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The TV shows I watched as a boy frequently offered up scenes of a father, dressed in suit and tie, coming home from work, carrying an expensive briefcase, and whistling a happy tune. But that would be the end of any work references. Once the briefcase was stowed, no sitcom writer dared bring down the mood with sordid details about the nature of work itself. Consequently, the message of the 50s was as vague as it was odd. Work was a place that required actions of mysterious origins—ones that left employees whistling tunes at the end of the day.

My own father painted a very different picture of the workplace. We watched our TV far from the white-picketed environs of the sitcom folk. The people in our neighborhood wore thick aprons and gloves at work in an effort to keep the gunk, slime, and glue off their clothes. You didn’t see my dad or anyone else from 25th Street whistling as they came home from work. The woman next door who gutted fish at the local cannery most certainly didn’t skip her way into her doily-adorned living room each evening. After work she went straight to the kitchen where she tried her best to scrub the stench of fish from her hands.

Given the circumstances on our side of the tracks, adults complained endlessly about the backbreaking and mind-numbing nature of their jobs along with the stupidity and pettiness of their bosses. They hated their jobs. It’s what they talked about. It’s what they told jokes about. It’s what they wrote songs about.

With this in mind, imagine my surprise some twenty years later when one day I found myself whistling as I walked out the door—on the way to work, no less. I loved what I did. I wore neither suit nor tie, but somehow I had found a way to extract pleasure from my job. What a shock. I had never dreamed that one day I would like work.

At first, I thought my satisfaction stemmed from the fact that I had a career (i.e., it required neither protective clothing nor a lunch pail) as opposed to a job. I was wrong. I could easily find ways to be unhappy within my white-collar environment just as individuals in the blue-collar world find ways to love what they do. I discovered that it wasn’t the nature of the work itself that determined job satisfaction. It was something else—something far more elusive.

Two decades passed before I met Rich Sheridan, a renowned entrepreneur and organizational philosopher. A few years earlier, Rich started his own software development company with the strong belief that creating software (some of which involved actual cartoon figures and cool sound effects) would be a genuine hoot.

But then Rich learned that customers (no matter how cool the product) often changed their minds in the middle of the development cycle, leading to ugly meetings with lots of finger pointing and much gnashing of teeth. Plus, the code writers who worked with Rich soon became specialists, making it impossible for any of them to leave work early or, heaven forbid, take a vacation. If they did, they’d leave an intolerable vacuum. Employees were now chained to their desks.

For Rich and his team, what had started as a gentle romp down candy cane lane was now a tortuous grind through the valley of unfulfilled expectations. Where had he gone wrong? More specifically, how could he turn his company into a place that left him with a tune on his lips at the end of each day?

Rich discovered the answer. He made an extensive study of joy and then infused his company with it. Best of all, he’s soon to release a book titled Joy Inc. that teaches how to create an intentionally joyful culture. Now, I’m not about to scoop Rich’s book, but I will suggest the following. As I met with Rich and his team in his joyful facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I was immediately filled with his vision.

The sitcoms of the 50s had been right. You can love your work. You can whistle as you walk through the door each night. But you have to want it, believe it’s possible, and work for it.

I myself have experienced a bit of a work-related transformation as of late. For years I enjoyed a job that consisted of traveling the world, consulting, and designing training. It was exhausting, but I loved it. Then one day, I had my fill with travel. I was done. After more than twenty years of being a road warrior, I gave up my airline Gold Card to stay closer to home and devote my time to writing. Surely, this would bring me joy. After all, I love writing.

I was wrong. Writing can be lonely. Very lonely. You spend a lot of time staring at a screen that openly mocks you with its ghastly emptiness. Soon, I didn’t care all that much for my job. It involved far too much isolation, mumbling, pacing, and self-ridicule. Unlike my childhood neighbor, I wasn’t gutting fish all day long, but like her, I wasn’t happy at work. So I prepared myself for retirement. I was certainly old enough to retire.

Luckily, I recalled my visit with Mr. Sheridan and his compelling case for joy at work and felt inspired to find ways to infuse my own job with joy. In my case, it involved restructuring my daily tasks and bringing on another writer with whom I could collaborate while occasionally reenacting Three Stooges bits. I now look forward to work. Every single day.

How one goes about finding pleasure in his or her job varies and I don’t want to underestimate how much effort (and risk) it might take to negotiate with your boss for more interesting work, restructure your job, gain a new perspective, or possibly even switch companies altogether. Nor will I go into the various sources of work satisfaction ranging from the thrill of creation to beating a goal to satisfying a customer to enjoying supportive relationships and so forth.

Mr. Sheridan can teach you about creating an entire company filled with joy. Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, can alert you to what it takes to be happy in general. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a job satisfaction guru, can teach you the elements required to enjoy any specific task at work. There’s plenty of help out there—once you decide to seek it. My point is far more modest. It’s this. We should expect to find joy at work and we should go out and seek it.

Years of hearing about lousy jobs and reading statistics that suggest over half of all employees don’t like their work can lead one to expect to be unhappy at work. For many of us, it’s our go-in position. We may not think about it much or even talk about it—ever—but the idea that work equals dissatisfaction can be so deeply embedded into our psyches that it keeps us from hoping and asking for more.

But we should hope and ask for more. We spend more time at work than just about anywhere else so it ought to be enjoyable. This doesn’t necessarily mean that in the ideal job employees routinely chase each other around with silly string, but a hoot once in a while or an excited sharing of a story should be common. Laughter should be common. Our default position should be that work—organized correctly—is pleasurable, and if it isn’t we need to make changes. Once this expectation is firmly set in our minds, we’ll start taking steps to find joy rather than develop methods for tolerating our existing miserable conditions.

And from what I’ve personally experienced, joy is worth the search.

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“Captain Newton wants to speak to you,” said the voice on the other end of the phone.

“The captain?” I thought to myself. I’d only been out of training for a couple of months and already I’d done something wrong! Why else would the boss of the entire base be calling me, a lowly ensign?

I was soon to find out.

“This is Captain Newton speaking. You know that large dumpster that sits in front of the supply building?”

Oh no. Nothing good could come from a dumpster. It stinks. It blocks his view. He hates it.

“Yes sir,” I responded. “I think it’s a Dempsey version, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Well,” the captain continued, “I’ve noticed the past few days that it’s been filled with scrap wood. If nobody else wants it, I was wondering if it would be okay if I fished out a few pieces for my home fireplace—on my way home. That is, if nobody else wants it.”

“I’ll check with supply ASAP and see how to make it happen,” I eagerly responded, taking pride in the fact that I had employed the military expressions “ASAP” and “make it happen” in the same breath. Next, I dialed the chief warrant officer in charge of supply and explained to him the captain’s request for the scrap wood—taking care to include the captain’s proviso, “if nobody else wants it.” The supply officer said he’d take care of it and get back to me.

Two hours later, when my phone finally rang it wasn’t the supply officer getting back to me. Instead, it was the captain’s wife. She thanked me profusely for the lovely wood for her fireplace. I graciously accepted her words of appreciation and then headed out to learn why the captain’s wife was so excited about a few pieces of scrap wood.

Before I could track down the supply officer, I overheard the following conversation at the water cooler.

