I Think I Saw My Father's Gun Last Night...

When I was a boy, my father had a Smith & Wesson Model 2, Top Break revolver which had belonged to a relative of his who had been a policeman in Atlanta.
After he died in August 1981, my mother gave it to me, along with several other guns he had bought and a couple of his rings, including his Knights of Columbus ring.

When I was about 10 years old, I dropped the revolver and broke off part of the hammer spur.

In the 1980's, while stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, a family member needed some medical attention, and not all costs were covered by the military system. I did not have a lot of money at the time, so I pawned almost everything I had of any value to try to take care of them.

I figured I would never see any of the stuff again, but, the other night, while searching onine, I found a Smith & Wesson Model 2 with a broken hammer spur which had been auctioned in 2006. I have no way of knowing if that gun was my father's, and no way of knowing who bought it. All I can do is keep looking and hope it comes up for sale again.

The Rumba Bar, Munich - Annie the Prostitute Has a Lonely Birthday

When I first hit Europe in 1967, I was exploring a new world in more ways than one. One thing I learned was that sexual mores were a bit different in Europe. To a young man of my age, this was a good thing.

I was also learning how great German beer can be, and I set about trying it in as many forms and venues as possible.

Being stationed only about 35 miles south of Munich, it was not unusual for me to wind up there with others who were interested in the seamier side of life.

That's how I came to be a welcome regular at the Rumba Bar on Goethe Strasse, just around the corner from the Munich train station.

Now, I was still a kid from the sticks and the first night there, being surrounded by prostitutes who were trying to convince me I was the hottest guy they had ever seen was a heady experience. However, at the moment I just wanted to drink beer and figure out how the game was played.

First of all, the girls were all a bit surprised at how politely and respectfully I treated them. Then, I noticed that one of the girls at the bar was crying.

I asked why she was crying. One of the other girls told me her name was Rosie and she was crying because it was her birthday and she was having to spend it trying to pick up guys in a bar. On an impulse, I told the girls I was talking to that I would be right back.

There had been a flower seller at the train station which was a little over a block away. I walked down there and bought a small but pretty bouquet of flowers. I then marched back into the bar, walked up to Rosie, handed her the flowers, and wished her a happy birthday.

The look of surprise on her face, followed by the realization that somebody really wanted her to feel special on her birthday, no matter who she was or what she was doing, was priceless. Immediately, she put her arms around me and kissed me, and most of the other girls followed.

The "party" didn't last long, however, as the owner, Eddie, who used to be a jockey, and, I later learned, carried a knife...and was good with it, made it plain that the girls needed to "get back to work".

However, from that time forward, I was always welcome in the Rumba Bar, and even Eddie eventually let me know that he respected me for the way I had treated Rosie and always treated his girls.

I went back to the Rumba Bar many times in the three years I spent in Germany, and was always welcomed, and treated, just a little bit differently than the other customers. It was a dive and the people there might have been from a different strata of society than I was accustomed to, but I was always welcome and treated like a friend (a paying one) when I was there.

Pierre Terrail LeVieux, seigneur de Bayard

by Donovan Baldwin
http://nodiet4me.com

"Le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche."

He was a knight of France in the 15th and 16th centuries. The Chevalier de Bayard was also considered to be the epitome of chivalry and was held up as an ideal for knights of the time, and for many others since.

He was so esteemed by the people of his time that the french phrase quoted at the beginning of this article, translated as "the knight without fear and above reproach", was used to describe him. For himself, Pierre Terrail LeVieux preferred the simple appelation, "le bon chevalier"..."the good knight."

A warrior respected and looked up to by other warriors of his time, both comrades and opponents, he was also known for his wit, intelligence, and kindness. On one occasion, when wounded, he placed a homeowner and his family under his protection as he recovered from his wounds in their house. One of the most skilled commanders of the age, he won battles not only by his own skills as a warrior and commander, but by the fruits of an espionage organization he fostered.

His personal valor came never in question. In one famous battle, he, with twelve other French knights, won in battle against an equal number of Spanish knights. Another tale has him single-handedly holding a bridge against 200 Spaniards.

So respected was he, not only his by countrymen, but by foes as well, he was twice released after being captured simply out of respect for his valor and his reputation. One time, he was asked to give his word to refrain from returning to the battle for at least six weeks...which he did.

