and I did until that summer. She had kept her word though because the necklace was right in the window where it had always been. I remember looking up at Grandma and saying, “We best get home.” I wanted to get away from the shop in case the owner came out and asked me why I hadn’t been there for such a long time.

On the day before our great gold adventure was to begin, I walked to town in the afternoon to meet with James and Eddie. I went to James’ house first and his mother told me he was sick and in bed. I think he had poison ivy or something, I don’t remember but the idea that he couldn’t go on the camping trip was really upsetting to me. I saw Eddie in town and reminded him we were meeting at my grandmother’s the next morning. I asked if he was going for sure and he said he was. I was relieved because I knew my grandmother wouldn’t let me go by myself. Anyway, I asked two or three times, “Ed,” I said—I always called Eddie “Ed” when I was serious—“Ed, you’re really going to be there, right?” He swore he would be at the house by eight at the latest and off we’d go.

I was excited. For one thing I’d heard about the falls and I had always wanted to hike up to them. The other thing was, I really thought I’d find some gold and for sure I’d pay off the necklace and, well, I had all kinds of dreams about what a bag full of gold would buy. I thought a car would be the big surprise. And back then kids drove at twelve years old. It was a country town with country roads and, I might add, the two policemen in town knew everybody. I don’t even remember if you had to have a license to drive. I don’t think so but it was a sleepy place really and what I call a Norman Rockwell place to be. I mean it; sometimes I look at his paintings and a lot of them remind me of back home. We had one barber, the Hanson’s general store, the dress and jewelry shop…and let me see, the feed and grain store and a couple of other places. Hardware! Simpson’s, it was called. It wasn’t much of a hardware store but it was there, along with a drug store and that was about it. There was one lawyer in town and a little shack called the Police Department, three churches and a four-room schoolhouse. I don’t know where people bought their gas but they kept it in cans. They did build a gas station in the following year though, and at the same time somebody built a regular grocery store and you can bet the Hansons didn’t like it. It was twice the size and sold nothing but groceries. I’ll tell you more about that a little later.

So, the next morning rolled around and so dideight o’clock, thennine o’clockand still no Eddie. I sat there on the porch with all my gear waiting. By ten, I knew he wasn’t going to show up. I was angry and hurt. Finally Grandma came out and said, “Well, maybe it’s best you don’t go. You can always go next summer.”

Well. I wanted to burst out crying. I mean I just had this huge urge to bawl like a baby! I didn’t, but no matter how I fought it, tears streaked down my cheeks. I wanted to go camping and find all that gold in the river and be rich. I blamed Eddie and I swore I’d never talk to him again. I had the fantasy of beating him up. Well, what the hell, I was devastated!

Grandma leaned down and gave me a kiss on the head and then she went back inside. So there I was left sitting on the porch feeling sorry for myself. I must have sat there for another ten minutes or so but then, I heard the loudest clanging behind me. I turned and there was Grandma standing in the doorway with the screen door open. She was banging two pie tins together and smiling away.

I told her I wasn’t in the mood for any pie. And, by the way, she used to make the best apple and berry pies you ever tasted. She quit banging the pie tins and said, “Honey, these are not to make pie with, these are to pan gold with! We’re going camping!”

You have to remember that women in those days didn’t wear pants, so Grandma wore a dress while I was dressed like the great explorer, feeling brave as could be with my hunting knife in its scabbard attached to my belt. The pack was heavy—we had can goods and I can’t remember what else but she had made a kind pack for herself and carried blankets and the canvas tent. That tent had to be at least twenty pounds and if I hadn’t been a naïve little kid I would never have let her carry all that she did.

We made it all the way to the falls. It took us a good three hours and as far as I was concerned we were a million miles back into the woods. There was such a wonderful feeling of isolation and a kind of grand aloneness. It’s difficult to explain but you just felt free from all the encumbrances of daily life. You know what I mean? There wasn’t school or anything to confine you. You could not see any sign of civilization no matter which direction you looked. I worried a bit about bears and lions, but I didn’t mention this.

We rested and ate some jerky. I don’t know how she managed because she had a lot of teeth missing in the back of her mouth. After we ate, we set up the little tent, Grandma spread the blankets on one side and I laid out the sleeping bag on the other. I tried to convince her to take the sleeping bag but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said she felt more comfortable using the blankets. I now realize she wanted to make sure I was warm and cozy but I believed her at the time and I had never slept in a sleeping bag before so I was excited about it. This too was an important experience as far as I was concerned.

The falls were not very tall but they were beautiful in the way they cascaded over the rocks and into the river. The river was wider where we were now; there were some small rapids but the river became calm again after only a few yards. I guess we were both pretty tired because we just sat for the longest time listening to the falling water and looking at the scenery. Then I caught my second wind and wanted to go exploring. There was a steep, rocky hillside across the way; I wanted to climb to the top and look at the stretch of forest and Grandma said that would be fine. I crossed the river taking one small step at a time on an old tree branch that lay fallen from one bank to the next. It was kind of scary and I felt quite heroic when I reached the other side. I waved to Grandma who had been watching closely and she waved back.

I turned toward the rocky ledge before me. It was a lot steeper than it had looked from the other side but I could see that if I managed to climb up the rocky incline, the rest of the hill was easy. So I started up the rock and got about seven feet above the ground and looked down. It felt very high and looking at the falls made me feel a little dizzy. I decided that the hill could wait and I nervously retreated and crossed back to where my grandmother was. I wasn’t about to let her know I got scared but I knew it and I felt embarrassed and angry at my cowardliness. You know how boys are about such things. On top of it all, the climb looked so easy from where we were sitting. I stayed in a grump for the rest of the afternoon. Later, Grandma and I took the pie pans and tried our luck at fishing gold out of the river. That brought me out of my funk. We didn’t have any luck though and we finally gave up for the day.

That night we built a campfire and Grandma knew exactly what she was doing. She dug a little hole using her hands and a stick and then had me find rocks to put around it. We heated pork and beans in a frying pan she had tied to the back of my pack. They tasted wonderful! Something happens to the appetite when you’re in the hills like that. Things taste and smell better, and you feel better, more alive. It’s difficult to explain. It’s like your body feels at home even if your mind is responding to a strange environment. But, it was spooky, too. Once it got dark, the isolation wasn’t as friendly. I mean, you can’t see into the darkness sitting by a fire and so you feel vulnerable to everything. I was sure I heard a bear two or three times but Grandma looked as content as she could be so I didn’t mention it.

We went to bed early. We crawled into the tent and I snuggled into the sleeping bag while Grandma lay on one cover and covered herself up with another. I know now she had to be very uncomfortable because that blanket of hers was not enough separation from the hard ground. But of course I didn’t think about that at the time. I thought she was just fine! We talked in the darkness for a long time and Grandma told me something that is probably one of the most important lessons of my entire life. She was smarter than I gave her credit for because she knew I had endured a failure that day. I never made it up the ledge or to the top of the hill I wanted to climb and she knew it bothered me.

She never said anything directly about me but as we lay in the darkness of the tent she started talking about Uncle Pete again. She said he could have accomplished anything he wanted to in his life, if he had really wanted to. Sadly enough he was a man who would set out to succeed but then would always come up with all the reasons why he couldn’t. There was always someone who cheated him or he would miss getting some break for one reason or another. He was always saying if he didn’t have bad luck, he wouldn’t have any luck at all. He always wanted to be at the top but he never quite made the climb.

At first I had no idea she was really speaking of my failure to reach the top of my own hill that day. But then she said, “You know, David, it is never the mountain outside you that keeps you from climbing it. It’s the mountain inside you. You remember last year when you started school and had such a hard time at arithmetic? You had a hard time because you had this big, old mountain inside blocking your way. The mountain kept telling you arithmetic was too difficult for you to do. That was a mountain you had to climb and you did it well! So, you see? Once you overcome the fears inside you, it’s possible to do anything you want to do. Remember we talked about potential? Well, a way to look at it is we all build these big mountains inside ourselves like Pete used to do. Each one of his mountains was an excuse why his dreams never came true. But the truth is, he was afraid of being rejected, of failing or succeeding or just working toward his vision in a way that would lead him there one step at a time. Those were the mountains he had inside. And, if he’d only been able to cross them, he would have found his potential on the other side and he would have been the richest man in Virginiabecause that’s what he wanted. And so, honey, I’ll tell you what somebody once told me: if you think you can or if you think you can’t, you’re always right.

That next morning after we had eaten breakfast, I crossed over the tree branch again, climbed up those rocks and made it all the way to the top of the hill. And when I got there, I waved down to my grandmother with both hands and with so much pride that, even now when I think about it, I can still feel it. It never dawned on me until years later that she had taught me to have the courage of my convictions.

I’ll never forget that day.

I sat by myself on top of that hill looking across the woods and all I could see were miles of trees and trails reaching toward every horizon. It was so majestic and yet there was something of a mystery to it at the same time. I can’t explain it really but it was like I felt a part of it all; like I was actually experiencing what Grandma had told me, about everything being the same and our differences were only apparent. I just sat there so much in love with everything, I felt a connection even with the stones. I was happy. I mean the kind of happiness that is completely free and once you’ve felt that kind of joy, you never want to let loose of it.

Something else my grandmother had said as we watched the fish playing on that other day came to mind—the fish were having such a wonderful time because they didn’t know where they ended and the water began. It never made much sense to me until I was at the top of that hill. It was as if I didn’t know where I ended and the world began—I was one with it all. Today, I know what that feeling was and the Buddhists have a saying for it. They call it, all in one and one in all. And once you’ve been there, even for a brief moment, you always want to go back.

I don’t know how long I sat there, but it must have been a good hour or maybe more. I was in full sight of my grandmother so she knew I was just fine. She looked relieved, however, when I finally got back. As soon as I sat down beside her, she asked if I had a good time and I told her I did. Then I said, “You know, Grandma, when I was up there I felt all this love and I think love is in everything. I really do.” I bubbled with pride. I could see how pleased she was and of course that pleased me. She took my hand saying, “God really is love, and you found God today. And just think. God has been in your heart all along.”

And her eyes sparkled with the promise of her next words. “David, now you know the greatest truth of all and you found it all by yourself.”

“That all would sure be nice, if only it were true,” Lenny said.

Mr. Mahoney nodded. He fell into deep thought and then replied. “It is exactly as she said it was, Lenny. Love is in everything. It’s not only true, but it is the greatest truth of all.”

Lenny wanted Mr. Mahoney to hire him and so the last thing he wanted to do was argue with something—anything—he said. Yet, he could not keep himself from responding honestly. “Look, Mr. Mahoney…David…I can’t really connect with what you just said. The world is anything but loving. There are diseases, starvation, wars, torture and all kinds of terrible things. Vast poverty,” he added. “If there really was a loving God, none of that would be in the world. I’m not trying to be disrespectful here but I don’t see much love between people, much less anywhere else.”

“You know, Lenny, it was once thought that everything in the Universe was separate and distinct and everything happened because of cause and effect. This was the worldview especially going back to my grandmother’s time and for hundreds of years before. But before then, people lived in a world of magic, an enchanted world! They believed there were spirits in everything, that we lived in a world that was both physical and spiritual and that we were connected to it all. This came down from the earliest of ancient people and remains in the teachings of the old sages and many modern thinkers. My grandmother could not even read very well but she knew instinctively there was more to life than materialism. Have you read the new physics?”

“I haven’t even read the old physics,” Lenny mused, trying to make a joke.

“Well,” Mr. Mahoney continued, “the new physics tells us the Universe is not separated into different things like stars and galaxies, plants and people but rather, it is a network, a web of relationships. And this is what my grandmother taught me, only in a nonscientific way. You’ll recall that a lot of people gossiped about her because she actually talked to things like the flowers in her garden, the trees, animals even the river…”

“Excuse me,” Lenny interrupted, “I have to say this…” But then he hesitated. His mind was racing with thoughts. Should he keep his mouth shut? Or should he risk stating his own opinion and perhaps angering or disappointing Mr. Mahoney? He probably wasn’t getting the job anyway, he thought, but then again, why was Mr. Mahoney spending all this time with him? Besides, he seemed like a good and understanding man.

“Spit it out,” Mr. Mahoney encouraged in a friendly tone.

“Well, okay,” Lenny said. “While she may have talked to all these things, they never talked back did they? You see what I’m getting at? I mean, maybe she imagined they had little hearts and mind or spirits but…no one has ever heard their roses say, ‘Hi, how about some water today’ or ‘It’s nice to see you, too.’” He hesitated again. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean any disrespect, but isn’t that so?”

Mr. Mahoney smiled. “The new science tells us that consciousness is everywhere, inside us and outside us. And more, that all things are manifested through this consciousness. In fact, there is really nothing material and this includes you and me. The sages and shamans have always said the material world is mere illusion and what we call reality is really only mind stuff. There are many new physicists who are agreeing with this. Remember what my grandmother always said? We are the same and our differences are only apparent? I grant you, the material world looks very objective. We have this sense that we are our bodies, the chairs we sit on are quite real and the fireplace and all the books on the shelves are solid objects. But, at what they call the quantum level, there is nothing in the realm of empirical, objective reality; there are only possibilities that are made manifest through consciousness and so we, you and I and everyone else, are in the continuum of the creative process. Like the Hindu god Shiva…Do you know the story of this god?”

“No sir,” Lenny admitted, which was fine, because Mr. Mahoney didn’t really expect him to. But Lenny couldn’t help but wonder where this guy was going. And where he was coming from.

“Well, it is said that this god is forever in the dance of the Universe—life, death, birth, rebirth, and so on. We are all part of this dance, not unlike the electron that is both particle and wave, depending on how it is observed. Consciousness changes it from wave to particle and, in this view, it is consciousness that keeps the stars in the sky, just as consciousness permits us to sit here and exchange our views, which is really exchanging our realities. How we view the world is always what the world becomes. View it happy and you have happy, view it joyful, you have joy, call it painful, you have pain or term it pleasurable and well, you’ll have a great time of it.”

All of this beyond Lenny’s way of thinking. “Whoa, I’m sorry, but you are talking way above my head! I don’t know anything about science, sages or any of that stuff.

“Well, yes,” Mr. Mahoney answered. “I did get off the track I suppose. I do that every now and then,” he chuckled. “But it all has to do with your comment.”

Lenny gave him a curious look. He had forgotten what his comment was.

“About the plants and trees not answering my grandmother when she talked to them. This is why I went into consciousness,” he explained, “because consciousness is everywhere and this is why some people call it the Mind of God. We needn’t delve into that. But I will say that the way my grandmother used to explain life and everything in it was to say it was a song and everything from the ant to the Universe itself are all part of the chorus.”