“You can’t believe the old man. He calls us and demands that we cut up beautiful new boards so he can burn them in his fireplace. We go out to his home, measure the fireplace, cut expensive oak to fit it, band the wood, and deliver it so he can burn it! We’re reusing our typewriter ribbons in order to save money, and he’s burning oak.”

Soon the entire base was abuzz over “The Captain’s Fireplace.”

To find out how the original request had become so twisted, I talked to each of the people between me and the seaman apprentice who actually delivered the newly cut wood. It turns out that each person in the chain of command had faithfully passed on the request to the person below him, while making slight changes in the wording. This was much like the “telephone” game we played as kids where you whisper something in someone’s ear, that person whispers the same to the next in line (distorting it ever so slightly), and so on until the original expression, “Mrs. Whipple has a pimple,” comes out the other end as, “Whip the purple carburetor.”

In this version of the “telephone” game, the chief warrant officer explained that he had called the chief petty officer and passed on that the “old man” wanted the wood in the dumpster. Note the term had switched from “captain” to “old man,” and from what I thought was a tentative request (“If nobody else wants it”), to a mandate. The next person explained that he had told his direct report that the old man wanted new wood for his fireplace. He figured they’d better not use scraps filled with nails and jagged edges and run afoul of the captain. The next fellow thought to avoid getting in trouble they ought to measure the fireplace so it would fit. It wasn’t long until it was new oak that was being measured, cut, banded, and delivered to the captain’s home.

Unlike the “telephone” game where the original expression follows a random path, the captain’s request followed a predictable one. The original request was altered to fit the story people were carrying in their heads about the captain—and all other senior leaders who ever abused their authority.

Rumors always follow this route. In order for tales to be shared, first they must be plausible. If you suggest that a person everyone respects did something ghastly, typically the first person hearing the rumor stops it, checks the facts, and otherwise refuses to besmirch the good name of someone they like. The rumor never gets off the ground. In the case of The Captain’s Fireplace, if one person had thought, “The captain wouldn’t want us to cut up expensive lumber. Let me go check . . .” the problem would have been averted.

For an unflattering story to be told, and then retold and twisted into something as bad as the wanton abuse of government property, the listener must have it in his or her head that the bizarre actions contained in the story are just the kind of thing the person in question would do. And the next person has to believe the same.

It gets worse. In this instance, the story that was passed down the chain of command was not about this particular captain, but about everyone’s notion of a typical captain, and as such was infused with the characteristics of every abusive leader who came before him. Captain Newton suffered from a prejudice just as pernicious as if it had been based on his race or creed. He was “one of them” (a senior leader) and we all know how they behave. They abuse their authority, jerk people around, and get what they want. Tainted by this mental set, Captain Newton’s innocent request was eventually twisted into a ridiculous demand for personal gain.

Given this proclivity to please the boss, coupled with the willingness to think the worst of others, leaders need to take care to ensure that their rough ideas or mere suggestions aren’t reframed by overzealous subordinates into rigid and foolish orders. Leaders must track their ideas as they flow through the organization. When a pile of scrap wood turns into a bundle of banded oak, take heed. This is not a feel-good story. This is a bad sign.

As crazy requests come our way, we all have a responsibility to get to the root of the matter rather than simply pass on the ludicrous demand with a disgusted eye roll. For example, while I was meeting with a grad student a few years back, he took a call from his boss. The student was on educational leave from a company in The Netherlands, taking a masters course 5,000 miles away from his family, and working nearly every waking hour to finish his degree a full semester early. On top of all this, his boss back at headquarters was now asking him to take on a new task that would consume all of his time for the next month. This, of course, would flunk him out of school and cause him, his family, and the organization innumerable problems. The student explained the situation to his boss who responded, “A VP made the request. Do you understand? A VP wants you to do it and he wants you to do it within the next thirty days!” That was it.

“Watch this,” the student said. He then picked up the phone, called the VP, politely described his predicament, and ended by explaining that he would do whatever was best. The VP immediately backed off the request and explained that perhaps the young man could take up the task after he returned from his educational leave. They’d talk later.

“I knew the VP wouldn’t want to cause me such grief,” the student explained. So, he stopped, assumed the best of the person in authority, went back to the source, gathered the facts, shared his view, and together they made the right decision. Rather than piling one more story onto the stack of tales about selfish and thoughtless bosses, he now tells the tale of the thoughtful VP who cared about his family enough to put off a job until it better fit the young man’s circumstances.

Granted, people do crazy things, make insane demands, and appear to be operating with less than a full deck far more often than we’d like to admit. And, like it or not, leaders aren’t exempt. Nevertheless, there’s no need to make matters worse by twisting ideas to fit our own worst image of others. Instead, we need to confront senseless ideas and absurd requests as they come our way. Start with your strongest tool. Assume others are rational—most people are most of the time. Search for the facts. Refuse to implement misguided ideas or commands until you’ve tracked down the original request and informed people about the potential consequences.

In short, eliminate creating your own version of The Captain’s Fireplace. There are far better ways to warm your toes.

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Most Christmas stories don’t start the day after Christmas. This one does. On December 26, 2006, after opening presents with her husband and baby boy and then hurriedly packing her bags, my daughter Becca climbed onto a jet and started the first leg of a journey to Stavropol, Russia.

Becca traveled to this former communist stronghold in response to what she described as an aching in her heart. After she and her husband, Bruce, had adopted a newborn baby boy a year earlier, Becca was left with the impression that there was more to be done. There was something missing. There was someone who needed her.

After scouring adoption agency websites for several weeks, Becca eventually stumbled on the picture of two Russian sisters, ages six and seven. The two rather fragile looking children were currently residing in an orphanage in one of the bleakest corners of the world you’ll ever find. And now, as if a fire had been lit under her, Becca was on a mission to meet the two helpless waifs. Perhaps they would be new additions to Becca and Bruce’s growing family. She didn’t know. She couldn’t know. She hadn’t even met them yet.

Whatever she did, Becca realized that she would have to act quickly because the older of the two would soon turn eight and by policy would be shipped to a different orphanage, forever separated from her beloved sister.

Twenty-four hours of rather tortured travel later, a stern official led Becca into a room where she met Tatiana and Veronica, the two prospective adoptees. The girls, shy at first, quickly warmed to Becca, and despite the fact that neither spoke a word of English, were soon auditioning for the role of daughter. First, they demonstrated dance moves they had practiced for just such an event. Next, they climbed a rickety ladder that leaned against a wall (left from an earlier repair job) and held on by one hand while leaning out precariously and singing Russian folk songs.

The girls had lived in the orphanage for two years, and Becca was the first visitor to call on them—no family members, no prospective parents, not a soul had thought to pay them a visit. Knowing that this might be their only chance to escape a fate that they were too young to even imagine, the two flirted, winked, and did everything in their power to beguile their prospective mother. And just when Becca thought her heart would break from watching the two girls fight for a chance to join her family, Veronica looked into her eyes and promised (through a translator), “If you adopt us, we’ll wash the dishes every day.”

As Becca cried herself across the globe, back to her home in the mountains of Utah, she carefully put together a plan that ended four months later when she and Bruce returned from Stavropol with two little Russian dolls. A year later, after passing through the standard waiting period, the new family gathered before a judge who asked the girls a few questions and signed a few papers. And then, as if writing the script to her own life story, Veronica turned to her younger sister and pronounced, “Now we’re a family.”