In an era when mercenaries were the rage, and it was not the least bit uncommon to change one's loyalty at the drop of a plume in order to pursue one's own goals, the Chevalier de Bayard remained loyal to his country and his king until his death in 1524. Even as he was dying, he reproached an old comrade-in-arms, Charles, duc de Bourbon, for fighting on the other side.

The other day, my wife mentioned to me that so many of us live lives sheltered from the realities of existence that we lose the connection we once had with life itself. Once we had to feed ourselves, protect ourselves, and choose life-or-death roles that we would play out in society. We made decisions knowing that we would have to live with the fruits of those decisions, unable to quickly and easily change plans. There was a time when the common options of life exposed us to the opportunities for fame and/or fortune or for death...or worse.

These days we worry about which video to rent, watching horror movies to get our kicks. Most of us fret about losing our hair or our figures more than losing our lives, while holding firmly to beliefs and positions which profit us rather than the world in which we live.

In his times when death, disease, or dismemberment was a reality of daily life, the Chevalier de Bayard remained faithful to his faith, his country, his king, and his honor. He was known then, and still remains, "le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche".

I wonder what will be said about you and me when we are gone.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Donovan Baldwin is a 65-year-young amteur bodybuilder and freelance writer currently living in Stone Mountain, Georgia. He is retired from the U. S. Army after 21 years of service and is a University of West Florida alumnus (BA Accounting 1973). He writes frequently on health and fitness and occasionally on other subjects as well, as witness this article. He has a blog titled Fitness After 40 at http://fitness-after-40.blogspot.com.
Originally published on SearchWarp.com for Donovan Baldwin Sunday, January 03, 2010
Article Source: Pierre Terrail LeVieux, seigneur de Bayard

by Donovan Baldwin
http://nodiet4me.com

I am 65 now, and, on Sundays, I take my 92-year-old mother, who no longer drives, to church. Normally, I dress well, as one should when going to church with his mother, no matter what his age, but today I have chores elsewhere afterwards and will not have an opportunity to change, so I made some concessions.

One concession was the shoes.

The ones I was going to wear this morning looked a little bad. They were supposed to be black, but had acquired a patina of age and disuse, plus a smattering of some unidentified white liquid from some previous task.

So, I got out the little shoeshine kit.

That was the first memory.

The first thing I saw was my father's "black" shoe brush. He died back in '81, but I still have all his shoeshine stuff. I knew it was his "black" brush because the label said so!

It was probablhy sometime back in the early 60's when my mom gave my dad the Dymo LableMaker for Christmas. He proceeded to go around the house labeling things. Until my mother moved out of the house in 1983 after his death two years earlier, one kitchen cabinet still had a label which told the world, with a proud red, though fading, label, that it was, indeed, a "KITCHEN CABINET".

Not all his labeling was done as a joke, however. Two things I still have are his two shoe brushes labeled "BLACK" and "BROWN" so he wouldn't accidently pick up the wrong one and ruin his shine.

However, that wasn't the extent of my memories. As I thought of the home where I grew up at the corner of Cary's Lane and Bayshore Drive in Warrington, Florida, and my normally staid and stolid father's sometimes whimsical humor, I smelled the shoe polish itself.

The smell, the spreading of the polish, and the buffing of the shoes triggered a kaleidescope of memories of an unknown number of shoes and boots shined during my 21 years in the military. Attached to those memories were places I have been, sights I have seen, and people I have known over the last 44 years.

In seconds, I traveled to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, to Monterey, California, to San Angelo, Texas, and from there to Bad Aibling, Germany. I crossed the ocean four times, went back to California and Germany again, and eventually returned home.

I saw the faces and heard the voices of Kevin, Bill, Frank, Olga, Wanda, Danka, Alex and a myriad of others whose paths had crossed mine on the way to wherever they are now. I remembered snow and sunshine, orchards and deserts, oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, and roads...lots of roads.

So much had happened in my life.

It only took a few minutes, and the memories began to fade as I finished shining my shoes and sealed polish, brush, and dauber back in the plastic case and put it back in the closet.

It had been a pleasant trip, a sad trip, and more interesting than anything I have seen on TV for years.

Later, when I took my mother to Mass, I thought of all the Masses I had attended and served as an Altar Boy at St. Thomas More in Warrington..and the funerals.

