Category — Rick's GoodThinkingStuff

The power went out. Again!

I looked out my second story office window and knew exactly why. I could hear the sounds throughout the morning. There was a crew of four men and three bucket trucks stringing power lines along the new poles they had been planting in the front and back yards of my neighborhood the past few weeks.

Often, during this time, I would work on my laptop on the front porch and watch this professional teamwork in total synchronicity, moving from pole to pole in planned sequence. First, it was connecting the phone lines. Then, cable. Today, and finally, from the back alley, the electricity.

What was of extreme interest to me was the foreman of this well-oiled machine. A big, burly middle-aged fellow whose sheer stature and hard look would intimidate most. But, he always uttered his commands, some very loudly as his underlings were often thirty-five feet in the air, with warm authority.

You could tell his crew really liked and had great respect for him. Although this was far from your typical ‘lean on your shovel’ squad, they still joked while working at a well-managed pace. Bossman, whose job description no doubt mandated a no hands-on, no physical labor approach, was always doing something to speed things along, be it picking up refuse or spooling wire. In fact, while they were in the process of connecting my power, guess who was pruning the overgrown pine tree branches in my backyard to make it easier for his boys?

It was at this point that I brought my high-wire friends a sampling of my special blend coffee (I prepared this, just prior to ‘lights out’), reserved usually for special company. Setting a tray down on the patio table, I engaged ‘Jim’ in conversation and remarked how much I enjoyed watching them work and how much it reminded me of my great production team when I owned a drycleaning business. Another well-oiled, and fun to run machine. His sun-hardened face beamed with pride as he began telling me about what a great group of guys he had and how they were the most productive crew in this large company. No wonder!

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Rick Beneteau invites you to become a Messenger of Change

About a half-year ago, I was suffering from a rather severe case of writers block when writing a piece for 10 Million Clicks For Peace.  I have a few tactics that always seem to work very well when this happens. One of them is to totally disassociate myself from the task-at-hand and begin writing something totally different. I had just received a Chicken Soup for the Soul call-out email for a book they were publishing in early 2010 called Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul.

Now, being a dyed-in-the-saddle NASCAR fan, I saw this as the perfect opportunity to hopefully add a personal story to what I felt would be a great book, and, cure my temporary inability to create the piece I needed for my humanitarian project.

The half-hour exercise worked! I quickly wrote about why I loved NASCAR so much. They accepted it.

The other day, after having almost completely forgotten about this, I received an advance shipment of books. Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul will be released on Feb. 16, just after the official start of the 2010 NASCAR season – the Daytona 500 – my favorite sporting event of every year!

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He was pencil thin and walked with a limp. A thirteen year-old boy with huge yearning eyes who was always an unlucky patient on the children’s floor of the hospital where my youngest daughter was all too often incarcerated.

Curtis had sickle cell anemia, an incurable, painful and terminal disease that plagues young people of African descent.

I would meander into his room to spend a little time with the rebellious loner and would often end up refereeing a screaming match between him and one of the nurses. The street-wise Curtis would usually win.

Over the course of a few years (the hospital was always my home-away-from-home), I eventually learned of the horror of his upbringing, the sad reality of his current life and the apparent dimness of his future.

My experience as a volunteer in the Big Brother-like program in our local Children’s Aid Society was that a small dose of interest and some one-on-one attention could go a long way to helping a kid who was in trouble with the law, failing school and in Curtis’ case, a social outcast.

So, when my time was over with the last boy I was involved with, I asked the CAS if I could hook up with Curtis, albeit ‘unofficially’ this time. Problem was, I was in the process of selling my drycleaning business while building a music production studio (for my next career) and my time was too much at a premium to commit to a structured arrangement. They agreed, and I began to hang with Curtis.

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My intention was to write this article with a fairly clear idea of what I wanted to express. But you know what they say about intentions – at least good ones?:-)

I came out to my balcony with laptop in tow and I started typing. However, the impressive powerboats and mammoth lake and ocean freighters passing by against the magnificent backdrop of the downtown Detroit skyline soon had my full attention.

I chose to live here just because of this million dollar view, and I work out here in my ‘second office’ almost every day, so why would I be so distracted this particular time?

The answer didn’t take long to appear. Coming into view, a foot at a time, was this sleek, bright white yacht with blacked-out windows. It slowly cruised by, as if to say “watch me!” She was indeed a thing of beauty, all 120 or so feet of her. The ultimate physical statement of success and achievement!

Suddenly, my preconceived notion of how this article was going to unfold simply flew away, just like the flocks of roosting seagulls do as I approach them on my morning walk along the river’s edge.

I began to wonder exactly who owned this stunning ship and how he or she ‘attracted’ it into their life. No doubt the owner was taking several weeks off, or perhaps even the entire summer, to cruise the Great Lakes. Or even better, this yacht set to sea in the Caribbean, headed up the Atlantic seaboard entered the St. Lawrence Seaway and sailed down through Lake Ontario and Lake Erie to pass by my balcony – just to inspire me!

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The nearby strip plaza, where I buy the coffee cream I all too often run out of, is “L”-shaped and has a variety store at each end. On a cream-replenishing mission the other day, I parked my car in front of the store I choose to patronize, just because I really like the Korean family who operates it. I first gathered up the mail I had in the car and walked to the corner of the plaza to deposit it into the mailbox there.

Walking towards me were two boys, about ten or eleven years old. They were debating which of the stores made the better Slushie. I interjected, “this one, for sure“, pointing to where I was going to buy my cream.

“How do you know?” was the comeback of the boy with the long, wavy blonde hair and crooked teeth.

“Because I get them there all the time“, I fibbed, knowing there was some unknown reason why I would try to persuade them to accompany me.

They followed me into the store and I hurried to the dairy section only to return to the counter and discover the boys didn’t have enough change in their Slushie fund to buy their icy-sweet reward. I believe the kind-hearted owner was about to tell the disappointed youngsters that they could in fact fill their cups but before she could say anything, I instructed her to “let me buy two Slushies for these fine young gentlemen.” She smiled widely as I began to understand why I directed them to the ‘best Slushie store.’

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She told Julian and I that she arrived at the total of her generous donation based on a certain amount she pledged on behalf of each of her five children, in the name of it making a more peaceful world for them.

That donation to 10 Million Clicks For Peace was from the woman I came to affectionately call, “Love, Joan”. See, over the years, Joan Bramsch signed every email that way.

Thing is, long before she donated to feed the world’s forgotten war refugees in her children’s names, Joan donated to, and helped promote, my Internet Toy Drive, which has helped the U.S. Marines and their Toys for Tots program to purchase toys for needy families at Christmas for nine years.

The connection Joan and I shared ran much deeper than just donating to my causes. She naturally did those things because she believed she could help change the world, and she certainly did that, in many ways. Just one of them was the precious information she freely provided to parents, teens and children. Joan’s Empowered Parent newsletter was one of my all-time favorites because every issue was filled with information that families could readily apply to make their homes happy, safe and nourishing environments.

Here is something, that in my opinion, amounts to the only instructional manual for raising children a parent would ever need, as written by Joan and her beloved husband, Bill, who passed in 2001. I suggest downloading and passing it along to every parent and grandparent you know.

On Monday, March 30, 2009, I received an email from Joan’s daughter, Nancy, informing me that her mother had passed. She is indeed, sorely missed.

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