It had been a hard journey for the two little girls and still more challenges lay ahead. Abandoned by their father at birth and then one day unceremoniously dropped by their mother at their grandparents’ door, Veronica, the older of the two, taught herself how to beg for food. In the winter, she braced against sub-zero weather as she knocked on doors, kneeled before strangers, and begged for her and her sister’s lives. By the time the neighbors turned the two girls in to the authorities, each was more skeleton than girl.

The first time I met the two was at our home a few hours after they arrived in America. Nica (Veronica’s shortened name) rushed to the kitchen counter, grabbed a cookie, and then took another one for her younger sister. “One for Tanya,” she explained through our neighbor who spoke Russian and was helping as a translator. “One for Tanya,” Nica learned to express in English as she gathered in a new toy or sweet for her younger sibling—always her younger sister’s defender and keeper. Always the protector.

But the gift that started the day after Christmas didn’t end with the signing of the adoption papers. Witnessing the monumental sacrifice, feeling the love, and welcoming two grandchildren into the family—you’d think the Christmas gift would now be complete. But it wasn’t. There would be a second act.

This part of the gift, the surprise part, comes from Nica.

You can’t survive the streets of Stavropol and then be thrown into an orphanage—where you reign supreme as the oldest member of a near-feral mob—without consequence. For years after arriving in the U.S., you’ll act in ways that are out of sync with kids whose greatest childhood tragedy took place when they lost a puppy or tore their princess costume.

Fresh from a life of deprivation and confinement, you’re very likely to be seen as strange, selfish, pushy, or forced. Fighting for your younger sister, who no longer requires or wants a protector, comes off as strange. Pushing your way to the head of the cafeteria line in a primal response to procure food—whenever and however you can—appears selfish. Taking charge of every childhood game seems pushy. Trying too hard to make a friend feels forced.

And then there’s the fact that you’re a Russian immigrant who speaks English with a bit of an accent. As you move into junior high school where being different can be a liability, trying too hard to be accepted practically guarantees you’ll be bullied. Eventually, you’ll learn dozens of swear words—all used as an adjective placed in front of the word “Russian.” And when faced with these challenges, you’ll fight back because, first and foremost, you’re a survivor.

One day, when someone who doesn’t know your history observes you verbally attack, take charge, or hoard, it’s easy to see how they might become annoyed. Anyone might become upset as the kid from the streets (now dressed in clothes that belie her upbringing) does something odd or off-putting.

And from all of this comes the surprise gift. Nica has sat beside me on our living room couch and given me glimpses into her heart-breaking story. I’ve imagined her as she faced unspeakable circumstances and have mourned for her, her sister, and everyone who has similarly suffered. I’ve watched Nica step in harm’s way for her sister. I’ve seen her stand strong in the face of adversity.

I’ve also seen her do things that can drive you nuts and would be the first to say that she needs to be carefully instructed. No doubt about it. Just like her American-born cousins, she’s still young and she needs lots of guidance and, given her history, special assistance. But unlike a stranger who might immediately become upset when Nica commits a social faux pas or inappropriate action, I can’t see her do anything—no matter how untoward—without also seeing a little girl in the streets of Stavropol begging for her and her sister’s next meal.

With this poignant image firmly in mind comes the surprising gift, the gift of compassion. Not compassion for me (which I’ve often received), but compassion within me—something I sorely need. Of course, over the years, I’ve felt sympathy for others. I understand the need to view the whole picture before drawing conclusions. I’ve even used the bromide of looking at both sides of a coin.

But this story isn’t about two sides, it’s about simultaneity. Having felt and mourned Nica’s past, I now see both her missteps and her history in a single glance. This sweeping view fills me with an understanding that makes up the very spirit of this holiday season. It fills me with compassion—a surprising and wonderful gift.

Visit our Facebook page to download our free holiday e-book, Kerrying On Christmas: A Collection of Holiday Stories by Kerry Patterson. The e-book includes this story as well as two other Holiday stories from Kerry Patterson.

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With Halloween just around the corner, I thought I’d draw this month’s material from my childhood trick-or-treating experiences. I’ll start with a rather bold allegation. I just may have been the best candy grabber in the history of Halloween. “Pshaw!” you say. Well, here’s the evidence.

As I walked home with my best friend one crisp October afternoon in 1956, he asked me a rather naïve question: “Do you want to go trick-or-treating with me?” What a hayseed! Didn’t he know anything about the finer art of extracting candy from strangers? First of all, going door to door with friends is a huge mistake. When you travel with friends, you slow down as you talk.

Trick-or-treat rule number one: During the precious few hours of the one night of the year when candy is free for the asking, don’t slow down for anything. Every moment lost could cost you a candy bar—which, by the way, just happens to be your only reason for going out in the first place. (It’s all about the chocolate.) One Halloween, I sprinted by a house that was on fire and didn’t break stride. You think I’m going to go trick-or-treating with a friend?

Here’s another time-related hint. Today’s kids tote plastic pumpkins and other such store-bought trinkets for holding their goodies. I carried, and I’m not making this up, a ratty looking burlap bag that originally contained a hundred pounds of potatoes. I chose this cast-off carrier because I didn’t have time to be swapping out bags in the middle of the evening. This choice, quite naturally, caused problems. By the end of the evening, a potato sack jammed with candy weighed just about as much as I did. Equally bad, a lot of people were offended by it. “Look at that thing! It’s positively disgusting!” they’d say as I held out a bag large enough to schlep a yak.

Rule number two: Run from door to door. When you only have a five-hour window to get free candy, you run. You don’t walk, you don’t jog, and you don’t even trot. You run. Of course, to be perfectly honest, not everybody took advantage of the full five-hour running period, but I did. I was always the first and last kid on the street. Every year my Halloween adventure started with: “It’s not time yet you moron! I’m still doing the lunch dishes!” and ended with: “You woke me out of a dead sleep!”

Rule number three: Put the trick back in trick-or-treat. The candy companies of the fifties didn’t produce the pathetic miniature bars they now make in such abundance, so when someone gave you a candy bar back in my day (and I firmly believe this qualified them for sainthood), you got a full-sized candy bar. This didn’t happen very often, but when it did, you scored big.

So, here was the trick. I’d carry three masks. I didn’t normally don a mask because it would limit my vision and slow me down. But if someone gave me, say, a Hershey bar (most people gave out penny candy) I’d hit a couple of neighbors’ doors, put on a mask, and return to the place that was giving out the mother lode. I would repeat this stunt with a different mask until they caught on to me. “Say, haven’t you been here before?” I once scored ten Almond Joy bars from the same house.

Rule number four: Beware of baked goods. I was raised at a time when a handful of homemakers still made their own treats—cupcakes frosted with an inch of gooey chocolate icing. They’d beam with pride when they opened their front door. “Here you go sonny,” they’d say as they held out a tray full of their baked concoction while eyeing my bag suspiciously. Now what was I supposed to do with a cupcake? Consuming it was out of the question. That violated the fifth rule of trick-or-treating: Never eat on the job.

One year I made the grievous error of letting a well-intended grandmother drop a cupcake into the center of my bag. I swear the chocolate-covered treat had its own gravitational field—sucking every decent piece of candy into its icing atmosphere until, by the end of the evening, it had grown to the size of a medicine ball. I learned to take cupcakes gingerly in my hand and then use them to mulch the neighbors’ flower beds.

Now for today’s broader (and less halloweeny) lesson.