Time to change the channel, I guess, but who needs TV if you have shoe polish and some memories?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Donovan Baldwin is a freelance writer currently living with his wife, dog, and memories near Dallas, Texas. He is a University of West Florida alumnus (BA Accounting 1973), and is retired from the military after 21 years of service. He has been an accountant for the Florida State Department of Education, a Fiscal Consultant, a Business Manager, and has held various other positions, including being a trainer for a major national company. He offers a line of do it yourself legal software which can be seen at http://legalhelp.xtramoney4me.net.

Originally published on SearchWarp.com for Donovan Baldwin Sunday, July 04, 2010
Article Source: A Simple Act Breeds a Sea of Memories

Decisions

The "bad" thing about most decisions is that we will often not know if they were a "good" decision or not until some time after the effects of the decision have been fully felt.

In fact, we may never reach the end of those effects.

While not every decision is earth-shattering, some can have a lifetime of repercussions, and taking the time to determine what we truly desire to achieve can be of paramount importance.

For example, if you had asked me back in the 60's, 70's, 80's, and even the 90's what I wanted out of life, somewhere in there would have been "a lot of money".

However, when I finally got around to examing my true desires, wants, and needs, I discovered, that I didn't really want the money. What I wanted was what I perceived money to be capable of getting for me.

I wanted the freedom to live my days as I wished. I wanted the liberty to do what I wanted to do, and not have to go to some job which held little interest for me and function as told by someone who I had little or no respect for, but whom I had to please in order to get the few things I could get with whatever was earned by my subservience.

As an accountant, I was trained to view profit and/or loss as a factor of revenue and expense. If you wanted to increase profit, for example, you could either increase revenue or decrease expense.

For some reason, that lesson took a while to be understood as it related to happiness, freedom, and the joy of living.

Many people, as I once did, take the attitude that you need to get more in order to be happy, successful, or "rich".

However, if being happy, successful, or rich is examined deeply, you begin to realize that these things do not depend on a quantified amount of how much of something that you have. They depend on having enough of what you need to get what you want.

This is where decisions can come in.

If you decide that you must "have it all", or as much of "it" as possible, you run a good chance of being disappointed and living a lifetime of regret for the decisions you have made which have not delivered your heart's desire.

However, if you realize that you can be happy, successful, or rich with less because you use whatever you have more wisely and make decisions which allow you to live in a manner of your own choosing, you will enjoy life much more fully and fulfillingly than the richest millionaire who depends on the amount of money available to him to provide cheap imitations of the rich reality you truly possess.
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Making decisions

The Walls of Life

Anytime you start to place philosophical boundaries on something, you become a target.

In this article, for example, I going to discuss what I call the three walls of life. It is within these walls that we live our lives, and the very existence of these walls influence our decisions.

Some people will say that they see four, five, six, or twenty-five walls. some will say that they see only two. Some will say that while maybe there are three, they believe that I have named them wrongly and should have called them....

Well, maybe they will be right, or maybe they will simply be seeing things a little differently than I do.

As my friend, Al, use to say, "It's all good!"

At least in this case.

After all, it is just a discussion, and I am just presenting my viewpoint. I hope I am right. I like to think I am right.

I have been wrong before, however, and will be again. Maybe this is one of those times!

Anyway, as I see, there are these three things which have been erected around us and which influence our decisions and progressions...and regressions.

Either we turn away, try to climb them, attempt to push them away, gather them to our bosom, or carom off them. The surround us and by their existence define ours.

They are:

1. Who we are
2. What we have to work with
3. Mortality

We are man or we are woman. We are old, or we are young. We are brave, or we are cowards. We are educated, or we are ignorant. We are believers or we are infidels. There are many such factors which help decide who we are.

One word often used to describe at least part of this is "paradigm".

A paradigm could be defined as our view of the world.

The first time I heard of the word, "paradigm", the speaker told the following joke to illustrate its definition.

One Autumn day, a cab driver from the city, tired of all the furor and uproar of his daily existence, decided, on his day off, to take a ride in the country.

As he was enjoying his peaceful jaunt on the back roads amid the woods full of trees with leaves of red and gold, he approached a curve.

Suddenly, a car came around the curve apparently out of control and headed for his car. At the last moment, the other driver regained control and passed by, barely missing the cab driver's vehicle. As she passed, the female driver stuck her hand out the window and yelled, "Pig!"