Lenny shrugged. There was confusion in his expression.

“In Latin, there is a word,” Mr. Mahoney continued. “It is unus. Unus means ‘one’ and this is where we get the term uni as in Universe. And verse is a poem or a song and so when we say Universe, we are saying one song and we are all part of that song just like my grandmother used to say. But ‘verse’ also means to instruct someone and so we are in one teaching, as well. My grandmother didn’t need a science lesson or a sage to tell her this because she was a student of the Universe and that’s really what we all are when it comes down to it, isn’t that right? I mean, think about it and it’ll ring true! But let’s ask another question. What do I know about you, Lenny?”

Lenny grinned. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Well, let’s see how close I get. I’d say you wish you could change this world and make it a better place.”

Lenny smiled. His face flushed a little. “That’s true, but probably a lot of people wish that.”

“I’d also say you feel bad because you’d like to be able to make your family happier and more secure. You’d like to have a better job! Right?”

Lenny nodded. “That’s why I’m here!”

“And sometimes you feel lost within yourself and you don’t share those times even with your wife. It’s like you don’t really know who you are from time to time and so you feel like that man who lost his oars in the rowboat way out in the middle of the ocean. What was it he said? Oh Lord, my boat is so small and the ocean is so large…”

Lenny grinned.

“There are lots of things in your life you wish you hadn’t done or could do over.”

“That’s for sure,” Lenny said.

“And sometimes you wish to hell you knew what life was all about.”

“All the time.”

“You’ve hurt people and sometimes even those you love. And not everything you’ve done or said makes you very proud of yourself.”

Lenny glanced away. The truth of this struck him deeply.

“I could go on,” Mr. Mahoney said. “But it’s more important to understand how I know these things. Well, we are in consciousness together and this permits me to project my own goodness and my own confusion onto you because everyone is a reflection of everyone else. But there is something to know about this. I have the inner-power, the pure power to be in empathy with you—to open up my heart and feel your feelings, your fear, your joy, your pain and your pleasure. And this is how the plants, the flowers and even the river spoke to my grandmother—she was in empathy with all these things. She loved them so much that she was in consciousness with them. You see, Lenny, when you let yourself love and I mean love unconditionally, you feel the meaning and purpose in all of life. And the more you love, the more empathy you have. Give your love to anything, I mean silently say I love you to anything at all and see what happens. The more love you give to the world, the more you know about the workings of the entire Universe because you become one with its song and one with its dance. And once this happens, good things start to unfold for you no matter what your circumstance is or who or what you are.

“Well now, enough said; I need to finish my story so you can get out of here. I’ve taken a lot of your time.”

“I don’t mind,” Lenny responded politely. But secretly he was disappointed because he had noticed Mr. Mahoney had not bothered to answer his question about why there is so much pain and suffering in the world. He was in for a surprise, however, because this would be the very subject Mr. Mahoney addressed as soon as he returned to his memories…

We were awake by dawn on the second morning at the falls. Well, actually my grandmother was up before me because she already had the campfire burning by the time I woke and had made what she called “cowboy coffee.” She boiled the water with the coffee grounds poured into it and then she stretched a piece of cloth over our two tin cups to keep the grounds from falling in. I didn’t like coffee very much at the time but it sure helped take away the early morning chill.

Grandma kept rubbing her back as we sat there but it didn’t dawn on me that she had virtually slept on the ground. I asked her about it and she smiled and said that when a person got older, their body didn’t fair as well as a young person’s and that’s why I should always take good care of myself. She said few people appreciated their good health until it was gone. I felt bad for her because even though she didn’t complain, I could see the pain in her face and I guess that put my mind to thinking because I asked her why bad things happen. And, of course, she wanted to know what was on my young mind.

I told her my mother was such a nice person and she always prayed to God and was kind to everyone. Then she got sick and went away forever. I must have been thinking about the things my grandmother had said about God being love because the more I thought about what happened to my mother, the angrier I felt. I thought about our old neighbor, too. Mr. Bernard used to live next door and he was always so friendly and would sometimes play catch with me. I was very attached to him and happy for this, because my father never played with me. Then one day Mr. Bernard stepped on a rusty nail and the next thing I knew, he had died of blood poisoning. Nearly everyone in town went to his funeral and that had been my first encounter with death. I was seven years old. I told my grandmother how sad I had been when I saw him laying in his coffin, knowing I would never see him again. “If God is so good,” I wanted to know, “why did people, especially good people, have to suffer and die?”

My grandmother told me to pretend like I was God as she told me a story. I said I would and so she began. “There were two very good, hard-working men. One was a farmer and the other a rancher. They were neighbors and both men believed in God. One morning, unbeknownst to the other, each man saddled his horse and rode to the narrow river that separated their land. There had been an early spring that year and the summer began with a drought. But on this morning some storm clouds had gathered and it looked like rain and this is why the men went to the river. They decided it would be a good place to talk with God.

“They arrived around the same time but they didn’t see each other because one was up river and the other down. The river was very low and so they could see the bedrocks in it, which was very unusual for that time of year. But now, the sky was covered with dark clouds. And, there was lightning and thunder as if a big storm was brewing. Now, the farmer down river looked up to the heavens and prayed with all his heart for a big, lasting rain that would flood the river and fill his irrigation ditches so he would be able to raise crops for the marketplace. But, up the way, the rancher was praying for light or even no rain at all, for he wanted to drive his cattle across the river to better pastureland to fatten up his beef with weight lost during the winter months. If there was a heavy storm, the river would flood and there was no telling how long it would be before he could cross it with his herd.

“Now, remembering that both the rancher and farmer are equally very good people and since you’re God, which prayer do you answer? Do you send rain to the farmer who needs it, or do you keep it from raining so the rancher gets what he needs?”

I told my grandmother I didn’t know because to help one would hurt the other. And she agreed. So I asked her what God did.

And she said, “God let Nature take its course because if he intervened he would have to love one more than the other. And since God is love, this was impossible to do.”

When I said I thought God could do anything, she chuckled. She said people liked to think of God as a politician, taking sides, condemning one and saving another. She said people made up all the rules and reinvented God to enforce them. I was curious and a little excited. “You mean, there aren’t any rules?” I wanted to know for sure because all a child is raised with is one rule on top of another. My own father had a rule for everything even though he didn’t follow them himself. He sure wanted everyone else to, though. My grandmother shook her head. I don’t think she ever liked the way my father treated my mother although she never said that to me. Anyway, she said there was just one universal rule and that was to do the loving thing. She said that’s what Jesus taught, to love our neighbors as ourselves and that’s the loving thing.

“As long as you always choose to do the loving thing, David,” she promised, “you always do what is good and what is kind.”

“Well,” Lenny said, “there are a lot of terrible things that happen in Nature. I mean…” Suddenly, he paled.

“What?” Mr. Mahoney asked.

Lenny shrugged.

“Tell me.” Mr. Mahoney could see something had upset Lenny.

“My brother was born with a terrible disease and he lived five of his ten years in a wheelchair and then he died. To tell you the truth, I lost a lot of faith in God after that and I was only fourteen years old myself. And, even if your grandmother was right, Nature can be very cruel, whether you call it God or not.”

“That’s not really true,” Mr. Mahoney said. “One man picks up a rock and bashes it into another man’s skull and murders him, but a falling rock has no target. My grandmother used to say that the rain pours down on the rich and the poor alike.”

“So you’re saying shit happens.” The resentment in Lenny’s voice wasn’t directed toward Mr. Mahoney, but rather at the memory of how much his brother had suffered and how that suffering had affected his family.

Mr. Mahoney smiled and spoke in a tone of understanding. “If it didn’t freedom would be impossible. Remember what I attempted to explain about the new science? We live in a world of possibilities, Lenny, but long before quantum physics, Jesus said, all things are possible onto you.”

Lenny was obviously now in a very sour mood; he felt that Mr. Mahoney was preaching to him and at that moment he didn’t care what Mr. Mahoney thought of him at all. “Well,” he said with an air of defiance. “If Jesus died for your mother’s sins, why did she have to die when you were a little kid?” He wanted to bring his point into Mr. Mahoney’s experiences.

“Do you know the meaning of sin?” Mr. Mahoney asked.

Lenny thought for a moment before answering, “breaking God’s laws.”

Mr. Mahoney shook his head, correcting him. “Humans want to control everything and everybody and so they create God as an invisible tyrant who rewards for obedience and punishes for disobedience. And what are these but fear tactics? Don’t confuse man’s morals with the ways of God,” he warned, “because if you do, you’ll end up living your life filled with guilt and shame. In fact, what is it people fear most? God and death! Let me ask you, do you love your children?”

“Sure I do.”

“Is there anything they might do to make you torture them?”

“Of course not.”

“Why? Because you are a loving father! Well, we are called the children of God by nearly every religious belief system in the world. So if God is the father of all, is he going to send his children to an eternity of hell’s fire and everlasting agony for what amounts to the transgression of theological principals, for breaking human laws?”

“Ah! I have you there.” Lenny suddenly smiled.

“How’s that?”

“That’s why Jesus was sent; to save mankind.”

“Is that right?” Mr. Mahoney shook his head. “And just what was Jesus saving mankind from? God…himself?”

Lenny looked perplexed.

“Look, Lenny,” Mr. Mahoney continued. “We live on a planet where the vast population despises paganism, calling it ignorant and superstitious and then, in the same breath, we are taught to worship pain, suffering and poverty. Do you know what the buzzword of every so-called civilized culture is? Sacrifice! Sacrifice! Sacrifice!”

“You don’t believe in Jesus?” Lenny asked.

Mr. Mahoney only smiled. “We’ve digressed here; let me get back to my story.”

By the second night, my grandmother and I were pretty tired so we decided we’d pack up the next morning and go home. While we were sitting around the fire, we talked about a lot of things and somehow the subject of Jesus came up. My grandmother loved Jesus. You could see it in her eyes. So for one reason or another I asked her to tell me about him.

She was pleased, saying, “I think most people miss the point of what Jesus was all about. He called himself the son of man, you know. He was raised in a time of turmoil because everything was ruled by tyrants and warrior kings. And he also saw conflict in his own religion. There was the pomposity of the scribes and Pharisees who wore their religion on their sleeves just like the Morrisons do with all their Bible thumping. The Pharisees and the Morrisons have one thing in common: they want people locked into the chains of righteousness and ritual. Their righteousness and their ritual!

“So along comes Jesus and he saw that people were looking to these self-proclaimed ‘authorities’ who professed they represented God and God’s word. And what did he say? He said not to call anyone ‘master’ because there was only one God and God’sKingdomofHeavenwas inside every single person. So he began teaching people to turn against their poverty. And what do you suppose he meant by poverty? He called poverty ‘not knowing themselves’ because like him, they were one with God and God was all.

“Now I know all this is difficult for a little boy to grasp,” my grandmother said. “But this is what you discovered on the hilltop yesterday all by yourself and this is what Jesus taught. We all have divine truth and divine love in us. You found yourself in everything and everything in you. And you called it ‘love.’ And that’s exactly what it is. You know, there was this person calledSt. Pauland he said this about Jesus: ‘In Christ, there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave or free, male or female.’ But you can see people have always swept this under the church carpet because every so-called religion puts a big sign on their roof that says only through these doors can you find truth and God. But, honey, Jesus taught the way to truth and God is through the door of your own heart. And that’s the door you opened yesterday and if you opened it wide enough, it’ll stay open for the rest of your life.”

I didn’t understand the full message she was giving me but I suddenly felt I’d done something significant on top of that hill I had climbed. I asked my grandmother if people like the Morrisons were bad. And she said, “Oh no, David, they are good people who are lost in their own concepts and the concepts they’ve been raised with. Somewhere along the line they learned to take God and love out of the rivers, the trees and even people. And they imagine that God is up there beyond the clouds in some hidden place, waiting in the shadows to cast judgment. If you want to know the difference between most people and Jesus, it’s pretty simple,” she said. “People believe in judging others, casting stones and dividing themselves into little circles wanting everyone else to be just like them. But Jesus taught that we’re all the same and he spent his life in forgiveness, compassion and love. Jesus had two rules—to love God and to love our neighbor as we love our self. Stop and think about that, David. If everyone followed just these two principles, this old world of ours would take a turn for the better in a blinking of an eye.”

I wanted to know why people didn’t just do that.

“Concepts, David. They are raised to believe the truth is found outside themselves and so they seek some authority to tell them what is right and what is wrong. And there is always somebody to claim they have the truth and the way.” She almost giggled. “And when it comes to religious folks, the preacher preaches the truth God supposedly whispered in his ears and not yours. And this is what Jesus rejected and come to think of it, I guess that’s what got him into trouble.”

“My mother used to say Jesus changed the entire world…?” I said, with a kind of questioning.

“Your mother was wrong, but lots of people believe this because it’s a concept given them. Look at the world and you’ll see that very few people ever listened to Jesus at all—people are still building walls between one another and wars keep coming and going. There is so much hate between people, it seems it’ll never end. Prejudice is everywhere. And people are still killing each other in the name of God and that started long before Jesus came and it has never stopped. In Jesus’ time, the Jews and the Samaritans were bitter enemies. In fact, it was written in some old Jewish books that the Samaritan well water was filthier than the urine of pigs. But Jesus drank out of the Samaritan’s well. There’s a lot to be learned from that.”

My grandmother and I talked about this for a long time and finally I declared that it would be so nice if the whole world was filled with love, but it probably never would be and I thought that was sad.

Grandma leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. “Honey,” she said, “the world can change when people change, and that begins with you and me.”

We were both exhausted as we walked out of the hills and back to the house. As I look back on those days now, I realize she was really too old to keep up with me but she did. I thought a lot about the necklace she liked so much and by the time we got home I was determined to buy it and give it to her for Christmas. I would, of course, have to make a lot of money to do so and that was exactly what I planned to do.

The next day I didn’t go into town to play with my friends. I walked from one farmhouse to another asking for work. Most of the farmers had children of their own and so I wasn’t hired liked I wanted to be. But the older people on the first farm down the road from us paid me fifty cents to clean up their pens—they had milk cows and hogs. But that was the only job I had for the rest of the summer.

When fall arrived and school began, I started chopping people’s wood again and everybody I worked for seemed glad to have me back. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to do it and the truth is I began to hate it. One night at supper, I told my grandmother how I felt and I think I wanted her to tell me to quit. She didn’t. She leaned across the table, took hold of my right arm and said, “My, my, you are becoming so strong.” And, of course, I puffed up like a rooster. I felt my biceps; they were hard and I was proud of all that muscle. Grandma said, “Chopping wood is such a wonderful exercise, isn’t it?”

