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Fear Selling
Life Lessons Why I Despise this type of “Motivation” Photo by Vadim Bogulov on Unsplash Did I just use a big hairy spider to induce you to read my article about fear? Yes. Yes, I did. A friend invited my wife and me out to supper once. I thought it strange that there were about 20 other couples there also. Turns out, he had reserved part of the restaurant to show us a video of a Christmas tree in a home. Sounds pleasant But in a matter of seconds, the Christmas tree ignited into flames destroying the house in less than a few minutes. “This is what happens if you don’t…
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Learning to Read
When they married in 1903 in Alabama, my paternal grandfather (Ollie Manning) could not read. I am sure this was common in this area of Alabama in the early twentieth century, and it was probably common to many people at the time. My grandfather was a carpenter, so he could work and earn a living. My grandmother (Mary Jones) decided that she would teach him to read. And she did. When they married, she was about 15 years old, and he was about 26. The picture below shows them on their wedding day. She was a little over 5 feet tall, and he was over six. I am not sure…
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Squirrels, Horses, and Marriage Proposals
Family Baldwin Square is not just another city park to me Photo by David Griffiths on Unsplash Before it was a park in the middle of the now “heavily populated” Satsuma, Alabama, under a canopy of oaks and home to a few billion squirrels, there stood a small wood-framed house with a detached garage, or as I liked to remember it — our horse barn. We didn’t have horses. But we did have a few dogs who could pass for horses any day — at least to a four-year-old boy with lots of imagination. There was no asphalt or cement for the short driveway — only finely granulated Alabama top soil baked in the afternoon sun. It was…
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A Love Story in Winter
Photo by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash I twirled her around a few times while the soft moonlight filtered and fractured its way through the frozen branches of a row of nearby birch trees. It was this magical moment that one simply cannot replicate in the warm and mostly snow-less climate of central Arkansas. But I was in Russia and for me, everything — everything about that place was educational, motivational, and intoxicating. This was one of those intoxicating moments. I had met this smart, talented, and beautiful northern woman weeks earlier. A few minutes earlier, we had taken some toys to an orphanage and were now walking through the snow and ice back to…
