My 16,777,216 Grandparents

Pomp can easily become a smug happening when based on miniscule facts. Take ancestors for instance. Lots of people get very pomp about theirs. I wonder if they ever thought about how many direct descendants are bouncing around in their DNA? We all have two parents, which give us four sets of grandparents and eight sets of great grandparents. The math is simple and if everyone will agree that each generation is usually calculated in 20-year increments, then there are five generations in 100 years. Now if that’s so, I have 1,048,576 direct linage grandparents who were getting smitten around 1608. Drop another 100 years and I have 16,777,216 grandparents who were roaming around in 1508 when the world’s population is estimated to have been only 800 million—that’s 2 percent of the population!

Lessons in Tiny Packages

Downloading the Creator comes with big lessons in tiny, if not invisible, packages. I had a car rattle that annoyed me and everyone else for months. It sounded like a screw rattling around inside the glove department or, worse yet the dash, but no one could pinpoint the problem including the car dealer. One day the rattle suddenly stopped when I reached for my water bottle sitting in the cup holder. Surprised, I released the cap and the rattle started up. Mystery solved. It was that small band attached to the cap that breaks lose when the bottle is opened. It sits unnoticed with just enough slack to rattle becoming an imperceptible irritant. Sometimes thoughts are like that.

A Lesson In Manipulation

Mother was more than a mother; she could well have been the first life coach although the idea of a life coach was yet to emerge as a profession. Children are natural masters of manipulation. At age five, I was no exception and remember quite well how I fell in love with a beautiful doll in the Sears Christmas Catalog.

I showed the picture to mother but didn’t get the response I wanted. All she did was agree with me that the doll was indeed beautiful. I then decided pity might work better and carefully curled up in an overstuffed chair. Holding the picture close to my chest, I produced tears that softly streamed down my cheeks. And just to make sure she heard me, loudly sniffed and sighed a few times.

She not only heard me, she immediately appeared in front of the chair and gently explained she knew how much I loved the doll. It was, however, unbecoming to pout, cry and pretend to make her feel as though she had to buy that doll to make me happy. If she did buy the doll, it would because she wanted to. “You mustn’t do something like this again. It isn’t nice and it isn’t thoughtful of the other person,” she said.

Flase Identity

False identity is paying people to make it appear as if they admire us. When the New York Times reported that Bill Zanker, president of the Learning Annex paid people to line up for a book signing for his and Donald Trump’s co-authored book, I wondered how much these men should allow when they wake up on the other side of dead with empty wallets?

Rebirth

We who watch death in every form are the ones who suffer. It is painful to say goodbye to our spouses, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, friends and most of all, to our children. Our life, like theirs, changes. Our life, unlike theirs, is still focused here. The person who made the transition was part of our habit, our identity, and our relationship with the world around us. When the person no longer exists in that capacity, we suffer a loss of identity. They don’t. We do.

Recognizing My Part

We all hit speed bumps and yesterday was mine. Feeling overwhelmed, it came to me "If it's not part of God, it's not part of me!"

Death Is a Colossal Birthday Party

When you turned twenty-one, are you the ten-year old you were once? Of course you are but you neither dwell on or are attached to having been a ten-year old at one time, although you can remember age ten when you are twenty-one. The memory of this life feels like that, like a moment in time or a movie you saw. You will recall it with complete detachment. In your earthly life, any age is only one stage of an overall lifetime. Each age has allowed you to gather enough experience to easily move on to the next age and is usually marked by a birthday party. Death, on the other hand, is one colossal birthday celebration!