I agreed. And all of a sudden I couldn’t wait for the next day so I could build those muscles of mine. But that was only one thing I learned that night. While we were still at the table, she said, “You know, people have the wrong idea about work and that’s why they begrudge it so much. When you think of work, you think of something you have to do and something that always keeps you from doing something else. That’s why people hate it so much. But people could change their point of view if they wanted to.”

I asked right away how that could be done.

She said, “I want to share a little secret with you. The whole Universe listens to you when you talk. Take your Uncle Pete. He was always saying how bad the world is and so his world was always bad. He just never understood how magical words are. And they are! I want you to try something.” She placed a piece of bread in my right hand. “Now, I want you to look at that piece of bread in your hand and say to it, I hate you and you make me sick. Say it a few times.”

I did. I felt silly doing it but I did. After a few minutes my grandmother said, “Now stick it in your mouth and see what happens.” I did and actually had a difficult time swallowing it. Of course, young children are very impressionable, but people of all ages can be, if truth be told. Anyway, she put a different piece of bread in my left hand and told me to now look at that and say to it, I love you and you are so good. And so I did this and something really did change. When I told Grandma, she was pleased, explaining that whatever we call a thing, it becomes. And then she teased me a little. She said “That’s why I always call you ‘honey,’ because that makes you the sweetest thing in the world to me.”

“I love you, Grandma,” I said.

“Just about everything good or bad happens to us because we name it something,” she said. “If we wake up in the morning and say, this is going to be a terrible day and I don’t want to face it, you’ll almost always get exactly what you give. Take chopping wood. I’ve done a lot of it in my lifetime but I’ve always had fun at it. Do you know why? I don’t call anything work. I call it ‘play’.”

And that was one of the greatest lessons for success I ever had.

“Don’t you want the people working for you to take their jobs seriously?” Lenny was puzzled.

“First of all,” Mr. Mahoney said, “I want people who work in my company to have a good time at it. If they have a good time, the customer has a good time. I know this isn’t said in many business books but it’s common sense. You never want to take yourself too seriously or you stop enjoying yourself. And if you don’t enjoy yourself, you will never be able to enjoy anyone or anything else. Not really!”

I didn’t earn enough money to buy my grandmother her necklace by Christmas of that year either, but I did manage to add forty dollars to the lay-away plan and that was quite an accomplishment in itself. We had a nice holiday anyway. In fact, my father drove in on Christmas Day and that made me very happy. He only stayed an hour though before saying he’d better get back on the road before it started snowing again. He gave me five dollars and I stuffed it in my pocket. He also said I had grown like a weed and that pleased me, too. I had turned twelve years old by then.

We had a mild winter and a lot of new construction was going on. It had started in early spring and everyone in town was curious and excited. They built the big grocery store by midsummer and around that same time we got our very own gas station. And just about everyone was thankful for that! Except for Grandma and a few others who still used horses and wagons, cars and trucks were everywhere in our little town…the wave of the future.

So was the big grocery store. It wasn’t a supermarket like we have today but it was a big place. There were plans to open up a mine five miles out of town and that would bring in a lot of people. And if the mine opened, the railroad would come in so our little town was on its way to getting on the map. Few people knew about all this at the time but the whispers had begun about growing into a real city and some people didn’t like the idea at all.

Anyway, when the big store opened, they put up a help-wanted sign and I rushed down to apply for a job. I was sure this was my big moment because their sign asked for boys as well as grownups. I was disappointed when I got there because just about every boy in town was in line and lots of grownups, too. I was very determined to get hired and thought I would be. The man who took the applications was very nice. But he said they were only hiring older boys and I had to be at least fifteen. I went home with my jaw dragging on the ground and a little angry. The sign had said “boys” and I was a boy so I thought they should have said how old a boy had to be. I told my grandmother how unfair I thought it was; I was really affronted. I mean, I had my dreams and they had crushed them as far as I was concerned. And on top of that, I’d stood in line all morning. And that angered me, too. I was just plain mad!

On that same day, she offered me some valuable insight. She said, “David, you’re going to find that a lot of people are not what you’d have them be and they won’t do what you want them to do. There are no bad people though, just people who do bad things. Remember the talk we had about Jesus? Well, he said to love our enemies. And I think he meant people who hurt us. And there will always be people like that, I suppose, unless the world changes for the better. But right now, there is always someone who will reject us, cheat us, or take advantage of us in one way or another.”

I wanted to know if anyone had ever done those things to her.

“Oh yes. No one gets through life without being betrayed, lied to and kicked around by somebody else. I remember one time your Uncle Pete found this investor. And this investor said he would back your Uncle and so Pete thought his dreams were coming true. But then, weeks went by and months went by. His investor—the man who said he had all the money—kept giving this reason and that for not making the investment he had promised. But your Uncle Pete kept the faith because he just had to believe this man was going to help him. But then, come to find out, the so-called investor didn’t have two dimes to rub together.”

“He lied? Why would he do that?” I wondered.

“He wanted to be the big shot, I guess; people do all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons.”

“What did Uncle Pete do when he found out?”

“He fell apart for a very long time. And he’d break out swearing every now and then, first saying he wanted to kill the man and then other times he’d say he wished he was dead himself. And for around a year, he did, indeed, almost drink himself to death. But you see, hate and anger harm those who harbor it more than it harms anyone else. And that’s why it is so smart to love your enemy because it frees you from your own self-destruction. Jesus was very practical, you see. He was very wise.”

I wasn’t so sure. “I’d like to throw a rock through that grocery store’s window.”

“I don’t want you to do that,” Grandma said sternly, “and do you know why? Because you’ll close the door of your own heart and that’s what makes people revengeful or filled with hate and anger. Some people close the door to their heart so tight they begin to believe they can’t love at all. And they become so lonesome they start hating their own life and themselves in it. I don’t want to see that happen to you. If it did, I’d have to start calling you ‘sour grapes’ instead of ‘honey’ and then that’s what you’d be.”

She made me laugh but I was still upset. “If so many people hurt you, how do you know who to trust?”

“That was something my own grandmother taught me when I was around seventeen years old. I had met this boy and fell in love with him. He was so nice and handsome. And he treated me like gold. But then, he just stopped seeing me and started seeing this other girl. It broke my heart. I cried my eyes out and told my grandmother what happened. She thought for a minute and then repeated this little poem to me:

Love many

Trust few

Always paddle your own canoe

“That’s some old mountain wisdom,” my grandmother smiled, “and it will have to do until people open their hearts to one another and to this old world of ours which is all love, of course.”

My grandmother had done her best to make me feel better but I was resentful anyway. I guess the truth is I felt sorry for myself. I wanted that job more than anything in the world because, as I said before, I had this desire to work at a grocery store. I mean, at that time in my young life I thought it was the job of all jobs. And, the new grocery store said they paid…I think it was sixty-five cents an hour—big money at the time!

It was summer though, and eventually the upset faded away as I spent more and more time with my friends. We played baseball mostly and as it ended up, Eddie, James and I had our camping trip after all. Eddie’s parents finally agreed to let him go with us but for only one night. So off we went one early morning with all our gear and renewed dreams of finding gold in the river. We each had our own pie tin to pan with and so we had a great time of it. I don’t think any of us slept well at night though—as for me, the night didn’t seem as safe as when my grandmother was there. Of course, I barely admitted that to myself much less to anyone else.

Grandma knew the woods and as I look back on those days now, I realize she had been born at the end of the American frontier days and I’ve always regretted I didn’t ask her more about her own childhood. It seems a little sad to me as we go farther into the new millennium the frontier days are soon to become mythical in the way stories about the Knights of the Round Table have become to us. Do you know what I mean? When I was little, every boy dreamed of being a cowboy at least a few times in his life. These days, children dream of being astronauts and living aboard space ships. I don’t see anything wrong with this, of course, since the world has to keep progressing; but I do think that people ought to return to Nature every now and then, if for no other reason, just to keep in touch with themselves.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, the camping trip with my friends. Well, we came home the next day feeling like mountain men but our pockets were empty of any gold. The rest of the summer went well and it was back to school and, for me, back to chopping wood. By then I didn’t mind chopping wood because I had learned to make play out of it. What my grandmother said turned out to be right—you call a thing “work” and that’s what it becomes; but call it “play” and it changes. And, as you might guess, I kept checking my biceps and feeling how big my muscles were getting. Now that I can look back on it all in a sort of overview, I realize I was a pretty ambitious boy right from the get go. One thing I knew for sure, I didn’t want to end up like my Uncle Pete.

Winter passed and the next summer rolled around. By June, much of our world had changed and it seemed it happened overnight. The coal mine had opened and there were many new faces in town. We had our own gas station and everybody was shopping at the big grocery store. An old brick building on the edge of town that had been boarded up for years was bought and renovated into a barroom called The Black Gold Inn. It was a little place but there was room for a dance floor and the miners kicked up their heels on Saturday nights…but a lot of them found their way to it on other days, as well.

The old timers around town resented the changes. And the Morrisons tried to petition to have the bar closed. They said it was the devil’s place and they made a big fuss over it for a good month before things quieted down. Preacher Morrison said whiskey and beer were Satan drinks that led people straight to hell. Oh yes, Mr. Hanson died that summer too. It was in April. I don’t know why I remember the exact date, but I do—April 19^th! There was still a lot of snow on the ground when they held the funeral and just about everyone in town showed up. My grandmother took me to show our respect she said, and so I went even though I didn’t want to. I felt bad for Mrs. Hanson but all the funeral did was remind me of my mother in her grave and so I was pretty downcast for a few days after.

My grandmother could see I was depressed but she never said anything directly about it. But one day she talked about how the butterflies would soon be returning and I was smart enough to know what she was up to. She wanted me to remember death was change and like my mother, Mr. Hanson was progressing in the whole scheme of things. Well, the weather turned and the snow began to melt and I think people just feel better about everything when the sun shines. I finally snapped out of the depression. Grandma took me on a picnic up in the hills on the first warm day and, we had a great time!

“We’ve talked a little about this before,” Lenny said, interrupting the story. “Do you really believe there’s more to life than…well, you know, being born and being dead and trying to live the best you can in between?”

“Anything that lives cannot die,” Mr. Mahoney said. “At least not in the way most people think about it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Not anything,” Mr. Mahoney repeated.

“Well, what happens to us?”

“You ever read Plato?”

“No, sir.”

“Plato gave us the first clue more than two thousand years ago. He said we were like people chained in a cave who believed their condition was reality. And because they were chained, all they could see were the shadows of people and pushcarts and other things passing by the cave. What Plato was saying is, we live in this world of shadows we view as our own universe and, as a result, what we call real is only illusion. The sun outside creating the shadows is what’s truly real. But because we’re chained inside the cave, we don’t see the sun, only the illusions created by it.

“From the time we are born we are conditioned to believe the world is a physical place and the tree over there is just a tree and, as the classical scientists tell us, it is the sum total of its parts. This is why they teach that we live in a materialistic, mechanical world. They believe everything can be explained by reducing it to its smallest parts. In other words, we are our brains, liver, skin and so forth and that’s it. Kill the brain and poof, that’s the end of it. No spirit, no soul and no self survives. Such scientists are deeper into Plato’s cave than most people, but they believe the illusion and their world is the world. Period! They also believe they are smarter than most people, too.” Mr. Mahoney smiled broadly.

“I guess they think we’re really not much different from a piece of wood thrown on the fire.”

“Very good, Lenny. That’s their bottom line. That’s what they believe. There’s a man who best represents this dead worldview. His name is Dawkins and he said something to the effect that we are gene machines. But there are plenty of scientists who disagree with this. They are most commonly called quantum scientists and they tell us that what we call the material world is created in and by consciousness. Now, this is difficult to grasp because consciousness is both inside us and outside us at the same moment. And so we are in the process of creating all the time. In the far reaches of this, we create the flowers in our gardens by bringing them into our consciousness. In a sense, by measuring them, but I don’t want to get too complicated here.

“The truth of it is, vibrations and the speed of vibrations make things appear solid. And they stay that way as long as they are observed and according to classical physics, they behave like our own bodies do. And so, like human beings, they grow and end up being what we call dead. But nothing can die in the way we think of dying. Things change or, in other words, return to the wave-state or to what religious people call, the spiritual state of being.

“If we would just turn our heads and look outside the cave we’ve been conditioned to live in, we’d stop existing in the reality of it all and start living in the actuality of it all. And, if we ever did that, we’d discover that the spiritual world and the physical world are two different processes of the same thing. All the ancient sages knew this and what was it Jesus said? One of his disciples asked him when the Kingdom would come and he told them the Kingdom would not come by our waiting for it and it is not a matter of saying it’s here or it’s there. He said the Kingdom was spread out upon the earth, and people just do not see it. And he made it very clear, much like the modern scientists are saying, that the Kingdom is both inside us and outside us. Of course, what we call the Kingdom is consciousness in the scientific sense and the Mind of God in the religious sense.

“You can look at it in a religious way or a scientific way and you come up with the same answer—we are living in eternity right now and the Kingdom is everywhere. My grandmother knew this and she lived it. And, in her own way, this is what she taught me. And so you see, you and I, everyone and everything that lives is in the creative process and what we call death is, as I said, only change. And again, anything that lives cannot die, because it already belongs to eternity.”

“Well, why doesn’t everyone know this?” Lenny asked.

“We’re still being conditioned to live in old Plato’s cave, I guess,” Mr. Mahoney said lightly.

“I’ll have to think about all this,” Lenny said. “It’s a wee bit over my head but I would like to ask this: did you ever ask your grandmother what happened to us when we die?”

“I did,” Mr. Mahoney answered.

“And what did she say?”

She said, “Ask the butterfly.” Now then, we’ve spent a lot of time already so I want to get to the end of my story.”

“One more question,” Lenny said eagerly. “If what you’ve told me is true, how could a person see or realize he was in God, or eternity or the Kingdom or whatever you want to call it?”

“Not by thinking about it,” Mr. Mahoney answered. “Only by opening your heart to it.” And he returned to sharing his memories…

As it ended up, I had a great time that summer. Well, summers are made for great times! Anyway, it turned chilly by the end of August and we had an early autumn that seemed to turn into winter overnight. I remember my grandmother asking what happened to fall? I think a lot of people were asking the same question. We’d had a light snow in the first week of September and it just kept getting colder and colder.

I was preparing to return to school and chopping wood. But then one day as Grandma and I were sitting at the kitchen table, a knock came at the door. We hurried to answer it and were surprised to see Mrs. Hanson standing on the porch, freezing cold. She’d driven her buggy out from town and there was quite a wind. Mr. Hanson had a truck but his wife didn’t know how to drive so she had hitched up their team of horses. Mrs. Hanson had never been to the house before and Grandma was pleased to see her. She took her coat and had me push the rocker closer to the potbelly stove. She told Mrs. Hanson to sit by the fire and offered her tea or coffee. Mrs. Hanson didn’t want either and so we all sat together in a kind of silence. Then Mrs. Hanson began to cry. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but it has been so difficult being alone since my husband passed on.”

