A funny-hold-your-breath story of Francis Kong we often find ourselves into - making excuses!

     My father is a creature of habit. After dinner he would go to his room, sit on his favorite chair, wear his reading glasses and read the newspapers. This routine went on for many years.

     One evening, my father became very upset. He couldn’t find his glasses. You see, my dad is a very gentle and soft-spoken person, but when he’s mad, he’s really mad! Everybody scrambled to look for his glasses. My two brothers started moving chairs and tables and my mom started looking under everything, but nobody could find his reading glasses.


    Out of depression, my mother said, “Why don’t you look in your desk drawer and see if your glasses are there?”


     My dad replied, “Am I that stupid? If my glasses were in my drawer, would I still ask you to look for it?”

    My mother kept quiet. She turned to all of us in the house and said, “Look for your father’s glasses, all of you.”

     After more than an hour of unproductive search, my mother looked at my father and said, “Just one more time now. Could you please look into your drawers and see if your glasses are there?”

     Mumbling, as old men are in the habit of doing, he opened his drawer, looked inside. We couldn’t see the drawer’s contents from where we were standing but we did see a look of surprise from my father’s face.

      His eye’s widened but his brows narrowed. We didn’t need to be psychologists for conclude that his glasses were inside his drawer all along.

      There was a moment of suspenseful silence, a little like the calm before the storm. I could sense my mother’s anger rising. “What would my father say this time?” I wondered.


       As he held up his glasses, he looked at all of us and with a loud voice said, “Okay. Now who put my glasses back inside my drawer?”

We make excuses all the time. You and Me? Yes, all the time. But remember, its just so funny and ridiculous for the one who knows the truth.

Never – never – never – never – never- give up!!

      In 1969, magazine editor T. George Harris took a little-known magazine, put it in black, and made it into one of the outstanding magazines of its time. In 1976, soon after his magazine was bought by a major chain, Harris learned that his wife had breast cancer. Eight months later, he lost his job as a magazine editor. He then watched the magazine he had worked so hard to build suffer hard times and slowly decline until it was ultimately sold at a give-away price.

     At age fifty-five he found himself alone (his wife by then in the Sloan-Kettering Hospital), out of work, and with four children to clothe and feed. He began growing vegetables in his backyard to help feed his family and took occasional carpentry jobs to earn a little more. In all these however, Harris says the most significant part of his struggle was taking over the responsibilities of a working “mother”.

     His sons helped him run the house and shared in the chores. He bought a gross of white athletic socks and a gross of maroon socks so he wouldn’t have to “sort and match” the laundry. He’d just leave a basket of socks on the stairs. “Maroon is a universal color,” he says “It goes just as badly with blue, gray and black as with brown and green.”

     Harris couldn’t afford riding the taxi, so he began jogging to and from freelance jobs and then to the hospital to be with his wife during her meals. He gave up junk food and that, along with his daily jogging, resulted in a weight loss of thirty pounds. His hectic schedule continued for months. Some evening he wouldn’t get home until nine of ten. In January 1987 his wife died of cancer.

     Harris’s busy schedule continued for four years. In 1982 the combination improved his health, his struggle to survive and his will to succeed led him to take a risk. With little money, he and a partner launched a new, magazine from a seedy office in New York City. In a few short years, “American Health” has attracted a circulation approaching a million subscribers and has received a National Magazine Award. T. George Harris obviously didn’t get “the breaks” he made his own.

Who would stop in the middle of his fast smooth easy carefree hassle-free sugar-free all-is-okay-don’t-worry trip on the free way to help change a flat tire? This one did. Read this…’coz it’s that good really.

On a chilly and miserable rainy day in early February 1996, one of the most affluent men in America was being driven down on the freeway when his personal limousine got a flat tire. His driver got out to survey the damage when a passing car stopped and a fellow traveler offered to change the tire. 

When the tire was in place, the wealthy owner slid open his window and said, “That was kind of you – what can I do to thank you?”

The man thought for a moment and then with a smile and a chuckle replied, “My wife would get a real kick out of your sending a dozen long-stemmed roses to her on Valentine’s Day.” The entrepreneur agreed to do so and drove off.

February 14 arrived and a beautiful box of long-stemmed roses showed up at the kind traveler’s door for his wife. Inside was a simple note, which read:

“Happy Valentine’s Day! Thanks for helping us out. Here are the roses I promised and, by the way, I paid off your mortgage.” – Donald Trump

It was always profitable to be kind – more profitable if your humble too.

     One day, a beggar by the roadside asked for a alms from Alexander the Great as he passed by. The man was poor and wretched and had no claim upon a ruler, no right even to lift a solicitous hand. Yet the emperor threw his several coins. A courtier was astonished at his generosity and commented, “Sir, copper coins would adequately meet a beggar’s need. Why give him gold?” Alexander responded in royal fashion, “Copper coins would suit the beggar’s needs, but gold coins suit Alexander’s giving.”
 
Our true wealth is not measured by how much we have but by how much we give away.