The cab driver, trained by hours in city traffic, immediately stuck his hand out his window and, giving the universal gesture which means "you are number one" yelled back, "Cow!"

With that resolved, and his peaceful day in tatters, the cab driver rounded the curve and ran into a 600 lb. pig.

The cab driver was a man who assumed, based on his knowledge of life. the manner in which he lived, and his own experiences, that someone narrowly missing him and yelling, "Pig!", could only be a total idiot who needed to be put in his or her place. The cabbie had no paradigm which allowed him, a city feller and a stranger in the country, to imagine that he was actually being warned of imminent danger by someone who cared about his safety.

I often hear people say, "It is what it is." He was who he was, and that established a boundary.

Sometimes, in spite of being a certain person with a certain point of view, training, education, mental ability, or some other attribute allows us to modify or even transcend the basic "who" we find ourselves to be. Sometimes, the skill is actually physical, as in the case of an athlete whose life would be bounded by ignorance, or some other limiting factor, but who is able to escape because of something that genetics, hard work, or plain luck, has placed at their disposal.

It works the other way as well. Perhaps the person has the seeds of greatness in some field of endeavor but they are never allowed to come to fruition because some skill, art, or aptitude leads the person along another path.

However, sometimes, greatness intervenes and attribute combines with ability to create something wonderful and fine which gives the human race a luster it often fails to achieve.

Unfortunately, who the person is and what they have to work with, no matter how they lie in relation to each other, will eventually touch mortality. That cold side of the triumvirate which molds the destiny of mankind will cause the good, the bad, the indifferent to suffer the same fate...cessation of existence.

Unless, something within the triangle is passed on to another.

That is the one way to escape and evade the walls of life which bind and confine us. Sometimes it happens by chance. In that case, we, or a portion of who we are, becomes a building block of the future. Sometimes, we choose to pass on something within the walls of that triangle. Sometimes we choose to pass on something great and good, sometimes small yet fine.

What would you choose?

I guess it depends on who you are, what you have to work with, and when mortality ends the game.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Donovan Baldwin is a 65-year-old accountant, amateur bodybuilder, freelance writer, certified optician, and Internet marketer currently living in the Atlanta, Gerogia area. A University Of West Florida alumnus (1973) with a BA in accounting, he has been a member of Mensa and has been a Program Accountant for the Florida State Department of Education, the Business Manager of a community mental health center, and a multi-county Fiscal Consultant for an educational field office. He has also been a trainer for a major international corporation, and has managed various small businesses, including his own. After retiring from the U. S. Army in 1995, with 21 years of service, he became interested in Internet marketing and developed various online businesses. He has been writing poetry, articles, and essays for over 40 years, and now frequently publishes original articles on his own websites and for use by other webmasters. He has posted a series of articles on The Law of Attraction , and other self-improvement issues at xtramoney4me.net/internetmarketing/reviews
/law_of_attraction_articles.

Accepting Criticism

By Michael Angier

There's an old adage that goes like this: to avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing. If you want to get ahead in the world, you'll have to do all three. So you should expect to be criticized.

The key is to discern what is helpful criticism (most isn't) and what you need to shrug off.

The ability to be unflappable in the face of criticism requires a healthy self esteem, self confidence and a tough outer shell. I call it having a thick skin and a soft heart. The trick is to never mix up the two.

If you're never being criticized, judged or disparaged in any way, you're likely not doing all that much and you probably need to move up a few notches on the "Go-for-it-Scale'.

All criticism should be listened to, but not all of it is valid.

A friend of mine used to say, "If one person calls you a horse, well that's just an opinion. If two people call you a horse, you may want to stop and think about it. If three people call you a horse, you may want to start shopping for a saddle."

Action Point: If you trust the source-or you're getting the same criticism from several people-consider the validity and take corrective action when it's warranted. If it's not, thank the person for sharing, and forget about it.

Recognize that everyone has their opinion and that you don't always have to defend yours. "Let the dogs bark; the caravan moves on."

Michael Angier, founder of SuccessNet.org, recently released the New SuccessNet Resource Book--the Top Must-Have Tools, Products, Services and Resources for Running Your Business Effectively

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Article Source: Accepting Criticism
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Accepting Criticism and the Law of Attraction