My grandmother gave her a hug and let her cry for a little while. Finally, Mrs. Hanson composed herself and apologized again. She said she had been so depressed and wasn’t sleeping at night. “Well,” Grandma said, “we’ll get rid of the blues for you.” My grandmother called depression having the blues. And so she went off to the kitchen to make tea and added cloves to boil in it. Then she took Mrs. Hanson’s hand in hers and squeezed her little fingers. She said that would lift her spirits and sure enough, it seemed to. Grandma knew all kinds of things like that. I wish I could remember them all.

Mrs. Hanson told us she was going to try to make it through the winter and then put the store up for sale or just close it down. Since the new store opened she had lost a lot of her customers, even people who had shopped with her for twenty years. Things were cheaper at the big store and there was more of everything. Then she said the reason she had driven out to see us was she remembered me coming in and asking for a job. She told my grandmother that I had been so polite and nice and of course, that turned my face a little red. Now, she wanted to know if I would still be interested in working after school for two hours and all day on Saturdays. And there it was—my dream had come true!

Mrs. Hanson said she couldn’t pay me much but she really needed some help and I was her first choice. I sat perfectly still in my chair without saying anything. I know my grandmother and Mrs. Hanson were wondering what I was thinking and I was deep in thought. It was that old guilty feeling about leaving the people I chopped wood for. I couldn’t do both, for sure. Still, I wanted the job she offered me as much as I had ever wanted anything. My grandmother figured out what was on my mind and spoke on my behalf.

“David has been helping with a few chores for people in the winter and he feels beholden to them. He’s a very responsible boy.”

“I don’t know what to do,” I said honestly.

And my grandmother smiled, asking, “What does your heart tell you?”

I didn’t know at the moment. She always said to follow my heart and everything else would turn out the way it’s supposed to. And so I just said the first thing that popped into my mind.

“I’d really like to have the job.”

I started the next day. A Saturday!

I learned how to stack vegetables and where the can goods went on the shelves and I got to wear the white apron just like Mr. Hanson always did. But more, Mrs. Hanson started teaching me how to use the cash register and I was glad I knew arithmetic then. By the end of that first day, I thought I was a regular storekeeper and I was happy as I could be.

My grandmother was pleased, too. She thought it was wonderful that I’d finally gotten the job I wanted and she was as happy as I was. But down deep I was also feeling guilty because I hadn’t had the nerve to tell people I wouldn’t be chopping their wood for them. I felt obligated to the older people who really needed the help. I finally confessed to Grandma and she put her mind to my dilemma. She told me that one person couldn’t do it all; I should tell the people I wouldn’t be helping them over the winter months.

I told her I would do so right after working at the store the next day, but I couldn’t raise the courage. I felt I was deserting the people who had been so nice to me. So I walked home not liking myself very much. Then I remembered something my grandmother had told me. About how words and thoughts speak to the whole Universe and how she said that what we ask for is what we always get. Well, I decided to put it to the test. It was cold and the wind was blowing pretty hard but I stopped in my tracks and looked from one horizon to the other and into the sky. And then I told the Universe my tale of woe. I don’t remember word for word what I said but I said it out loud. I’m sure if someone had seen me, they would’ve thought I was crazy. Nevertheless, I said that I didn’t want to let people down but I couldn’t work at the store and cut wood, too. And, I didn’t know how to make it right. Then, I just broke out bawling; I guess I was bothered more than I realized. I felt I was between a rock and a hard place.

When I got home that afternoon, I was relieved when Grandma didn’t ask me if I’d told my old customers I’d be working at the store that winter. I knew she assumed I had. And, to make matters worse, a really big storm was brewing; a heavy snow was on its way. People would need to stay warm. That night when I went to bed, I couldn’t sleep. I imagined the old people out in the snow cutting their own wood and being frozen to death. And it would be my fault. I had, in my way, taken the weight of responsibility for them and I really felt terrible about letting them down. Still, each afternoon when I left the grocery store I found myself walking straight home, telling myself I’d go see my old customers “tomorrow.” Well, tomorrow didn’t come for a week.

In the meantime, theVirginiaskies became solid gray as far as anyone could see. Everyone was talking about the big snowstorm heading our way. On the following Saturday Mrs. Hanson asked if I would go back to the woodshed and bring in some wood for the store’s stove. So I went out the back door to the big old barn of a building and as soon as I opened the doors, I thought I was in Heaven. That old building was stacked to the beams with kindling, all dried and ready to fire. I made three or four trips back into the store, stacking up the wood and brought up buckets of coal from the basement. All the while I could not wait to share my new idea with Mrs. Hanson.

And what an idea I had! There was so much precut kindling in the shed, we had more than enough to sell. There were lots of people around town who would buy it and we could deliver it just like they delivered coal. Mrs. Hanson was kind but she didn’t think the idea would work. She put her hand on my shoulder and led me to the store window. “David, look yonder and you will see that trees are plentiful and wood is everywhere. No one is going to buy ours. And anyway, most people around here are much too poor to burn their money in their stoves and that’s what they would be doing if they had to buy their wood.”

“But some people don’t have a big supply,” I argued. “They cut it nightly or every few days and many people are too old to do it for themselves.”

Finally Mrs. Hanson agreed that if I found a buyer, she’d let me use the wagon to deliver it and that was all I wanted to hear. As soon as I got off work that afternoon, I all but ran to my old customers to tell them I could deliver wood once a week and all they had to pay for it was fifty cents for enough until the next delivery. I was sure everyone would jump at this opportunity but only two of my customers agreed. They were Mr. and Mrs. Green and the widow Mrs. Hart, but you know what? I had done what was right, and I was still able to help the people who really did need me. I didn’t get home until after dark that night but all along my way I kept hollering thank you, world…thank you! I felt in my heart that my grandmother was absolutely right. When you really want to do something nice for other people, nice things naturally begin happening for you in return.

Working for the store didn’t end up being as much fun as I had thought it would be. In fact, it was pretty boring most of the time. Mrs. Hanson lived on the second floor and there were plenty of days when she barely came downstairs at all, so I was pretty much running the place at twelve years old.

But, one thing came out of it; I learned how to play checkers. There was a table with a checkerboard always set up and Mrs. Hanson and I would spend a lot of time playing. She won for weeks and weeks but then I got really good at it and we had some real contests. As time went by, I came to love her; she was such a nice lady. But I felt bad for her, too. We had a few customers but the miners and their wives went to the big grocery store like everyone else. Mrs. Hanson said they were running her out of business. She hoped to sell the building during the following summer and move to her sister’s place inBaltimore.

She missed her husband a lot, as well. They never had any children so all they had were each other. Now and then I’d see her crying but I never let on. One day I told her about how I had my grandmother’s necklace on lay-away and she was really impressed when she found out I had nearly fifty dollars already paid. She offered to lend me the rest but I didn’t take it. Even though I was a young boy, I could see she was worried about money.

I turned thirteen and let me tell you, it was the most important year of my life. I mean, when you turn thirteen it’s like you leave your childhood behind. My birthday fell on a Sunday and Mrs. Hanson drove her buggy out to the house with a present for me. She had wrapped up a winter coat she had for sale in the store that I had my eye on. My grandmother gave me pants, a shirt and socks. It was good birthday.

Now, here is where the real magic of this tale begins. Maybe you’ve heard the old saying it is always darkest before the dawn? Well, that describes what was to happen next. I walked to the store after school on a Monday around three weeks after my birthday and as soon as I entered, I could see Mrs. Hanson was beside herself. Even though she gave me a smile as I walked toward the counter, I felt something was wrong. I started to put on my apron but she stopped me, saying, “David, things are getting so slow, I have to cut back on my spending and so from now on, I want you to only come in on Saturdays.” Tears were welling in her eyes. I think a tear might have welled in my eyes, too but she just gave me a handful of candy and sent me home. As I walked to Grandma’s house that afternoon, I wondered if I might not have done a good enough job; all kinds of selfish thoughts like that sprang into my young mind. At bottom line, I was one depressed puppy.

My grandmother tried to appease me by reminding me I’d now have more time for myself; she said young boys needed their childhood. And she told me all the nice things she could to lift my spirits. Things like I had always worked too hard for my age and she tried to ease my pain the best she could. But I told her I really liked working at the store and I liked to earn money. I also thought the world of Mrs. Hanson and Grandma agreed she was a very nice lady.

I went to bed feeling lost and letdown. The last thing my grandmother said was, “Remember the river. When people run into a serious obstacle they think they have to fight and overcome it. In fact, your Uncle Pete seemed to be so proud that he was a ‘fighter.’ He fought or overcame obstacles his entire life. In the end, he felt as if he had traveled a million miles; but the sad truth was, he hadn’t gone anyplace at all.”

I was still feeling sad the next day as I sat at the kitchen table watching my grandmother cook breakfast. I couldn’t believe I wouldn’t be going to the store after school and Saturday seemed a year away.

Grandma was quite cheery, however. Well, she always was, really. Anyway, while we ate, she brought up the subject of Mrs. Hanson and how poorly her business was doing. I didn’t realize it then but I was about to get another great lesson when it came to business. And I’ll tell you the truth of it. I would not be sitting here today if it weren’t for that particular morning. My grandmother said, “Do you know what I think? I think I know why Mrs. Hanson is having such a hard time at it.”

I quickly interjected my own conclusion. “It’s the big store! They sell everything cheaper. It was good around here before they built that big old, stupid place with all their stuff in it.”

“Everything changes, David,” Grandma said, “and no one or anything knows that better than the river. As I’ve told you before, lots of things get into its way but it just changes course. Take Mrs. Hanson, for example. She is still trying to run the store like she did all those years with her husband. Times have changed. The town has changed. But she hasn’t.”

I asked my grandmother what she would do if she were Mrs. Hanson.

“Well, if I had a store and I couldn’t offer the best price in town, I’d give people the best service. You know, the truth is, Mrs. Hanson didn’t lose her customers overnight. Even I don’t enjoy going anymore; the only reason I don’t shop at the other place like everybody else is I know she needs the business.”

I had never known.

“After her husband died, she carried her sorrow and anger with her into the store and every time you shopped there, she told you her story. I don’t mean in words but in her attitude. Why, it began to feel like a funeral home. A lot of people would have paid a few pennies extra just because they had always shopped there and nearly everyone liked the Hansons. And so, it is my guess, her prices did not chase most people away. It was Mrs. Hanson herself. People in business are funny in some ways. They spend a lot of time thinking about how to sell. What they ought to do is put more effort in the idea of how to buy.”

I asked what she meant.

“What do you think would happen if Mrs. Hanson decided that selling things in the store was not important? What if she just opened up her heart to everyone who came in and said to them I love you and I want to make your visit a good time. Or, it’s cold outside, why don’t you give me your list and I’ll fill it while you sit by the fire. I’d bet it wouldn’t take long until she had more customers than she knew what to do with. You see, she’d be making it easy to buy and when it’s easy to buy, it’s never hard to sell. I used to tell your Uncle Pete that but he never listened.”

Uncle Pete didn’t listen. But, I did.

I couldn’t wait to get out of school the next day. And what a day it was. The storm had finally arrived and it was all but a blizzard. And it was only the beginning. This would be one of the worstVirginiawinters in anyone’s memory.

I started home and as I walked across the field to reach the dirt road, it was difficult to see. Then when I was about half way, I felt this strange urge to go back into town. I didn’t want to, especially after walking all that way and I didn’t want to worry my grandmother either. So I just tucked my head in my coat collar and pushed my way against the wind. But I kept having this strong feeling I was going in the wrong direction, like I was being pushed back and so I thought, I’ll let the wind push me instead of pushing against it and I turned around.

I walked directly to Hanson’s store and to say the least, Mrs. Hanson was surprised to see me. She made me take off my coat, sat me by the fire and insisted on running upstairs to make me hot cocoa. When she came back down, I was behind the counter wearing my apron. She asked me what in the world I was doing! And I said, “I love you, Mrs. Hanson and I want to work here, pay or no pay.”

I’ll never forget her reaction. She broke out crying and kept hugging and hugging me. She whispered back “I love you too, David, I love you, too.” It was a good day in the store.

The wind had died down a lot when I finally walked home but as soon as my grandmother’s house came into view, I began to feel really bad because she had expected me to come right home after school. I walked into the house and told her I was sorry for being late and that I had gone to the store to help Mrs. Hanson.

Grandma just smiled and said, “I knew where you were, so I wasn’t worried at all.”

“What was it about working at a grocery store that you liked so much?” Lenny asked.

Mr. Mahoney smiled. “You know, one time I asked my grandmother why the wolf howled at the moon. And she said, because it makes him feel good about himself.”

He returned to his story.

I was feeling good about myself, too, because I started doing exactly what my grandmother said Mrs. Hanson could do. That is, I began to open my heart to every customer who came in, few as they were. Even Mr. Hobbs who owned the feed and grain! Mr. Hobbs was a big man who always wore bib overalls and had a cigar stuffed in his mouth. He was at least six foot three with a belly almost half that wide. People said he was strong as an ox, though and healthy as could be. He was also sour most of the time and never spoke unless he had to. Anyway, he had run low on cigars and came in to buy a few. Mrs. Hanson waited on him. He bought three King Edwards and I think they were a nickel apiece at the time. I remember Mrs. Hanson saying to him, “I haven’t seen you around for a spell; I hope you’ve been well.” Of course, that was her way of letting him know she had noticed him not coming in and shopping with her. Mr. Hobbs didn’t pull any punches. He was no socialite anyway! “I’ve been buying my things at the big store,” he said. “They’re cheaper and they have more.”

Mrs. Hanson just nodded and smiled. What could she say?

Then Mr. Hobbs looked past Mrs. Hanson at the sign behind her. It read, Mrs. Hanson’s Home Made Apple Pie. It was an old sign that hadn’t been taken down since Mr. Hanson had died. Now, it created one of those rare occasions when Mr. Hobbs actually smiled. He said, “My wife has been down with a cold for near two weeks now so how much are your pies? I know my kids would like it and I guess I could stand a piece myself.”

Mrs. Hanson started to tell him there were no pies available, but I stepped up to the plate and told him they were fifty cents each. Mrs. Hanson gave me a sharp look but she didn’t say anything. I told Mr. Hobbs the pie wouldn’t be done for a while but I’d be glad to deliver it to him at the feed and grain before he went home. He blew out a big puff of cigar smoke, put fifty cents down on the counter and walked out.