Before writing it down for this column, I’d never shared this childhood story with my own children. As much fun as it is, I suppose all these years I’ve had a fear of exposing a certain quirkiness about me and my love for chocolate, or revealing that at one time, I was a bit greedy and weird. This hesitance to share a shadier side of my past raises an interesting issue. When you mostly share your accomplishments (as the majority of us are wont to do) and fail to share your embarrassing moments, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities, you’re less interesting and less human. All of this superficial perfection amounts to an individual who is less approachable and doesn’t connect well with others.

The same could be said for your relationships at work. I’m pretty confident in assuming that most everyone has a peculiar story like my Halloween ritual that they’d rather keep locked away than aired to friends and coworkers like dirty laundry. Instead, we delight each other with long and impressive lists of accomplishments, noble experiences, and stories that aren’t really told, but rather boasted to anyone in ear shot.

Ironically, sharing a list of accomplishments typically creates more distance than unity. However, sharing oddities, fears, and stories of your personal faux pas creates the very glue that binds people together. Of course, we typically don’t share such personal information at work. It’s just not done. Nevertheless, at a time when companies expect employees to work in more collaborative and “team-oriented” ways, how can we expect to be unified into anything that even approximates a social unit when all we know about each other is what can be found on our resumes?

So, this Halloween season, dare to be vulnerable. Consider donning a new costume this year, not one shielded by masks of sobriety, perfection, and accomplishments; rather, expose your coworkers to the more interesting you—the geek you, the childlike you, the oddball you. For instance, did you dunk for apples as a teenager until you choked and spit up on your date? Did you make your own costume for a neighborhood competition only to have critical parts of it fall off during the awards ceremony? Or, as related earlier, did you aggressively knock doors on Halloween night until someone finally shouted: “Hey kid, it’s time to haul your potato sack home!”

Knowing stuff like that binds families and teams together.

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To pay homage to the tens of millions of people out there who labor long and hard for all of us (often with little pay and virtually no recognition), today I honor my grandfather, The Merchant of Bellingham.

During WWII, my father worked for Boeing as the team leader of a group of craftsmen. They produced the mechanism that makes it possible to lower bomber landing gear by hand (should something go wrong with the automated equipment). When the war came to an end and there was no longer a need for life-saving bomber equipment, Dad was out of work. That is, until he stumbled on the idea of owning and operating a small grocery store—the kind you could find just about every six blocks in the mid-forties.

As it turned out, Dad wasn’t cut out for such employment (he ended up in apartment management), so Grandpa took charge of the store. He moved in, we moved out, and over the next twenty years, my grandfather (a fiery five-foot-two Irishman with a cigar stub perennially stuck in the corner of his mouth) became “pop” to everyone who stopped by the store to pick up a quart of milk and chat about the weather.

One day when I asked Grandpa what he called himself (I knew what he did, I just didn’t know what to call it), he told me he was a “merchant.” I haven’t heard anyone use that term since then, but when Grandpa claimed the title, it was clear that a merchant was something special. He always dressed in wool suit pants, a white shirt and tie, and a crisp green apron. And whether he was candling eggs, putting away redeemable bottles, or standing patiently as a child picked out five cents worth of penny candy, Grandpa attacked the task with the pride and precision of a physician performing surgery. After all, he was a merchant.

I remember watching Grandpa patiently wait on people of every ilk and disposition. Since his store was located in a rather poor neighborhood, there was no telling who would walk in the front door or what they might require. Several individuals who were learning disabled frequently found their way to his establishment. They’d shyly point at the items they wanted, reach into their pocket, and pull out a handful of crumpled bills and loose coins. Then, without making a big deal of it, Grandpa would pick out the right amount of money, bag the groceries, and send the customer on his or her way with a hearty “thank you.”

One time, a couple of teenage boys who were in the store ridiculed an adult customer who had been unable to count his money, and later that day when the boys returned for a soda pop, Grandpa counseled them on showing respect for all people.

Grandpa had spent the first forty years of his career as a bit of a celebrity in the lumber business. He was such a whiz with numbers that he could walk through an entire lumber mill and keep track of the board footage in his head. He had earned a great deal of respect performing these calculations, so you might suspect that in his senior years, he’d find the task of waiting on people to be beneath him. But he didn’t. Grandpa often told me it was an honor, even noble, to help others meet their needs. After all, he was a merchant.

People counted on Grandpa and Grandpa knew it. After my first year of college, I prepared to travel abroad for two years. One Sunday afternoon, and at the very last minute, I asked Grandpa to attend my going-away speech at church. He replied with a look of utter shock, “I can’t close the store!” (He kept it open thirteen hours a day, seven days a week.) “What if Mrs. Eherenfieldt needs some cheese for her casserole? Or what if Ronnie Kepler falls and skins his knee? Where will Mrs. Kepler get a Band-Aid?”

My father had made precision landing gear that saved whole bomber crews. Grandpa provided cheese and Band-Aids and saw himself as equally important.

And he was.

Along with the cheese and Band-Aids, Grandpa doled out friendly banter and helpful advice. I remember watching him celebrate with a young man who had just been admitted to a prestigious college. Granddad had watched him grow up. A penny-candy kid who excelled in math and who Grandpa saw as one of his protégés. Grandpa had taught him math tricks and study techniques. It was all part of the services rendered at Noonan’s Grocery.

Sometimes, people came to the store, glanced around nervously, and then timidly whispered in Grandpa’s ear. Years later, I learned that they asked for credit. They needed food for their tables and Grandpa would be the one who supplied it. Over the years, I heard some criticize Grandpa for extending credit to people whom nobody else would ever float a loan. Most paid him back, but a lot never came up with the money so at the end of the day, Grandpa didn’t make much of a profit. When I asked him about the practice of making bad loans, he smiled knowingly and explained that his mission covered more than simply making money.

One day, as I stopped by the store to pick up a loaf of bread, two rather somber looking gentlemen in dark suits were exiting the place.

“Those fellows were FBI agents,” Grandpa explained. “They come by every once in a while when one of the locals applies for a Federal job that calls for a background investigation. They talk to me about the candidate. You know, did he steal stuff as a kid? Things like that.”

Grandpa loved being a merchant who sat in the social and commercial center of the neighborhood. Partly because of the nature of the job and partly because he simply loved to work. In 1966, when my folks moved to Arizona, they invited Grandpa to come live with them in the land of sunshine and oranges. Grandpa wrote back that he’d enjoy the change in weather, but that he’d be staying in Bellingham. After all, (and I quote from his letter) “you know how hard it is for a man my age to find a job.” Grandpa was eighty-six at the time and hadn’t realized that Mom was asking him to retire. The thought had never entered his head.

Two years later, while fetching a cold bottle of soda pop for Tim Harmon (a young man with learning disabilities who had grown up hanging out at the store), Grandpa had a stroke and fell to the floor. Tim, not knowing how to operate a phone to call for medical help, ran out the front door and tried his best to flag down a passing car until someone pulled over to lend a hand.

Tim gently cradled Grandpa in his arms until an ambulance eventually arrived. “Pop” had fallen and Tim, loving him like his own grandfather, gently comforted the man who had served so many for so long.

“Call the bread man and ask him to remove the stock from the shelves. It’ll go bad,” Grandpa managed to utter as the ambulance pulled off. “We can’t be selling stale bread. Mrs. Eherenfieldt will never be satisfied with stale bread.”

