From The Storyteller
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Hello All: Thinking back and remembering all the wonderful people I've encountered in so many different places give me hope for our tomorrows. I suggest you try it. Enjoy. Doug
Seasons “The most difficult part of staying up late is getting up every day at 5:00 a.m.”, me to myself as I reaffirm my commitment to being a professed “early morning” person. Sunrises and sunsets happen routinely and depending on the season I always get to see at least one them a day, and sometimes both. This of course caused me to reflect on two totally different winter seasons I’ve experienced. I lived in Harlingen, which is a city in deep south Texas, for several years. A typical joke about winter there would be, “I got to wear my winter clothes on January 6”. Downside - enough humidity to break a sweat walking from the A/C house to the car at 7:30 in the morning. In contrast to those years, I share my typical, Chicago winter workday when I was 20. Up at 5:00, get dressed, eat quickly, put on 30lbs of winter clothing, go out in –10 degrees weather, shovel foot deep snow to free car, start car (hopefully), drive 20 minutes to the commuter train station, board the train, ride shoulder to shoulder with 100 other people for 50 minutes, and then walk six city blocks in freezing winds through gray melting snow to begin my eight-hour workday. I’m smiling as I compare my life in both places. In Chicago I was a young bank teller, and in Harlingen I was pastor of a Methodist church. I enjoyed living both places, and this brings me to the reason I loved living in two places so totally different. The answer, “People”. Big city, small city, hot and humid, or cold and windy are simply details about a place. I loved both places because of the great people who lived there. Moral: People make a place great. |