Mrs. Hanson asked me what in the world I thought I was doing. Didn’t I know she didn’t have an apple pie and more than that, we were out of apples? These were two problems I hadn’t thought of. Mrs. Hanson handed me the fifty-cent piece and told me to go and return it to Mr. Hobbs. When I left the store I was feeling angry at myself for being so stupid but then I turned away from the direction of the feed and grain and started running toward the big grocery store with a whole new idea! Maybe they would have apples! I hadn’t been in the place since the time I applied for a job there and so I didn’t really know.

When I walked in, I was in awe. The store was beautiful, with polished wood floors, and rows and rows of things to buy. Now, it was small compared to the big supermarkets of today but back then, for our town, it was amazing. And, I found what I was looking for. They had shipped in some big,Arkansasapples and I bought a bag full. When Mrs. Hanson saw the sack she knew where I had been and she just shook her head. She said that she wasn’t in any mood to cook pies. But, she did anyway and left me to tend to the business, with a warning not to do anything like that again. I knew she was a lot more upset with me than she was letting on so that made me feel bad. I thought I had been quite the hero but she had seen it another way.

While Mrs. Hanson was upstairs, old Mrs. Jenkins came in. She was as old as my grandmother but frail and sickly looking. Mrs. Jenkins hadn’t been to the store for a long time either and she only lived three blocks away. I knew that because she was one of the few remaining customers I still delivered firewood to. She had a list in her hand so I told her I would collect the things she wanted while she sat by the fire. She was obviously glad to let me do it. “You’re always such a nice boy,” she said. “Where’s Cordy?” I told her Mrs. Hanson was upstairs and we talked more as I filled a box with the things she needed. She told me honestly that she had been on her way to the new store but she didn’t feel like she could make it that far because of the storm. “I’m so mad at myself,” she said. “I should have gone to the store days ago but I thought this storm would pass; old Mother Nature can fool you.”

She bought food—can goods and things like eggs and bacon. She also bought three yards of gingham and a pound of nails. I wanted to ask her what she was going to do with them but I didn’t. She ended up with a box full and I asked if she wanted it all charged to her account but she insisted on paying cash. I knew why; she planned on shopping at the big store next time. I just smiled and was as pleasant as I could be. And so she put on her big winter coat again and picked up the box filled with her order. I could see it was heavy for her so I said, “I’d be glad to carry that home for you.”

“I can manage,” she said without any enthusiasm, so I insisted and off we went.

As soon as I set the box on her kitchen table she began telling me how appreciative she was because her rheumatism had been acting up with the cold weather. That’s when I came up with my idea. I told her that if she liked, I’d come by her house regularly and if she gave me a list, I’d get everything for her and she wouldn’t have to go out in the snow at all. She looked a little baffled but said that would be wonderful. By the time I returned to the store, you could smell apple pie cooking and the whole store felt…I don’t know…happy! Maybe it was only because I felt happy about doing a good deed. Anyway, it was nearingfive o’clockwhen Mrs. Hanson carried the pie downstairs and covered it with a cloth. “Tell Mr. Hobbs I expect to get my pan back,” she said.

I raced across the street and then down to the feed and grain and when I got there Mr. Hobbs was about ready to close. He thanked me and offered me a dime for my trouble. I wouldn’t take it. I told him I was just glad to do it and wished his wife well. Then I told him that if his wife didn’t feel better to just bring me a list of what she wanted and I’d take it to his house. Mr. Hobbs didn’t respond much but before I left, he told me to thank Mrs. Hanson. And I thought that was nice. I mean for Mr. Hobbs, since he really wasn’t a very friendly person.

The snow had let up a little by the time I got home that afternoon and I told my grandmother about everything that had happened. She seemed so pleased by it all. As far as the way I felt: abouteight o’clockthat night I walked out onto the porch to see the weather and I looked up at the night sky. The moon was shining through the clouds like a big white disk. And guess what I did—I looked up and howled at it just like a big, old wolf!

From that day forward, I couldn’t wait to get to the store. I was doing what my grandmother had taught me. I put my love into it all and to everyone who came in. And none of it felt like work. It was play, really. I was having fun! I was also thinking I was becoming quite the businessman. In fact, Mrs. Hanson said to me one day that she wished her husband could see the fine job I was doing. And she told me I was more grown up at my age than some people ever became and when I told my grandmother, she agreed.

I felt good inside. And the truth is, by the time summer rolled around we were doing good business again. I don’t mean the store was making tons of money but it was supporting itself and, by the way, Mrs. Hanson had always managed to pay me even when I’d volunteered to help that time when I simply walked in and put on my apron.

Most people kept shopping at the big grocery store though and we didn’t attract any of the miners who had moved into the mining camp up in the east hills. But, I came to discover there was a reason for that. The mine owners also owned the big store and so, of course, that’s where the miners shopped. They all had credit there so there wasn’t any way we could get their business, although every now and then a miner would come in with his family and buy something. Mostly hardware! And this gave me another idea. I talked to Mrs. Hanson about reducing the grocery side of things and adding to our hardware line. I told her we ought to put in more tools and household things the big store didn’t sell. They sold picks, shovels and hard hats, but everyone came to us for nails, screws, hinges and that kind of thing.

At first she didn’t like the idea, saying that her store had been a grocery store since it opened and the other things were mainly for convenience. She said most people drove to the Sears and Roebuck in the city to shop for the kinds of things I was talking about. But later that winter, when the hardware salesman came around to take a new order, she ordered a lot of things she had never ordered before—even two electric saws I had pointed out in the catalogue that she called “outrageously expensive.” When the salesman left, she turned to me and said, “I hope you’re satisfied now because I don’t have enough money to spend on groceries when that salesman comes around.”

I felt a little scared because now it was like the whole store’s future was on my shoulders and that was a big responsibility for a kid still green behind his ears. I told my grandmother all about it as soon as I got home and she looked pensive. That really worried me. But then she agreed it was a good idea. There had never been a real hardware store in town and it was about time there was, she said. I felt relieved. I had made the biggest decision of my entire young life and as I look back on it, I was a thirteen-year-old with more authority than I probably should have had. But, as things turned out, I had some insight, because as soon as the stock came in, even the miners became our customers and we sold both electric saws the very first week. Mrs. Hanson seemed happier than I had ever seen her. And that made me happy.

Very soon Mrs. Hanson was all smiles and customers were coming in again just to chat or window shop. You know, hardware and tools to men are like toys to children. They like to look at them and so we really started doing some great business. In fact, business was so good, I worked full days, five days a week during the following summer and I still found time for baseball.

It wasn’t just our stock, however. Mrs. Hanson was always telling me how nice and helpful I was to everyone. And that was the truth, mostly because of what I had learned from my grandmother, of course. And something else happened that was a big surprise. When I turned fourteen, Mrs. Hanson took me by the hand and walked me to Mr. Hanson’s old truck that had been sitting idle for three winters. She said if I could learn how to drive it, it was mine! Well, you can imagine what a thrill that was. And you can bet I learned how to drive that truck as fast as possible with help from—of all people—Mr. Hobbs. He turned out to be one of the nicest people, when you really got to know him.

At Christmas time that year, I finally gave Grandma the cameo necklace.

“She must have been very surprised and pleased,” Lenny said.

“Oh, she scolded me for spending so much money but she kissed and hugged me and cried a little, too. She wore the necklace every single day after that. Now, there’s something I want to make sure you understand because it is important to why I’ve shared all this with you. It wasn’t the hardware that built the business at Hanson’s store; it was the attention we paid to helping people buy. When a person came in, he or she was greeted with our very real desire of wanting to help them. And we took an interest in their lives. And from that experience, I can tell you the biggest mistake most sales and business people make. They try to figure out what a person is thinking about when it comes to their product or service. If they paid more attention to how people felt about what they want, they’d double and triple their sales.

“We all want to feel cared about and, in this alone, you may have the greatest secret of success ever spoken in a nut shell. You have to be a love merchant,” Mr. Mahoney explained, smiling. “I want you to remember that term, Lenny, because I want to tell you more about it a little later.”

Lenny nodded and said he would remember. “So I guess everything turned out great after you started putting in more hardware; that was impressive thinking for a boy. No wonder you ended up doing so well.” He looked around the office, a monument of real success and now he secretly wanted the job even more than when he had first arrived. He liked Mr. Mahoney and thought he was a very unique person. This was a man and a company Lenny really wanted to work for. He wondered if Mr. Mahoney was ever going to get around to talking directly about the job opening but he determined that it wasn’t his place to bring it up.

“Oh!” Mr. Mahoney exclaimed. “I have to tell you about Grandma’s truck ride.”

I remember vividly the first afternoon I drove Mr. Hanson’s truck home. It was a Saturday afternoon and I felt like king of the mountain. When you’re young, a car or truck gives you three glorious feelings when you’re behind the wheel. You feel in control, you feel free and you feel all grownup. The first thing my grandmother said to me was “Be careful in that contraption,” but the next day I convinced her we ought to go for a ride. Needless to say, Grandma was a little reluctant, but she finally gave in.

I don’t know why, but she dressed up for the occasion and put on an extra splash of lilac water. And, off we went! Of course, my ego was singing songs because I felt so important as I shifted gears and acted like I’d been driving all my life. We turned away from the house and headed down the dirt road to town and every time we hit a little dip or bump in the road, Grandma would holler out, “Whee!” and giggle, so I knew she was having a great time, too. I don’t think she had ever been in an automobile before even though they had been around for twenty years or more. As I said, most people had them, even in our little, one-horse town; but there remained a few like Grandma who never learned to drive. As I look back on it, that was a great place and time and I’m eternally thankful for that part of my childhood.

We ended up driving to the mine site and to where the miners lived. The mine camp was made up of a lot of small shacks and it was thick with children playing and dogs barking. I think there was a time when we had as many as a dozen dogs at one time chasing our truck. Lots of people waved at us as we drove by and my grandmother waved back. We parked when we got close to the mine to take a look at it. It was a shaft mine and we were very impressed. My grandmother kept shaking her head and told me that when she was a little girl, she and her brothers used to walk up into this area and fill buckets and boxes with coal to carry home. She said that especially around the creek bed a person could chip away coal and that’s the way people collected it back in those days. She pointed down a slope and said there was a little house down there where she had been born. I had never known that before so I was very interested.

She didn’t talk much about it but I could see she was reminiscing and it was the first time I ever saw sadness in her eyes. She pointed to the hills and told me where this person or that person used to live. But there wasn’t a house in sight. She said this was where the first community in the area began, a long time before our town was even thought of. And once the town started, people began buying land and her father bought a place where she’d been ever since…where we lived now.

When we got home, Grandma brought out old pictures and many were those old-fashioned tintypes. She pointed out relatives I didn’t even know I had and told me a few family stories that carried me back into the eighteen hundreds. That entire day turned out to be wonderful and I don’t think we went to bed that night untileleven o’clockor so. That was mighty late for us!

She was up early the next morning in spite of it and by the time I was awake, she had the entire day planned. I had my heart set on playing with some of my friends in town but I could see she was raring to go and so I kept my own plans to myself. She wanted to drive up into what she called the “far hills” and asked if I thought the old truck would make it, since there was no real road, only a timber trial. She explained that at one time, the old trail was very busy with wagons filled with timber but that was a very long time before I was born. By nine, I had cranked up the motor of the truck and we were on our way with a basket filled with food.

We took the regular road north and Grandma still knew where the old trail was and we headed up into the hills being bounced around by the rough terrain. Sometimes we’d lose track of the trail altogether and drive through the tall grass and weeds until we found it again. I sure got a lot of practice in shifting gears that day because some of the inclines were steep and to this day, I don’t know how they ever got horses and wagons up and down those hills. Anyway, Grandma knew exactly where she was going and when we reached a certain spot, she said, “Here we are.”

It was a pretty place; you could see the entire valley below and in the far distance, our little town. It looked tiny from where we were sitting in the truck. We carried a blanket and the food basket to the base of a big tree and sat down. I remember looking at my grandmother; she had this smile on her face from reliving the happy memories of her life. I don’t recall if I asked what she was thinking or not, but I do remember her telling me that when my grandfather was alive, he would ride up to that same spot where we now sat to think out his problems or just to enjoy the view. She said that when they were first married, they had ridden there many times together, as well. The drive we’d taken the day before had brought back a lot of memories. Being on this hill with her beloved husband was one of them. When she awoke that morning, she felt a tugging in her heart to talk with my grandfather again.

I left my grandmother to herself a long time. I just felt like she wanted to be alone with her own thoughts and so I hiked around and had a great time exploring on my own. I’ll never know what was on her mind that day but it was something special, because she didn’t even notice when I came back and sat down on the blanket again. I will never forget the expression on her face; I can still see it as clear as I can see my own hand. It was as if her eyes were fixed on something I couldn’t see. And she had this wonderful smile on her face. It was such a happy smile and yet, there was a little stream of tears running down her cheeks. That image remains with me as if it were only yesterday. I suspect a lot of people wouldn’t think my grandmother was very attractive at all when she got up in years, but to me she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

Well, we ate lunch and decided to head back so we got in the truck and started down the hill. It seemed a lot steeper going down than it did coming up. We had a couple of scary moments but Grandma had a lot of spunk and even though I think she was nervous, she sure giggled a lot. Probably because she was nervous! She would holler out and screech, just like a kid on a roller coaster. I swear, she was having the time of her life. I was too young and naive to worry about the possibility of the brakes going out and thankfully they didn’t; we got back to the main road safely.

But we weren’t on the road for very long when, unfortunately, the truck stopped running. I tried to start it up again, I cranked and cranked, but the motor would not turn over. So there we sat, a million miles from nowhere as they used to say. Grandma suggested that maybe the rough ride down the hill had jarred something loose. I didn’t know anything about mechanics at the time but I looked at the motor anyway, having no idea what I was looking at. Finally, we decided to walk home and if some other car or truck came by, maybe we’d get a ride. It wasn’t like it is today, of course. Back then there were not many vehicles on the road at all. Especially way out in the sticks where we were!

I think it was about two in the afternoon by then; it was a very hot day and we had a lot of miles before us. I remember my grandmother saying, “Well, what we have to do is make the best of it. And the way to do that is to just enjoy the walk.”

We were out where there weren’t even any farms and so there were vast grasslands and open spaces to enjoy. And, we talked for the first mile or so. The walk was enjoyable in the beginning but we were more than twelve miles from the house. I remember asking my grandmother why she and my grandfather went so far to get to the spot where she had taken me and she told me there was a little more to the story.