And such were the last words of the Merchant of Bellingham.

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When I was seven years old I learned how to ride a bike. I learned on my brother’s old, stripped-down, J.C. Higgins. It was a pathetic little thing possessing no fenders, no handle bar grips, no hand brakes, no . . . just about everything. Then, of course, I wanted to ride the bike every chance I could get, but since it was my older brother’s pride and joy, well, you can guess how that worked out.

Yearning for a vehicle of my own, I tried to save money to purchase my own bike, but at age seven I only earned 50 cents a week allowance and I usually spent 40 cents of it on a trip to the movies. Every week, I was torn between watching Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, and the other heroes of my youth—and saving for a bike.

Mom saw my dilemma, and after watching me eyeball my brother’s bike for the thousandth time came up with a plan.

My grandmother had recently married a rather wealthy lawyer who was so desirous to show his love for her that he gave her a 200-pound ironing machine (the kind usually used at hotels). Grandma appreciated the gift, but had other ideas. She figured she could use her newfound wealth to send her laundry not through a giant ironing machine but to a professional establishment. So, Grandma hired a moving company to haul the thing to our house.

“With your bad back and all,” Grandma explained to my mother, “I’m betting this newfangled contraption will be just the ticket.”

In truth, the machine was absolutely terrific—if you happened to work for Barnum & Bailey and needed to touch up a tent. Unfortunately, the huge appliance was hard to operate, “ate” shirts and blouses, and only made Mom’s back feel worse. Eventually, the monster was moved to our basement where it sat next to my brother’s bike—the one I so sorely coveted.

“I bet,” Mom explained one night over dinner, “we could take that silly ironing machine that is just gathering dust in the basement and auction it off.”

“We could certainly use the money,” Dad replied.

“Yes, and I know just what to do with it. Billy has grown too big for his bike so I figure we can sell the ironing machine at auction and then turn around and buy Billy a bigger, better bike.”

This wasn’t going well for me.

“And then Kerry can have Billy’s old bike.”

Things were looking up.

Now, you might be thinking: Why did my mom’s plan end with me owning the hand-me-down bike while my brother Billy, who already had a bicycle, would get the new (to him) bike? Those of you who are a younger sibling know the answer. As a kid brother it was my job to recycle cast-offs. My clothing store, for example, was my older brother’s chest of drawers. And when it came to sporting goods, well, I was thrilled with the idea of getting my brother’s bike. It was a bike. I didn’t have a bike. Was there any other way to get one?

Two weeks later, when the local auctioneer placed the ironing machine up for bid, Dad turned to me and explained that, judging from the crowd of hayseeds that had gathered, it was doubtful that anyone would want the curious offering we had placed on the block.

“We’ll need to get about fifteen dollars if we expect to turn around and buy one of the bikes that are going up for auction,” Dad explained. “I don’t think anyone around here even knows what that machine is.” Now I was worried. Would I ever get a bike of my own?

Dad was right. At first, the curious apparatus just sat there while people poked at it with their index fingers. Perhaps a carburetor had fallen off a passing space ship. Eventually, the auctioneer read the instructions from the metal plaque soldered to the body. “Why, it’s a fancy ironing machine,” he announced with an air of achievement. Soon the bidding was off and running until a woman with a large feathered hat bid fifteen dollars.

“Sold!”

When we returned home later that day, my brother Billy jumped for joy at the sight of the second-hand Schwinn bike Dad had purchased while I rushed to the basement to claim my windfall. I was ecstatic. At last, a bike of my own!

Unfortunately, I couldn’t ride my bike just then because it was now raining and the dirt road in front of our house had turned into a river of mud. Since the bike didn’t have fenders, if I ventured out onto 25th street, it would paint an ugly brown stripe up my back, neck, and head.

Finally, after a week of unrelenting drizzle, the sun dried the road enough to be useable. I hopped on Billy’s old bike (I still thought of it that way) and rode around frenetically while shouting and yipping for joy. It was a dream come true. For about five minutes. Then I came to the realization that I didn’t really have any place to go (I was seven. Where would I go?) Nor did I have any smooth surfaces to take me there—just a bunch of rutted hills that led to more rutted hills. Plus, the bike only had one gear. It was really hard to pump. In fact, it was so hard that one day as I tried to get up speed to shoot across the slimy, hand-hued wood bridge that crossed the creek near our house, I skittered off the bridge and into a muddy stream—turning myself into a ball of mud and slime and ruining my brand-new white corduroy pants. So I parked the stupid bike where the ironing machine once sat until I eventually outgrew the thing and my mother gave it to Goodwill.

This wasn’t the last time I yearned for something I was convinced would bring me happiness, only to discover I was dead wrong. (If you’ve ever saved up for a Slinky, you’ll know what I’m talking about.) You’d think that after a string of disappointing purchases we’d all have learned that owning things doesn’t exactly guarantee happiness.

Unfortunately, the vivid advertisements that pump out of our TV sets at the rate of about 100,000 a year continue to preach otherwise. Copywriters tell us that buying things will bring us all sorts of spectacular benefits. For instance, when I was a teenager, the hair product Brylcreem was said to make you so attractive that women would chase after you, wrestle you to the ground, and run their fingers through your hair—something that I thought sounded mighty promising at the time—but that never actually panned out for me.

But then again, it’s not as if having more money (and the things that go with it) never helps. For instance, a recent study revealed that happiness does actually go up with income—to a point. And then it levels off. Not having enough to pay the rent or get your teeth fixed wears on you, so happiness rises with an infusion of cash. But when you reach a certain level of owning stuff, your happiness quotient stays the same. More stuff doesn’t boost your score. That is, researchers found, unless you do a couple of different things with the extra money. You can use it to create memorable family experiences or to help others. When you do one or both of these, more money can indeed yield more happiness.

At some level, we all understand this concept. But then again, at a deeper, more visceral level, we think: Yeah, I know more money won’t make me happier, but with more money I’d be in Paris being the same degree of happy, and maybe even driving a sports car. It only stands to reason that driving a sports car in Paris creates a higher order of happiness than driving a Honda in Omaha. Meaning, of course, that try as we might, we can’t find a way to believe that owning more toys doesn’t guarantee more happiness.

Last week, I witnessed for myself the serving-others aspect of the recent research finding. My twelve-year-old granddaughter Rachel was dusting shelves for her mother while a friend stood by in tennis gear waiting to go play doubles at a nearby court. Rachel’s three-year-old sister Lizzy was toddling behind her, and after Rachel dusted each shelf, Lizzy would plead: “Help me!” Rachel would then lift Lizzy who, in turn, would drag her miniature duster over the same surface. To me, it was precious. Nevertheless, you’d figure that since Lizzy wasn’t actually helping move the job along, Rachel would ditch her baby sister in favor of finishing sooner and playing tennis. But she didn’t hurry. You could tell by the broad smile on her face that she took genuine pleasure from indulging her little sister.

“Rachel enjoys helping others more than doing just about anything,” her mother explained. “She learned that at an early age.”

What a blessing to have learned at such a young age that serving others (be it with your extra resources or your time) can be a great source of happiness. This idea, of course, can’t be sold through infomercials nor sponsored by celebrities, so it won’t spread across the country like the latest design in running shoes. In fact, unless the world experiences some sort of cataclysmic upheaval, one of the most important principles ever known to humankind will continue to be overshadowed by a deluge of messages that suggest we can’t really be happy unless we own things.

