It tolls for thee

It is always sad when people you love are hurting financially. I have had three or four people ask for help recently. I'm trying my best. 

Why?

Because I have been up and down myself and not that long ago people were helping me when I had no where else to turn.

As many of you know, I was rich once, basically a retired millionaire.

Man came around and managed to steal over twelve million dollars from my family's company. 

Then my ex left and cashed the c.d's at the bank ten minutes before I arrived. 

Threatened me with all sorts of nasty stuff if I didn't give her everything I owned.

So I went from the penthouse to the outhouse in a matter of seconds. I was literally eating out of a bowl of change under my bed. 

The guy who had not long before was on an expensive safari in Africa, flying around in hot air balloons and having catered lunches on the savannas in the middle of the zebra herds.

Can happen to any of us. Instantly. Bam, you are on your ass. Believe me.

Friends say I became a nicer person after my fall from grace, less arrogant, I don't know. But I certainly was humbled. And it took years of grinding to make my way back to solvency and to learn a new career.

Years on the blacktop with Leslie selling our crap at flea markets after getting up at two in the morning and working to exhaustion, week after week.

Honestly, I don't trust people that have never failed or never fallen. They probably just got lucky. My admiration is for the people who picked themselves off the ground and found a way to make it work.

*

My friend Bob the Carpenter told me something that made me laugh today, something his grandfather once told him.

"Better to shit in your own sink than to sink in your own shit. Let that sink in."

John Donne was right back in 1624, No man is an island, nor even a peninsula as Grace Slick countered so much later. We are all connected, even a humble nurse in Minneapolis trying to help people in the street and brutally murdered. And we are all diminished by his tragic end.

No man is an island,

Entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less,

As well as if a promontory were:

As well as if a manor of thy friend's

Or of thine own were.

Any man's death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

We can't make it without each other.