When she was growing up, the place was called Superstition Hill by white folks because it had been a mystical place for the Native Americans. She said white people had the habit of calling everything they didn’t understand “superstition.” However, the Indians believed that it was a place where the physical and spiritual worlds came together. And, if a person opened their mind and heart, the heavens opened up to them and they could see into many worlds beyond, into the places of their ancestors. I asked if anyone ever saw the heavens open up and she told me she thought the Indians did.

I wanted to know if she had a nice talk with my grandfather earlier that day in that special place. And she said with the biggest smile, “Yes, I did! And it was just like old times; I talked and he listened.”

By that time we were both very hot from the sun and the old farm road had quite a few steep grades so by the time we got home we were worn out. As soon as we reached the porch we both sat down to catch our breath but then Grandma went inside and took a bath. When she came out, she smelled like liniment so I guessed she was sore from walking. She told me to take a bath too and so I did and we just sort of moped around the house until suppertime. While we were eating, I remember looking up at her at one point to see her staring at me. I asked if everything was okay because I noticed she had not eaten very much. She told me she was just fine, that she was only thinking how proud she was of me, that she wanted me to have a wonderful life and she felt in her heart I would. She said that although I didn’t know it, I was already more grown up than most men ever became and of course, that boosted my esteem to the hilt.

As tired out as we should have been that evening, we ended up having the most wonderful talk. And that was the first time I heard the term “love merchant.” She wanted me to always remember to be a love merchant no matter what I ended up doing for a living. Of course, I wanted to know exactly what a love merchant was and she told me it was someone who always treated others like they would want to be treated. She said that was another thing my Uncle Pete never figured out. He thought success was based on being smarter than the other person.

“Your Uncle Pete was so smart, he was forever outsmarting himself.” She said his problem was he’d forgotten how to love himself and so he could never love others. “You have to love yourself,” she said to me, “because you can’t give what you don’t have. You can’t give love to others if you can’t give it to yourself.” She went on to say that by the time they are grownups, most people have learned to close their hearts because they want to protect themselves from being hurt and disappointed. But a love merchant had no fear of this. “A love merchant,” she explained, “always walks with an open heart and always does the loving thing. And guess what?”

I shrugged.

“As long as you do the loving thing, loving things will always come back to you. Remember, David, whatever you give, you always receive in one way or another and that’s the way the world works. That’s why some people with all the money in the world are never very happy or content. Their purses may be fat but their hearts are impoverished. And I want you to always be rich, honey, no matter how much or how little money you make.”

I explained that Mrs. Hanson said you have to keep an eye on people because a lot of them will steal from you or take advantage of you in some way. “She talks about it a lot,” I confided.

Grandma nodded with understanding. “Some people go through their whole life never letting go of their bitterness because somewhere along the way, people have let them down. But the love merchant forgives and forgets because he knows everyone he meets—the good, the bad and the indifferent—has something to teach him. You see,” she added, “every one of us is teacher and student at the same time. And when you understand this, all your hate and anger simply go away and your heart opens up to love again. And when your heart is open, the more love that pours out is poured back in. Your heart is just like a well that never runs dry,” she told me. “But if you block it, you leave a lot of people thirsty and that’s all there is to it. Do you know who the greatest love merchant to ever live was?”

I didn’t. And so she said, “That was Jesus.”

“I don’t quite understand it,” Lenny said; “your grandmother sounds like she was religious but she didn’t go to church. I don’t know, but, to me, that seems a little confusing or conflicting in its own way. Not so much today maybe, but I mean for those times.”

“As I said before,” Mr. Mahoney patiently explained, “Nature was her church. But that isn’t why she didn’t go to church like most others in town did.”

“Then, why?”

“I asked her once and this is what she told me. She said, ‘Honey, all religions start out on the wrong foot. The first thing they tell you is how sinful and terrible human beings are. The first thing the preacher tells you is you have to be saved. I mean, I remember when I was four years old my own parents took me to their little church and they told the crazy old preacher I hadn’t minded and he told me the devil was in me and I needed salvation. Why, for years, I was afraid to sneeze because I was raised to fear God. Well, I decided right then and there if God is someone you have to fear, I didn’t like him very much. And I didn’t, until I was a full-grown woman and began to understand for myself that God was a being of unconditional love. And after that, God and I got along just fine.’”

“She sure had a will of her own,” Lenny remarked.

Mr. Mahoney chuckled, “Yes, she did,” he agreed, “we all do, of course, but most people choose not to use it.”

“So how did you end up in this business?” Lenny asked.

Mr. Mahoney leaned back in his chair. “Well, Lenny, it’s all part of the story…”

I slept like a rock that night after a long, grueling day walking back from our broken truck. When I woke, it was already daylight so I knew I had overslept. But so had my grandmother and that was very unusual because she was always up before the sun. I peeked into her bedroom and when I saw she was still sleeping, I decided I’d surprise her and cook breakfast.

Now one thing I wasn’t experienced in at my young age was cooking. But I mixed up the hotcake batter the way I had watched my mother and grandmother do it and I think I probably did okay. I threw some wood and coal into the stove and got the fire going. When the stove got hot, I poured the batter into a frying pan and went in to wake up Grandma. I opened her bedroom door again and hollered out that breakfast was ready. But she still didn’t wake up, so I walked over to the bed and gave her a gentle push.

All of a sudden my whole world stood still because she didn’t move. I went to the other side of the bed so I could see her face and she was just laying there with her eyes open as if she were looking out the window. I was sure she was dead but then she looked straight at me and my whole body slumped in relief. She tried to say something but she couldn’t. There was something terribly, terribly wrong. I became frantic because I didn’t know what to do. Finally I ran out of the house, put a bridle on one of the horses and raced into town for the doctor. I’ll never forget that ride. It was like being in a dream, when you want to run so fast and you’re stuck in slow motion. I found the doctor at home still in bed so I had to wait until he dressed. As soon as he did, we climbed into his car and sped back to the house. I sat on the porch, worried sick.

I don’t know how long the doctor was inside—it seemed like forever—and when he finally came out, he told me my grandmother had suffered a stroke. I wanted to know if she would be okay. The doctor said he honestly didn’t know. It was up to her and God. He made himself at home with a fresh pot of coffee and stayed with me for a few hours in order to keep an eye on her. I was thankful for that. We didn’t talk very much but I explained we had walked in the hot sun a long way the day before and he admitted it was probably too much for her. But, I told him we always used to walk up in the hills! He said that wasn’t quite the same as walking in the hot sun for hours at a time, especially going up and down hills. And there were quite a few of them along our way. I felt awful.

I guess about nine in the morning I gathered my courage and went back into my grandmother’s room. She was laying on her back then and I looked out the window toward the hills. I choked up because we had walked up to the river so many times and all those memories sort of hit me at once. I told my grandmother how much I loved her and sick as she was, I saw her eyes sparkle.

But then she died.

My memory gets a little blurry after that. I think the doctor drove into town and then the mortician came out and put my grandmother in a coffin. We didn’t have a mortuary in town and so they just left her there in the house and the doctor said he would tell people what happened and arrange for the funeral so everyone could pay their respects.

Lots of people came out that day to look at Grandma, including Mrs. Hanson. She had closed the store and stayed with me so I wouldn’t be alone. All of this had taken place bynoon; some people brought food and it was strange in many ways. Everybody kept hugging me and I finally went outside to be by myself.

It’s hard to explain how I felt—empty and angry at the same time. And then I started to cry and I couldn’t stop. And that’s when I did the craziest thing. I had to get away. The horse I’d ridden to the doctor’s house was still in town so I bridled our mare, jumped on her back and just rode off as fast as I could. It’s a wonder I didn’t kill that poor horse because I really pushed her until we reached the broken-down truck where it still sat at the side of the road. I hated that truck with such a passion now and blamed it for what happened to my grandmother. I swore at it, cried at it and threw rocks at it. I wanted to hurt it as I believed it had hurt me. I don’t know how long I was out there but when I rode back home, most of the people were gone. Mrs. Hanson said she had been very worried about me.

The next day, Preacher Morrison said a few words at my grandmother’s funeral and I just stood there with a lump in my throat, staring at the cameo necklace she still wore around her neck. My father came but we spoke little and then he left once more. When the service was over, Mrs. Hanson took me to her place and I slept in an extra bed she had on a screened porch.

After a few days had passed, Mrs. Hanson suggested I move in with her because I was too young to stay at my grandmother’s house all by myself. I didn’t want to, but I did. And so, one day we went out and boarded up Grandma’s place and my young life had changed again.

Over the next couple of years, we slowly went out of the grocery store business altogether. And I put up our new sign that read, Hanson’s Hardware.

Mrs. Hanson was very pleased; she said the name sounded just right. And we began doing very well. Well, we were the only real hardware store in town and so we did a lot of business. Another few years went by, and soon I was twenty years old. In fact, it was on my twentieth birthday when Mrs. Hanson made a big decision. She said she had quite a bit of money saved up and she wanted to move to her sister’s home. She never told me but I figured her own health was failing. I felt bad because she was really all I had in the world. I mean, in all those years I saw my brother only two or three times and my sister lived in Oklahoma near the Army base where her husband was still stationed as an Army “lifer,” so I never saw her. As for my father, I had not seen him since my grandmother’s funeral.

I asked Mrs. Hanson if she was going to sell the store before she left and that’s when she handed me the papers that turned the place over to me. She said, “This is your birthday present, David” and even though I told her she shouldn’t do that because she could sell the place instead and make even more money, she wouldn’t hear of it. She wanted me to have it, she said, and that’s all there was to it…

I had an Oldsmobile of my own by then and so about two weeks after my birthday I drove her to the train station and we hugged and kissed goodbye. I’ll always remember watching that train pull out and disappear into the distance. I felt sorry for myself but I snapped out of it and put my mind into the store and since we had quite a big yard in back of it, I started buying lumber and so then I had a hardware and lumber store. Do you remember my old school buddy, Eddie? Well, I hired him to work for me. And, a few months later, I had another employee. I was doing very well for a town that size.

I had a girlfriend, too. A girl named Peggy I’d gone to school with. She was a year younger than I was and we were very sweet on each other. In fact, I had planned on asking her to marry me but then the war came along. Eddie had gone down to join the service but he was rejected because he had flat feet. So I asked if he would run things for me if I joined up. He said he would and so I found my way to a Navy recruiting office where they said my feet were just fine. So, off I went.

All during the war I wrote to Peggy and Mrs. Hanson, but then I got a letter from Mrs. Hanson’s sister that told me she had passed on. That was truly one of the most difficult days I had in the service, in spite of the fact I was in the middle of a war, because on that same day I got another letter, this one from Peggy saying she had found someone else. My very own “Dear John” letter. A year later, I came home without a scratch to find the town had changed even more. There was a drug store next to my hardware store and two gas stations instead of one. But the best surprise was the movie house!

I had also changed, of course. I felt restless. I even thought about joining up again and making the Navy my career. But, finally, I asked Eddie if he might like to buy the store and his eyes widened. The truth is, it had turned into a little gold mine and by then Eddie was married and had two children of his own. He borrowed some money and bought the place right away. There was something in my heart that told me it was the right thing to do. Yet, I didn’t know why, because I had no idea what I would do with the rest of my life.

I decided to leave town. The day before I left, I went to the graveyard and had a talk with my grandmother, thanking her for everything she had given me, and after that, I drove to our old house, a property I swore I would never sell. I didn’t go in because it was still boarded up. Instead, I hiked up to the river and sat where my grandmother and I used to sit when I was a boy.

I asked the river if it thought I had done the right thing, and a leaf fell from one of the trees. I watched it as it flowed down stream. I thought that was answer enough and so I told those old hills goodbye and that was the last time I enjoyed them for many, many years.

I moved here, and after awhile, I met my future wife and fell in love. Her father had been in the construction business and was retiring at a young age. I think he was fifty at the time. He was a very nice man and we got along very well. It wasn’t until we were married that I came up with the idea of the rental business. I had been working as a manger for a very big lumberyard in town and I had quite a good future promised to me. After I had been there for a couple of years, the owner said he would make me a partner when he retired and that was going to be within five years. Well, it was quite an offer. That yard owned ten delivery trucks and they were busy every day so the place was making a lot of profit. Yet, I kept having the feeling my destiny wasn’t there, although I didn’t have a clear idea of where it was or what I really wanted to do.

My father-in-law had been retired for a few years by then and I remember going out to his place where he had all this old construction equipment and I thought, now there are a lot of people who could use that stuff. I don’t know why that particular idea was appealing to me but it felt right, so I went for it. Like my grandmother said, you have to follow your heart.

“And the rest is history,” Mr. Mahoney said, finishing his story. “I’ll bet you hadn’t guessed that I could be so long winded.” He smiled and looked at his watch. It was nearing three in the afternoon.

“I enjoyed it all, really,” Lenny said.

“Well, you said you’d like to know how I got to where I am, so now you know.”

“You credit all this to your grandmother then?” Lenny was looking about the impressive office again, remembering he was not only sitting in Mr. Mahoney’s office, but in his building, as well.

“I attribute it to what my grandmother taught me because she gave me the wisdom I would not have had otherwise. But also I attribute it to my father, Mrs. Hanson and even my Navy experience; to my wife and lots of other people.”

“Your father abandoned you,” Lenny replied, confused. “Why would you…”

“You have to remember what my grandmother taught,” Mr. Mahoney interrupted. “Each one of us is both teacher and student at the same time. Life is a learning process, Lenny, and everyone we meet adds to our education. Some people are good and kind to us, and some hurt and betray us. The trouble is that when we run up against terrible times or unfair people, we tend to lose our tempers and fall into anger and resentment or self-pity. And when we do, we close the door of our heart and our potential to grow from these things.

“My grandmother was a woman who had no formal education but she knew that we are all connected in a web of relationships that expand into all of Nature. She was way ahead of her time because that is exactly what a lot of the new scientists are telling us now. She never had a business of her own but she knew that if you only permit yourself to do the loving thing and be of service to others, success would naturally unfold for you. This business of mine hasn’t become what it is because I’m some sort of a business wizard, smarter than most others. Hell, when it comes down to it, I’m pretty much a country bunkin. That doesn’t mean I fell off the turnip truck nor does it mean I’ve got an exclusive on potential.”

“On the other hand,” Lenny said, “you were a hard worker even when you were a little kid and that has to count.”

“Well, that’s the way some people would look at it, I guess, but the truth is I learned early on not to work hard but to have fun at what I did. It doesn’t mean you never have an off day or that everything always turns out right. You just put your joy in the process and that way you never let anything get you down.