But then again there’s no knowing for sure. An ironing machine might be just what you need. A new bike could really help you out. The hair product might even make your hair shine. But then again, maybe all of these things will let you down. Most assuredly, none of them can be counted on to bring you anything as important as happiness.

You want happiness? Use your time and resources to genuinely and freely serve others: visit a shut in, read to a sick friend, compliment a coworker on a job well done, write a thoughtful note, or take homemade cookies to your grandparents (one of Rachel’s favorites).

In short, find a way to bring others happiness. It’s the fast track to joy.

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During the month of July, we publish “best of” content. The following article was first published on July 20, 2011.

When I was a young boy and our extended family gathered to celebrate holidays, it was common for the adults to congregate in the dining room and play pinochle while we kids romped around the yard or (when it was raining) watched The Hopalong Cassidy Show on our 19” DuMont TV consol.

But not always. Sometimes my uncle Vic would break away from the adults and teach me a trick or two. It was Vic who showed me how to press two fingers to my lower lip to create a wolf whistle. It was Uncle Vic who taught me how to tie a cat’s cradle, how to spin a button on a string, how to make a coin disappear, and dozens of other childhood tricks and games.

I often wondered why my uncle so readily slipped away from the rest of the adults—just to spend time with a kid. One day, long after he had passed away, I asked my mother why Uncle Vic was as likely to spend time with me as he was to mingle with his peers. Vic’s actions were particularly curious given that his wife, my aunt Mickey, was such a vibrant, vocal personality. I couldn’t imagine how she ever ended up with such a quiet man.

“Don’t you know what happened to your uncle?” my mother asked. “When my sister first met Vic, he had been the life of the party, oozed confidence, and looked the part of a movie star. Why, when he and Mickey walked into a restaurant, the crowd would hush and stare at them. It was as if celebrities had entered the room.”

“And then what happened?” I asked.

“World War II.” She explained. “It happened to all of us—only more so to Vic. You see,” Mom reluctantly continued, “your uncle joined the Army and was immediately sent to the Philippines where he was put in charge of a platoon. It was the job of Sergeant Victor Veloni and his platoon to clear the remote islands.”

“Clear them of what?” I asked.

“Of enemy soldiers who stayed behind to cause havoc with the American troops and Philippine civilians. Surely you’ve heard about them. You know, the soldiers who perched in palm trees—some for years—waiting for a chance to shoot anyone who came into view. Your uncle Vic and his team would land on an island and then do whatever was required to remove the tree-dwelling snipers.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

I could tell that Mom didn’t want to talk about the details.

“Vic and his team would police the island until someone would shoot at them, and then they’d deal with the sniper.”

“They walked around until someone shot at them!” I exclaimed.

“Mostly,” Mom replied. “It was the best way to draw the enemy into the open.”

I could hardly imagine trudging around a steamy, tropical island in full military gear, while waiting for a bullet to pierce my helmet. It’s beyond comprehension.

“Wasn’t that dangerous?” I asked.

“Dangerous?” Mom continued, “Vic ended up losing every single man in his platoon and half of the replacements. One by one, he lost his dear friends and comrades as they fell prey to sniper fire. Our prayers were answered when Vic came home alive, but he never forgave himself for doing so.”

“And that’s what changed him?”

“When the war ended and your uncle returned to Seattle, I hardly knew him. He was the same handsome man who had gone off to war, but the vibrant, fun-loving Vic that used to live behind that chiseled face was no longer there. The horror of watching his friends die, the tension of waiting for the next bullet, the self-imposed guilt for not taking one of his own—it killed the Vic we knew and left behind the quiet, withdrawn man you grew up with. Not everyone who survived the war actually survived the war. Vic went off to battle, but somebody else came home.”

I had no idea about any of this. I was just glad my uncle Vic had spent time with me. I just wanted to know why he had always been so kind, gentle, and attentive.

Earlier this month, as teenagers from the local Boy Scout troop posted a flag in our front yard to help celebrate the Fourth of July, my thoughts turned to the scores of people—like Vic—who have sacrificed in so many different ways, so that you and I can enjoy our many freedoms. As the scouts unfurled the flag, my mind turned to an earlier day with a different group of scouts I had taken to a military cemetery. As these young men and I gathered on a grassy hillside just outside San Francisco, we stood by the graves of decorated soldiers and read aloud the detailed stories of the selfless acts that had earned each fallen soldier both his medal and his grave.

Today my thoughts turn to not only these young men and others who have fallen in the field, but also to those who have returned home—many injured, all affected, and some, like my uncle Vic, transformed into a completely different person. When TV news commentators talk of the number of wounded and killed in current battles, or when statistics pop up on the screen to summarize what’s happening over seas—I don’t see the numbers. I don’t think of the statistics. Instead, I see an image of my uncle Vic. It’s not the image you might imagine. It’s not of a crowd gathered to pay homage to his sacrifice. It isn’t of a general draping a medal around his neck. Nor is it of a band trumpeting his glory. It’s far more humble—and more important—than any of that. It’s the image of a little boy holding a cat’s cradle string, and sitting on the lap of a true American hero.

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I was looking for lead pennies in the change drawer grandpa kept at the front of his grocery store when Chuck hurled his massive bulk through the front door. Chuck’s body wouldn’t let him come in gently. His misshapen feet forced him to lean forward at a tilt that propelled him quickly and precariously across the floor until his cane eventually brought him to a halt.

“A pack of Luckies!” Chuck shouted to my grandfather who, having heard Chuck’s rumbling arrival, was now standing behind the counter. The two men exchanged friendly banter as grandpa rang up twenty-three cents on the cash register and handed Chuck two cents in change. I watched as Chuck gingerly leaned on the counter for support, rifled through his right front pocket, pulled out a wooden match, dragged it across the back of the cash register, and then put the flame to one of the cigarettes he had just purchased.

I liked Chuck. He was always cheerful and, even though I was only a kid, he treated me like a real person. I felt sorry for him though. His feet were horribly turned in and you could tell that it took a great deal of effort, accompanied by a lot of pain, just for him to get around. I had no idea what had happened to him, but had long ago learned it wasn’t something I should ask him directly.

Nevertheless, we did talk. Whenever I ran into Chuck at my grandpa’s grocery store or around the neighborhood, we discussed baseball. We were both fans. On this particular day, as Chuck puffed on his cigarette, we chatted about Dizzy Dean and what a cracker jack announcer he was.

“He hit the ball nine miles,” I shouted in my best Dizzy Dean voice. “Four and a half up and four and a half down!” Then the two of us laughed. It was nice having a real conversation with an adult, even though I was only seven.

“What happened to Chuck?” I asked my mom over the canned tamales we had for dinner that evening. “Why can’t he walk like everyone else?”

“I’m afraid it was his mother’s fault,” Mom responded.

“Melba!” my father inserted—unhappy with what he thought was an attack on Chuck’s mother. Dad had no patience with speaking ill of others.

“Well, it’s true!” Mom said. “Chuck was born with his feet turned in. The doctor prescribed special shoes that would eventually correct the problem. But every time she put on the shoes, little Chucky would whine or cry. They were terribly uncomfortable. His mom couldn’t bear to see him suffer, so one day she simply stopped making him put on those shoes. Now Chuck is a grown man and he’ll never walk normally. It’s his mom’s fault because she gave in to his complaints.”

This was my first encounter with the concept of “tough love.” I could see Mom’s point, but couldn’t totally grasp the idea. It had too many facets for my young mind.

Now, insisting that someone else do the hard thing in the short-run in order to provide a benefit over the long-run—why, that’s easy. When we’re not actually in someone else’s skin, we know with certainty that, given the chance, we’d act thoughtfully and logically—even if it were hard. We’d insist that little Chucky wear his corrective shoes. It’s easy to make such a claim when you’ve never actually held him in your arms, heard his whimpering, or stared into his eyes.

To her credit, Mom demanded that she herself administer that same tough love when called for. It wasn’t long until I discovered this firsthand. As I moseyed home from school a couple of days later, I ran into “Red-headed Rodney” Axleby, the eight-year-old boy who lived just up the hill on the way to our house. Red-headed Rodney asked me to come play with him. I explained that I had to go straight home from school or I’d get in serious trouble with my mom. Rodney didn’t care about our silly rules and since he was bigger than me, he told me he’d beat me up if I didn’t stay and play.

An hour and a half later, when I finally arrived home, Mom was standing on the porch with her arms folded. This wasn’t going to go well for me.

“Go cut a switch,” Mom insisted as she handed me a knife.

This was new. I had to cut the switch that she’d use to punish me and it wasn’t even my fault. What was the world coming to? A few minutes later, I returned with a switch small enough to not hurt much but not so small as to anger my mother further. She immediately put me across her knees.

“But Mom,” I cried. “Rodney made me play with him. I wanted to come home on time. Honest. But Mom . . .”

Swat! Mom wasn’t taking excuses. She also wasn’t taking any satisfaction from the experience. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see tears slowly running down her cheeks. Mother never used a switch on me again (although as the years unfolded she did find plenty of other ways to discipline me). I also was never late coming home from school again.

Decades later, as I drove my eighty-year-old mother to the market and happened to catch a glimpse of what looked like the adult version of Red-headed Rodney in the rearview mirror, the memory of that switching came to mind.

“Hey!” I accused. “How come when I was just a little kid and I came home late from school because Red-headed Rodney made me stay and play with him, you punished me? It wasn’t my fault!”

“I hated doing that,” Mom explained.

“So why did you do it?”

“Five days a week you walked home from school all by yourself, a full mile and a half, down a road that was filled with all kinds of temptations and dangers. I knew if I let you stop and play with friends, skip rocks on the pond, chase water-skippers and the like—you’d never get home on time and who knows what would happen to you.”

“Plus you had a very inventive mind,” Mom continued. “If I accepted your explanation that a bully forced you to stay and play, you’d have ten more reasons for being late the next day and twenty more the next. I hated spanking you that day. If I had done what I wanted, I would have taken you into my arms. But I did what I thought was best for you.”

Mom understood tough love.

My partner once sat on the plane next to a fellow who had just given a speech on the threats to the modern family. “What’s the biggest threat?” my partner asked.

“Distance,” the fellow replied. “In today’s mobile society, grandparents often live far away from their grandkids.”

“And why’s that a threat to the family?” my partner asked.

“Because it’s a grandparent’s job to give unconditional love. Kids need people who dote over them, no matter what, and grandparents are perfect for the job.”

My one living grandfather (the one who owned the grocery store) knew all about unconditional love. He thought the sun rose and set on me. I could tell by the look on his face. I’ve tried to be equally admiring of my own grandchildren, plus, I’ve done my best to be just as loving to the neighbor kids when they drop by. Everyone needs an occasional dose of undiluted adoration from someone who doesn’t also punish them. And you know what? I’m up to the task.

But now, as I think of the many faces of love, my mind turns to the tears running down my mother’s cheeks that day. I don’t know if spanking me was the right thing to do. I’m certainly not advocating corporal punishment. But I do know she was doing what she thought was right, even though it hurt her.

So Mom, for Mother’s Day this year, let me say this: thanks for loving and adoring me when I did the right thing. And equally important, thanks for being tough when I didn’t.

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When I attended elementary school in the early fifties, I suffered from fairly severe allergies. Unfortunately, none of the doctors in my hometown believed in such twaddle. I complained of a general sense of malaise until my mother took me to our family physician. He (between puffs on a cigarette) explained that my illness was all in my head and that what I really needed was “a good dose of self-discipline.” Mother politely thanked the doctor and we returned home where I recklessly breathed the air and became sick—causing me to miss school. A lot.

Fortunately, every time I stayed home from school, something magical took place. I’d tune our TV set to the soap operas I watched the last time I fell ill. While a couple of weeks passed between sick days, the soap opera plots had not advanced one tiny bit. It was as if the actors remained frozen inside our TV set until I jolted them back into action by flipping on the switch. The amnesia case I had watched was still just being discovered. The upcoming divorce hadn’t progressed. The dalliance was still in the early stages. I didn’t miss a thing.

When I returned to school, the same magic also transpired. I could miss an entire week and it was as if no advances in learning had taken place during my absence. Skipping school left me unaffected—except for one minor inconvenience. By the end of each year, I had missed so many days that Mother was summoned to meet with the principal to discuss “my case.” It was always an awkward encounter.

“Your son has missed over forty days again this year. We’ll have to hold him back.” This was invariably Mrs. Kavonavitch’s opening salvo.

“But he earns good grades,” my mom countered.

“True, but he’s a disaster in the making,” Mrs. Kavonavitch mused. Then she scolded mother for giving into my “imaginary” allergies and reluctantly promoted me to the next grade.

My older brother, Bill, didn’t take any of this lying down. He suffered through school day in and day out and in his mind it wasn’t fair that I, “a big fat faker,” got to lie around and watch TV. He was dead certain I’d end up a hobo.

“He lacks discipline,” the doctor warned. “He’s a disaster in the making,” the principal chided. “He’ll end up a hobo,” my brother predicted.

As bad as people thought things would end for me, they expected far worse for our neighbor, Louie Egbert. Louie was the sketchy teenager who lived next door to us who could do just about anything that kids admire and parents revile. He could throw an ax twenty feet through the air and stick it into a telephone pole. He could climb down a tree face first just for the heck of it. He could (and routinely did) juggle flaming torches. In short, Louie was a regular redneck Cirque Du Soleil.

I admired Louie for all of these skills, but even more for his talent at building splendidly dangerous rope swings. Louie climbed a giant pine tree, secured a rope to a hefty limb, chopped off all of the limbs below, and voila; the neighborhood had a brand-new, death-defying recreational device. Adults didn’t share my admiration for Louie. The treacherous swings he fashioned were never on his family’s property. Plus, his swings marred perfectly good trees and were made from thick ropes that Louie stole from local tugboats.

“He’s gonna end up in prison,” my dad warned me. “He’s jail-bound for sure,” others chimed in. “A bad seed,” someone else added.

In early fall of 1964, after I climbed off one of Louie’s rope swings for the last time, I (to paraphrase my brother) “hauled my lazy, psychosomatic carcass off to college.” There, I joined the math club, majored in chemistry, and minored in how to get along with John Oglethorpe, my lunatic roommate. John was a pathological liar, and, as is often the case when only one of two people feels compelled to connect arguments to some morsel of reality, we quarreled about everything.