“Tell you what,” he added, standing. “When you leave here this afternoon and you see strangers along your way, open up your heart and say silently to them, I love you and by the time you get home, your day will feel bright and happy. You see that all those people are you, only in different circumstances. Once you catch onto that, you won’t look down or up at anyone; you simply love all others and that results in loving your self and your life a whole lot more. The more you love, the freer you are and that’s the greatest of all truths. I can’t tell you how many times my grandmother pointed that out when we used to go to the river.”

“Mr. Mahoney, you said one thing when you first started your story that I’d like to ask you about since I have children.”

“Okay,” Mr. Mahoney said; “we’re on your time now.”

“You said that your grandmother didn’t really ever make you mind and that sounds so alien to my way of thinking.”

“I can understand that from a young father. We all have to learn not to put our fingers in the fire,” Mr. Mahoney explained. “But, when we get to an age where we can reason, say even when we’re four or five years old, if we are only taught to mind, all we learn to be is mindless. What you want your children to learn is how to be mindful. And that means to do the loving thing, like being kind and conscientious about how they treat others and other things. A youngster who is mindful, for example, doesn’t kick the dog just because his mother won’t let him have cookies before dinner if he does. Do you see what I’m getting at? A youngster who is mindful doesn’t take something that doesn’t belong to him. Why? Because he’s aware that such an act hurts someone else. Of course, you can preach mindfulness to your children day in and day out, but if you don’t reflect the same thing, well, then, they’ll project a whole lot more of what they see you do than they will of what you tell them.”

Lenny nodded.

“Anything else?” Mr. Mahoney asked.

“Do you know what I think?” Lenny said. “I think you ought to write a book so other people can learn what your grandmother taught you. I mean, there’s so much to remember and I think people would like to know your story.”

“I never thought about that,” Mr. Mahoney said, perking up. “Do you see how it works? I just wanted to introduce you to ideas I think are good and important and what happens? You become my teacher and now I have an idea I didn’t have before. I just might write that book,” he said, smiling. “And if I ever do, Lenny, you’ll be in it.”

As Lenny left the office, Mr. Mahoney’s secretary looked at him smiling brightly. “Did Mr. Mahoney tell you a story?” she asked.

“Yes, he did.” Lenny returned her smile.

“He never runs out of stories…”

The comment worried Lenny. Maybe none of what Mr. Mahoney had said was true; maybe he was just an old man who liked to spin yarns. And anyway, there was one thing for sure. He had stayed away from the subject of the job opening. Lenny thought about going back to work at Puffer’s the next day and became depressed.

Donna was excited as he walked in the door. And the first thing she asked was if he had gotten the job.

Lenny shook his head and shrugged.

“Well, what did you do all day?” Her cheery mood dulled.

“I spent the entire day with Mr. Mahoney.”

“And he didn’t say if you were going to get the job or not?”

“No, he didn’t,” Lenny snapped. “We didn’t even talk about the job.”

“What did you talk about then?” Donna responded just as sharply.

“He told me the story of his life,” Lenny confessed, “and about how his grandmother had raised him and…I don’t know, it was all philosophical and religious in a lot of ways.”

“Oh God.” Donna shook her head. “He just made you sit there and listen to all that? What is he? Some kind of religious fanatic?”

“No,” Lenny declared. “He’s really a nice man. I think he was trying to help me. I mean, I was there from early morning…”

“I know how long you’ve been gone, Lenny.” Donna was becoming very upset. “Did you tell him you wanted the job?”

“Yes, of course I did, Donna.”

“And what did he say?”

“He didn’t say anything.”

“So he just wasted your whole day for nothing?”

“He gave me a lot to think about. Why are we hollering at each other?” he asked. “I love you.”

“That’s not the point,” Donna said, lowering her voice.

“Yes, it is, Donna, I think it is,” he said gently. “Sometimes you have to be like a leaf on the water and go with the flow.”

Donna had nothing to say to that, so she turned and left the room.

Lenny went to bed that night feeling miserable. But as soon as the lights were out, Donna turned to him apologizing, saying she had only been let down because she had felt so sure he had gotten the job. They held each other and made love.

The next morning, Lenny left for work at Puffer’s but oddly enough he was feeling anxious to get there. On his way, he had decided to test some of the things Mr. Mahoney had told him. On this day he would love everyone, including Mr. Puffer and make his work fun. Why not? As long as he had to be there, why mope around in resentment all day?

His fresh mood and new attitude didn’t last, however. As soon as he walked in, he was told to see Mr. Puffer immediately. When Lenny walked into his office, Mr. Puffer was as sour as always but this time he was angry, as well. He told Lenny he had been missing too many days at work and he read the proverbial riot act to him. By damn, if Lenny didn’t want to work there, he ought to find something else to do!

Lenny told Mr. Puffer he liked working there and promised that he wouldn’t miss any more days. Mr. Puffer told him if he did, he could pick up his paycheck and be done with it. Mr. Puffer dismissed him, but Lenny remained seated. Finally Mr. Puffer looked up from his work with an irritated expression. “Are you going back to work or are you just going to sit here all day?”

Lenny smiled broadly. “I was just thinking that I love you,” he said. For some reason, he suddenly felt like laughing but, of course, he didn’t.

“Are you on drugs?” Mr. Puffer asked.

“No, Mr. Puffer, I’m just kind of high on life today,” Lenny answered and he was sincere. For some reason he was feeling free, even happy.

“Have you punched in your timecard yet?”

Lenny nodded that he had.

“Well, either get down to the warehouse or punch out.” There was a strong warning in Mr. Puffer’s voice. Lenny stood and started to leave the office but Mr. Puffer stopped him, asking, “Are you having problems at home or something?”

“I’m fine, sir, everything’s just fine,” Lenny answered and he returned to the warehouse to start his day.

Two weeks passed and Lenny decided that since he hadn’t gotten a call from Mr. Mahoney regarding the manager’s job, he would stay at Puffer’s until something better rolled around. He didn’t dare take off another day for job hunting, that’s for sure.

He and Donna were getting along very well, even though their financial problems persisted. They had talked and Lenny said something to Donna that seemed to have changed everything: he just didn’t think anything better would come along until they began making the best of what they already had. And Donna had responded in a positive way. She began taking better care of their apartment and because she and Lenny continued to communicate in positive ways, she was putting her heart into everything. For one thing, she used to resent cleaning the apartment and did so mostly for the children’s sake. But now, she was fixing things up, giving the place a few little touches that made it feel homey and cared about. Lenny noticed, of course, and quite suddenly their lives were happier, even in the shadow of financial struggles.

One evening Lenny said to Donna, “You know, even if Mr. Mahoney did pass me over for the job, I think we have a lot to thank him for. Just looking at our lives and the world differently has created a lot of great changes, don’t you think?”

Donna agreed. “I would still like to have a better life,” she admitted. “But as soon as the children get a little older I’m going to work and then we can get caught up on everything.”

Lenny nodded. He still didn’t like the idea of Donna working outside the home but he had come to realize that he was being old fashioned about it and that most wives and mothers held jobs and managed to care for their families successfully. But in addition, he had a deeper understanding: if that was what Donna wanted to do, then she had the right to do it. He would support her wishes.

On the following Friday night, Lenny drove home from Puffer’s looking forward to the weekend. When he got there, Donna met him at the door with a kiss and a surprise. She had taken the kids to her mother’s for the night! Lenny was delighted and he saw a spark in Donna’s eyes he hadn’t seen in a long time. He loved it when she sparkled like that… She was wearing her favorite dress, a pretty but simple yellow one made of cotton, but to Lenny it was sexy and of course, Donna knew this.

She had ordered Chinese food so she wouldn’t have to worry about cooking dinner and when it arrived, she set a lovely table complete with candles. Lenny was enjoying every minute of it. It had been such a long time since they had taken an evening for themselves. “I don’t know what inspired all this,” Lenny said, opening the boxes of hot food; “but whatever it was, I’m a happy and grateful man!”

After dinner, they were talking and laughing, thoroughly enjoying each other’s company, when Donna said casually, “Oh, by the way, someone called from Mr. Mahoney’s office and said you’ve got the job…if you still want it.”

Lenny’s mouth dropped open in complete shock! He had been convinced he was not going to be hired and now his dream had come true. He looked across the table at Donna and watched her eyes fill with tears. She was smiling and crying at the same time and now so was he. It was a night of love and celebration they would never forget.

During his first break on Monday morning, he called Mr. Mahoney’s secretary and was told he should give his job a two-week notice and then come into their office to find out about his training. When he hung up the phone, he wanted to jump with joy; the last thing he wanted to do was go back to work, but he did. And, of course, he gave his notice. The next two weeks passed slowly for him but he worked diligently and continued to do his job well. The weekend seemed to last forever and finally, on the biggest Monday morning of his life, he walked back into theMahoneyBuilding, this time as an employee. He couldn’t remember ever being so excited! For one thing, he would be earning nearly double the salary he had earned at Puffer’s and that was only the beginning. If he did well, and he would make sure he would, there would be advancements.

As he reached the receptionist’s desk, Marsha—he remembered her name this time—greeted him with a wide smile. “Hello,” she said. “And how is our newest employee this morning?”

“He’s great, just great, thanks,” Lenny answered with a wide smile of his own. Marsha sent him to the Personnel Department where he was greeted with nothing but more smiles and enthusiasm. He could hardly believe how welcoming everyone was, from the receptionist to Mr. Mahoney himself. He couldn’t wait to get home and share his experiences with Donna.

Donna was just as anxious to hear all about what had happened and Lenny told her everything, even the smallest details. He also told her they were going toVirginiafor a bit because that was where new employees were trained. “Oh no,” Donna responded; “my mother called today to say she and my father are going toSan Franciscofor a few days. I don’t want to leave the children with a babysitter we don’t know. You might have to go by yourself.” She was already feeling the disappointment.

“Nope, I won’t,” Lenny said brightly. “They encourage people to bring their children.”

“You’re kidding!” Donna said in disbelief.

Lenny shook his head. He wasn’t kidding one bit.

The trip across country was a pleasant and easy flight; the kids had a blast! A Mahoney company bus picked them up at the airport. The driver chatted with Lenny, saying he had been working for the company for more than ten years. Lenny and Donna could take his word for it: they were in for a good time. Donna wondered exactly where they were going. The driver said, “To the Training Center,” promising them they would enjoy it. “It’s beautiful here this time of year.”

And it was. After leaving the confines of the city, they found themselves on a freeway, then an older highway and finally on a private, unpaved road leading into a wilderness with a purple range of mountains in the distance before them. They had not been toVirginiabefore and so the two-hour drive was filled with new images and things of interest. The children were delighted with the adventure. Somewhere along the way, the driver asked Lenny what he was going to be doing for the company. Lenny said he was being trained for a managerial position for a new, large Rent It facility that had recently been built.

“They just keep growing,” the driver remarked enthusiastically. “Congratulations.”

“It seems like it’s a great company to work for?” Lenny said, intentionally leaving a question mark after his comment. He was fishing, of course.

The driver smiled. “Well,” he said, “like in any other business, some employees come and go but those who catch on, stay on and we have people who have been with the company for thirty years. I think I told you I’m in year ten myself.”

“Do you like being a driver?” Donna inquired.

“I started working in one of the yards,” the driver replied, giving a brief account of his history with the company. “But I felt the need to be on the move. My nature, I guess. When I went in to give my notice, Mr. Mahoney himself came in to talk with me. He said I’d been doing a fine job and wanted to know why I wanted to leave. I told him the truth, that I didn’t have the where-with-all to work in a closed environment.”

“And what did he say?” Donna truly wanted to know.

“He asked what would make me happy and I told him that I liked to be out on my own and that I was thinking about going back to driving a truck. He offered me this job and now you couldn’t get rid of me with a stick.”

“So this really is a good company to work for?” Donna coaxed.

“Those who stay on work with the company, as opposed to for it. There is no real division between management and employee in the traditional sense. Mr. Mahoney has a policy that the fellow who sweeps the floor is just as important to the success of the company as the person who sits behind an executive desk. No matter what our job is, each of us is in sales and service, you see. A company is like this world of ours, nothing but a bunch of relationships, one thing connected to another. Let’s say a receptionist answers the phone in a snippy way. Well, he or she has not only created a snippy, uncaring image of that company for the customer on the other end, but he or she has, in that instant, represented everyone who works there, all the way up to the main office. You see? Take me, for example. Right now I am in charge of the company’s public relations. If I’m a grump today and look like I resent driving you folks to where you’re going, you’re not only going to think that I’m not so friendly, you’re also going to judge the company’s attitude based on me. You might not think that’s the way it works, but it does. Do you know that even the custodians in our company are brought down here for training?”

“To learn how to sweep and mop?” Donna was intrigued.

“No,” the driver answered. “To learn about the company and the equipment and services we offer. Why? Because a customer might ask the person behind the mop where something is and if he says, I don’t know, you’ll have to ask someone else, well then, he has created an inconvenience for the customer and, depending on his attitude, he might have even lost that customer. By the way, I know of one custodian who started out with a mop in his hand and he’s now a manager of one of our best yards. You know, everybody talks about customer care, but in this company, we also have staff and employee care, and executive and owner care. I don’t know, I guess we’re more of a philosophy than anything else but you’re soon to find that out for yourselves.”

“I can’t imagine that everyone doesn’t stay with this company for a hundred years,” Lenny remarked.

“Some get it and some don’t,” the driver shrugged. “Well, we’re here,” he said, pointing to a large, one story building. “That’s theTrainingCenter, but before you start that process, we want you to be settled in your accommodations.” They drove for another few minutes and suddenly neither Donna nor Lenny could believe their eyes. There was a little village of cottages set amidst the trees and the driver stopped the bus before one of them. “This is your place while you’re here,” he said.

“Well,” Lenny said to Donna as they started down the path to the front door. “I’m beginning to feel as if I’m living in a fairytale.”

“Me, too,” Donna agreed and she opened the door to a brand new world.

In some ways the environment was, indeed, reminiscent of a fairytale. The cottage was decorated in warm, cozy colors with comfortable furniture. There was a fireplace in the small living room and it looked very romantic. The driver came in with their luggage and headed toward the bedroom. Lenny and Donna along with their children followed him.

The bedroom was small but just as welcoming. And in another room, there were bunk beds and a crib. The kitchen was stocked, although the driver said there was a café where they could eat out, if they chose. They needed only to sign their names. As soon as the driver left, Donna said she didn’t think she would ever want to leave and Lenny agreed. Everything was so quaint and lovely. It all felt so very rustic and yet so very romantic. They walked outside through the backdoor. The tiny yard was terraced with flowers and there were trees and hills a short distance away, creating a landscape of natural beauty that inspired Lenny to say how free he felt.

Donna waved at a couple standing in the yard next to them and they waved back. Soon they were in conversation. The couple introduced themselves as Carl and Lupe; they managed a Rent It inArizona. Lenny was surprised. “I thought this was only for new employees.”

“As long as there is room, you can come here lots of times,” Lupe explained. “We haven’t been here for seven years and we thought it would be nice to experience it again. You know, sometimes you have to be reminded of things.”

“We started putting our names in to spend time here three years ago,” Carl said. “But there are so many requests and sometimes there isn’t any space available because of new employees coming in.”

“Do you always have to go through the training again, even if you just want to visit?” Donna asked.

“Only if you want to,” Lupe answered, “and just about everyone does. It refreshes your memory and reminds you to enjoy yourself. Sometimes people forget to have fun at their jobs, you know, and so it’s good to come back every now and then.”

“How many people are here now?” Donna wondered.

“Well, I’m not sure. The Center holds five hundred people but a lot of them are sent down from other businesses. There aren’t enough places to stay so most are in the motels along the highway a few miles from here. You’ll see, when you go to orientation this evening—there will be people from all over the world.”

“I didn’t realize this was such a big deal,” Lenny remarked. He was impressed.

“Why would Mr. Mahoney want to share his secrets of success with other businesses?” Donna asked and turned to Lenny saying, “That sounds unusual, doesn’t it?”

“Not at all,” Lupe interjected. “But that is something you will learn about. We do not look at business as winning battles but rather as gaining hearts.”

There were babysitters for those with children and so Lenny and Donna felt relaxed as they entered the Center for the first time. It was quickly filling up with people. The large parking facility was packed. And it was obvious that guests had arrived from places all around the globe. There were Asians and others from theFar East, people fromAfricaandEurope, from just about everyplace, includingRussia. As it ended up, there were only three couples in attendance that were actually working for or starting to work for the company, Lenny and Donna included.

As soon as everyone was seated in the theater, a spokesperson was introduced and he walked out onto the platform. He looked about the audience and said to everyone, “I love you.”

Lenny and Donna glanced at each other. What was this?

“I love you,” the spokesperson repeated. “And now you ask, how can I love you because I do not know you? I will volunteer the answer: because we are all the same and our differences are only apparent. We are different races, different genders and from different backgrounds but who among us does not bleed when cut? Whose tears are not equally as salty? And are there not two treasures amidst all the treasures in the world equally important to each and every one of us? To love and to be loved! Are we not all the same in this?”

Everyone in the room applauded.

The spokesperson continued. “Everyone who enters our places of business is always seeking these treasures—to love and to be loved. Every living thing on the planet is a treasure hunter in this way. And if you doubt this, go home tonight and ask your pet pooch, or the houseplants in your kitchen or your next-door neighbor. Ask yourself! If this is true, why don’t we simply treat ourselves and others, including our customers and clients, lovingly? What does this mean? Well, the greatest love merchant in all of history gave us the insight we need to answer this question. He said to treat others as you would want to be treated and to love your neighbor as you love yourself. Does this simplify life or what? Does this not stop all the warring between competitors, be they in business, politics or religion? But then we may ask, who are our neighbors? They are not just the people who live next door to you. They are the people living all around the globe. I am your neighbor.

“Look around the auditorium and you will see people from many different cultures. They are your neighbors. Do you want to know all about them? When you go back to your cottage or motel tonight, look in the mirror and their secrets will be revealed to you. And upon knowing them in such intimacy, you will love them for they are you and, I repeat, their differences are only apparent. If you look into the mirror long enough, you will get to know them in all their fears and idiosyncrasies and all their pains and pleasures. And soon enough you will stop judging them through your own ideologies and concepts and you will begin loving them as your brothers and sisters. Life is projection and reflection, folks. Project your hate, your disgust, your anger and your prejudice on others and you have created them hateful, disgusting and unloving. What you project into your reality is always reflected back to you.

“The vast odds are that you believe the world acts upon you but I am here to tell you, it is you who act upon the world. You are not the created but rather you are in the process of creating and are in the song of the Universe. If your world is not rich, you are impoverished within and are lost to the mystery and majesty of self. What has been given you is a world of possibilities. And within these possibilities is a quiet truth that is whispered to all of us—the world is what you make it.

“I will tell you now, if you are not happy tonight, if you discover yourself frustrated and anguished in your life, it is because you have closed the door of your heart. And no matter how bright you are intellectually, no matter how expert you are in the mental department, and even if you are a master maker of maps, if your heart is not open, you are lost. And when any of us are lost, we live in the shadows of doubt. And when we are in doubt, we are in confusion and chaos. But, I will tell you now, from chaos comes harmony and this too is the working of the world. You have it within you to create either, because what you deem the world to be, it always becomes.

“You have spent a lifetime learning how to be a closed system. And from this training you have been indoctrinated to look at the world or even just around this room and see everyone else as them. This is because you believe the world is fragmented into bits and pieces but I tell you, this is not the case. When we permit ourselves to go beneath the surfaces of our differences, we discover our sameness and our connectiveness, not only to all people but also to the entire Universe. And because we are connected, we have been given the greatest of all gifts. And that gift is our potential to have empathy. And where there is empathy, there is always compassion. And where there is compassion, there is always love. Unconditional love! And where there is unconditional love, there is always success. Over these next five days, we’re going to be covering how all this works. And if you can leave all your indoctrination behind and become open to all the love that is in your own heart, you will begin to create positive synchronicities in your life. And, I tell you now without any hesitation whatsoever—success will naturally begin to unfold upon whatever path you are on.

“I will leave you with these thoughts to ponder on your own time. We have the weekend coming up and so we will not resume the seminar until Monday. We encourage you to take advantage of the scenic places available to you and to find places to hike and enjoy Nature. Many of you have probably not done this for years and maybe a few of you have never done this. And so, if you do decide to wander into the hills and find a place that offers you solace, open your heart to even the silence and see how much joy you’re given in return. And if you choose, take the time to say I love you to your world. Whisper to it, I am loving and I am lovable.

“Our goal is that by the time each of you leave here and return to your jobs and your homes, indeed to your daily lives, you will have become love merchants. And by becoming love merchants, all that is loving and good will follow.”

“This isn’t at all what I expected,” Lenny said as he and Donna walked back to their cottage that night.

“What did you expect?” Donna asked.

“I don’t know. First of all, I didn’t expect so many people and…” Lenny hesitated.

“You expected a training seminar, learning about sales and service?”

“Yes, I suppose I did. I thought this would be about company policy or something more directly related.”

“Lenny, that’s exactly what it’s about! It’s about what is expected of you. After spending a whole day with Mr. Mahoney, I’m surprised you don’t get it.”

Lenny nodded. “I guess we’re in love merchant school,” he said lightly and suddenly he was smiling and feeling very good about himself, his marriage, his family, and his life.

“We are,” Donna said, taking his hand. “And I think we should begin practicing right away…”

“Good idea!” Lenny stopped walking and suddenly Donna was in his arms. “I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too,” Donna whispered softly.

And they kissed, filling with more passion than they had for a very long time.

The next morning was Saturday and the weather had been warm and inviting since dawn. It was nearing nine by the time Lenny and Donna had the children dressed, fed and had eaten their own breakfast. Now they were talking about what they would do for the rest of their day. Donna thought that taking a walk and getting out into Nature as the speaker had suggested the night before was a good idea. “It’s so beautiful out,” she coaxed, but Lenny was feeling some jet lag from the day before and was reluctant to go. Nevertheless, he finally agreed, much to Donna’s delight.

They gathered the kids and off they went to explore and enjoy a morning stroll. Their three-year-old was obviously having a wonderful time from the moment they left the cottage. He began collecting pebbles along his way and sticking the little treasures into his pockets. They climbed over a grassy slope and continued through the wild grass toward a grove of trees a hundred yards or so before them. “We should have brought a picnic basket,” Donna said enthusiastically. Lenny promised her they would do so the next day if she wanted to. Their three-year-old wanted to know what a “picnic” was.

When they reached the grove of trees, they decided to sit and rest. The morning sun was very hot by then and they were thankful they had carried water with them, including the baby’s bottle, so everyone had a welcomed drink. The shade from the trees was also refreshing and so they enjoyed just sitting there and listening to the rustle of the leaves whenever a soft breeze occurred. Lenny drifted into thoughts of Mr. Mahoney and the orientation speech of the night before and all the people who had attended. What was it all about? He thought he would be learning pricing, systems of the company’s marketing, about some of the equipment. It just seemed so unusual. Donna wanted to know what he was thinking about.

“The job,” Lenny told her.

“I think it’s going to be wonderful.” She was sincerely inspired. “You’re not losing interest are you?”

“No, no,” he assured her. “It’s just this love merchant thing.”

“What about it?”

“The world just doesn’t operate like that.”

“That’s the whole point,” Donna answered, feeling a surge of frustration. “The world could. And should.”

“How?” Lenny shrugged. He wasn’t quite as positive about it all.

“Didn’t you listen last night? It has to start with you and with me. People came from all over the world to be here and we were fortunate enough to be sent. Did you notice Walter Green was in the audience?”

“Who’s that?”

“I read about him in Newsweek or, I don’t know, some magazine. He’s one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world—his company earns billions.”

“Why would a person like that go out of his way to be here? He already has everything!”

“Well, maybe he still doesn’t know how to love life,” Donna offered.

“If I was making billions, I’d surely know how,” Lenny said.

“Lenny, tell me the truth. Are you getting cold feet about taking this job?”

“No,” he insisted again.

Wanting to continue their hike, Donna let it go and so they followed a small trail that led them to the crest of a hill where Lenny couldn’t believe his eyes. He pointed across the meadow to an old, abandoned shack. “Oh my God, that’s it!” he said. Suddenly he felt very excited and energized.

“That’s what?” Donna could sense Lenny’s excitement.

“The house where Mr. Mahoney lived with his grandmother. I have to see it.”

“How do you know?” Donna asked, trying to keep up with Lenny’s stride with kids in tow.

“I just do.” By now, they had reached the porch. “This is where they sat and talked…” Lenny was in awe being there. “They would sit out here for hours and she would teach him things.”

“Why does this excite you so much?” Donna asked.

Lenny turned and took Donna’s hands in his. In his eyes, she saw faith for the first time. “Because now I know the story Mr. Mahoney told me was true. It’s all true, Donna. Let’s go inside.”

“The door is boarded up,” Donna said, “I don’t think we’re supposed to…”

But Lenny was already pulling away the planks. They walked in. It was mostly dark and musty; dust particles floated through streams of light that found their way through boards nailed across the windows. It created a soft celestial effect.

“Look,” Lenny said in a hushed tone that seemed appropriate somehow. “This was their kitchen!”

Donna was already looking at the coal stove. She was fascinated by the antiquity of it all.

Lenny sat down at the small wooden table. In the moments when he allowed it, he could feel the presence of the wise grandmother and her devoted grandson. He pointed at the back door. “Out there,” he said, “is where they had chickens and where they kept their horses. There’s a building, a big storage shed.”

Donna lifted what was left of a lace curtain from the dirty kitchen window and looked outside. There were, indeed, the remains of a chicken coop and beyond that, a flat-roofed shed. “You see, I told you!” Lenny’s excitement escalated. “I can’t believe it; this is the house where Mr. Mahoney was raised, and I’m sitting where they once sat.” Then Lenny led her into one of the bedrooms—there were two—and in the largest one, they looked at the bed with its worn, bare mattress. There was a little wooden nightstand nearby. “This was her room,” Lenny said. “She died here,” he added.

Donna shivered at the thought.

Lenny moved to the window and pointed through an opening where some of the boards had rotted away. “You see there? They used to walk up into those hills. The river is up there and there’s a spot with waterfalls.” He stopped talking and starting thinking. “I understand now,” Lenny said confidently. “All of it.”

“What, Lenny? What do you understand?”

“What this is all about—the seminars, this place, everything. This entire experience is about sharing what Mr. Mahoney’s grandmother taught…what she had learned from…from the river and the woods…” Lenny felt slightly embarrassed to be talking like this, but Donna touched his hand, encouraging him. At this moment, he was more grateful for her love and presence in his life than ever before.

“Mr. Mahoney is sharing his grandmother with the world. I mean, think about it. What we are doing here is learning the philosophy, the wisdom of an old hill woman who had little formal education but knew more about life and the Universe than… God, Donna! I finally get it!” He was pacing about the house excitedly. “It’s all love. That’s the truth of the Universe. Love is in the essence of everyone and everything. That’s what she taught and that’s what is being taught here. All of our lives we learn how to close our hearts until one day all meaning and purpose go away. We get caught up in wanting to be smarter, richer and even better than everyone else but if we strip away those goals that belong to the world and not us, and return to our own heart, we realize that all is one and one is all.”

“That’s what the speaker was saying last night,” Donna said. “Lenny, do you know what I did this morning?”

“No, what?”

“I did what we were asked to do. I looked in the mirror and I said I love you. I never loved myself before. Not really! But I did this morning and all of a sudden, everything became brighter. I mean, literally. And I had this moment of loving the entire world. I have never felt so free in my life. And that feeling has been with me all morning and I hope it stays forever.”

Lenny moved closer to his wife. “His grandmother used to tell Mr. Mahoney that it was important to love himself because she said you can’t give what you don’t have. You can’t love others unless you love yourself.”

“And we all have enough love to fill the Universe,” Donna added.

Lenny smiled. Now they both got it. Donna’s face was bright and happy. He had not seen that look since their wedding day.

“It’s too bad that she had to die,” Donna remarked, looking back at the old mattress on the bed. “I would have loved to have known her.”

Suddenly, their three-year-old was jumping up and down and pointing to the window. Lenny and Donna turned to see that there, just outside, a large, multicolored butterfly drifted in the breeze, completely carefree. And it stayed in their view for a very long time.

“It’s so beautiful,” Donna remarked. “I wonder what kind it is.”

“It’s a merchant of love,” Lenny said with a lump in his throat. “It’s change. Life is changing, Donna and for the better. Just like we have always hoped it would.” And now other butterflies were at the window. They stayed but a moment and in the next, they had all flown away.

Donna turned to look at Lenny. “Are you crying?” she asked, surprised. She had never, ever seen her husband like this before, so sensitive, so in touch with his own feelings. And she hoped from now on she would never see him any other way.

“No,” Lenny answered. “I’m celebrating.”

Taking Donna’s hand into his, they collected the children and started to leave. At the doorway, Lenny stopped to remember a woman whose love and wisdom was so complete, it continued to fill and nurture the Universe. Silently he said, thank you…I love you.

And, then, together, really together for the first time in years, Lenny and his family left the old house and went on to the rest of their lives.

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