One day, John became so upset at my demand for facts that he chased me around the apartment with a butcher knife. Eventually, I escaped the attack and found a way to exact revenge. When the semester came to an end, I moved 800 miles away and spoke ill of him every chance I got.

“He’s a nutcase,” I told my parents. “He’ll end up friendless,” Mom added. “Won’t amount to a thing,” Dad piled on.

I didn’t hear anything about John or Louie for decades. The year I set off to college my parents moved three states away, so it took my fortieth high school reunion to get me back to my old digs. Soon, I found myself talking with my childhood buddies and learning what had taken place over the intervening years. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Louie, the rope thief, was now a respectable businessman and member of the Rotary Club.

“He’s not in jail?” I exclaimed in disbelief.

“Nope, he surprised all of us,” several people responded.

When I asked a classmate who was a distant cousin of John “butcher-knife” Oglethorpe what had happened to the guy I thought was most likely to be killed in a dark alley, she explained, “He just retired.”

“From what?” I asked.

“The ministry.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather. And then I learned how almost all of my childhood acquaintances had found a way to become productive citizens—even the “hoods” like Louie and John. No matter the dire predictions and unflattering labels, all succeeded to one degree or another.

As I moved around the reunion hall and talked with several other potential criminals from my own class, I was surprised that they, like John and Louie, not only avoided a life of crime, but their transformation stories were equally unremarkable. None experienced an epiphanous life-changing event. No burning bushes. No rock-bottom prison moment. No tear-filled family intervention. Instead, like the soap opera characters I watched as a boy, nothing in their lives changed rapidly or flamboyantly. They did change, but their transformations took place unceremoniously and over decades.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. When my partners and I studied individuals who made massive changes in their lives for our book Change Anything, none of the successful changers transformed in a splendiferous flash. Instead, they turned their lives around by patiently applying a whole host of techniques to their problems. They learned from their mistakes. They found new friends and distanced themselves from old accomplices. They honed their social skills. They developed career talents. Skill by skill, month by month, they changed. And in so doing, they give us, our children, and their children hope.

I’ve written about this before. I’ve suggested that today’s shenanigans don’t always translate into tomorrow’s felonies. Now I’ll add one more piece to the puzzle. Imperfections aren’t likely to be remedied in a flash. Louie slowly found a way to channel his creativity into entrepreneurial success. I don’t know how John transformed from a pathological liar into a preacher, but my friends assure me that he ultimately turned into a good man. It took a while, but he did it.

So the next time you become discouraged with your own inability to bring about rapid changes in your life, remember, if you’re moving in the right direction, time will gradually work its magic. Just look at school-skipping me and the “hoods” I grew up with. I didn’t end up a hobo. They didn’t end up in jail.

Now, for those of you who don’t want to wait until you’re in your mid-sixties to get a firsthand look at how time is working in your favor, there is a way to help recalibrate your change clock. It’s an easy enough process. Simply plop a lounge chair onto the Alaskan tundra, casually sit back, look up at the mountains, and watch the glaciers race. You’ll feel a lot better about yourself.

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The following article was first published on February 17, 2010.

This year I’ve decided to give you (kind readers) a Valentine’s Day gift. I know it’s a few days late, but since my present is neither candy nor flowers (and won’t decay) I think the gift I have in mind will do just fine. I’m giving you a nonperishable story of a Valentine’s Day I experienced some thirty-five years ago. It’s a tale that I believe might help lift your spirits some day when you’ve done something—how does one put it?—not all that clever. Plus the story provides a nice reminder of the importance of keeping focused on what you really want.

It all started one Saturday evening when I suddenly realized that I only had an hour to buy my wife a Valentine’s Day gift. Since Louise was working on a project across campus (I was a grad student at the time), I loaded our six- and four-year-old daughters into the back seat of our Volkswagen bug, strapped our six-month-old son into one of those plastic baby carriers, and headed off to the nearest shopping center I could find.

Soon, with Becca, Christine, and a Raggedy Ann doll connected to me in a daisy chain of hand holds, and Taylor swinging gently in the plastic carrier clutched in my other hand, we found ourselves scurrying through a very high-end shopping center that was close to our apartment—but unlike any place I had ever been before (it didn’t have “Mart” or “O-rama” in the title). It was chock-full of wealthy, beautifully attired, perfectly coiffed people who frequented the luxurious stores that surrounded us.

Since I had been cleaning my outdoor grill when it struck me that I needed to buy a gift, I didn’t look much like the prim and proper patrons around me. I looked more like the Maytag repairman, and my kids appeared as if they had just been plucked from the sand pile in our back court. Which they had. The shoppers’ genial smiles turned into looks of disapproval as they scrutinized our scruffy clothes, our home-cut hair, and our barely opposable thumbs.

Eventually, the four of us found our way to the home center of a posh department store where they had on display the very present my wife had hinted she wanted—a variable speed blender, complete with pulse control. Soon, a perky clerk was wrapping up a bright red blender I had chosen in honor of Valentine’s Day. I knew that a household appliance wasn’t as romantic as, say, a diamond necklace, but you have to ask yourself: Can you whip up a batch of pureed spinach with a diamond necklace? I don’t think so.

Next, as the clock continued to run, the girls and I scampered out into the shopping center in search of an affordable card. Everything was so expensive. A simple card cost five bucks.

“Daddy,” Christine uttered, “don’t you think . . .”

“Shush,” I blurted as we hurried past one high-end store after another. “I need to find your mother a card.”

“I know,” Christine continued, “but . . .”

“No ifs-ands-or-buts about it. If I don’t find a card, I’m in trouble.”

Seeing that her sister was getting nowhere, three-year-old Becca asked: “Where’s baby Taylor?”

It was like being hit by a bucket of cold water. There in the hand that had once carried my son, was a package containing a variable-speed blender, complete with pulse-control. Where was baby Taylor?

“He’s back in that big store,” Christine offered as she pointed to the far end of the shopping center.

Egads. I had left my son in the middle of the blender display! In a flash I reversed course and headed back to the scene of the crime where I frantically tried to get into the store—repeatedly banging into a locked pair of massive glass doors.

“The place is closed,” explained an older gentleman walking by. “It’s Saturday night.”

“But I left my so . . .” I cut myself off midword. “But I left something inside.”

“You’ll have to go around back to the employee entrance,” the fellow explained.

Moments later the girls and I scurried along a terribly long wall while employees disgorged from a lone door at the far end of the building. The animated employees walking our way were all talking about some idiot who had . . . (well, you can guess). Then, as they saw me frantically hustling along with my two remaining kids in hand, they quickly concluded that I was the fool they had been bad-mouthing.

If looks could kill . . .

The best I could do was smile back lamely. I just wanted my son back.

Eventually my daughters and I found ourselves inside the building and standing next to a knot of folks who were cooing and making other baby noises while my son, still in his plastic container, smiled back politely. I searched for the proper words.

“Has anyone found a baby? It seems I’ve lost one.” No, that would land me in jail for sure.

“Funny thing, I came with three kids and now I only have two. Go figure.” Equally lame.

Eventually I blurted out, “You’ve found my son! Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

Pointing out that they had found (rather than I had lost) my son appeared to take the edge off the pack of store clerks. Nevertheless, the lady in charge gave me a long, hard look before barking, “Do you think you can get him home without losing him?”

“I brought my Raggedy Ann,” Christine remarked as she held up her well-worn doll. “And I didn’t lose her.”

“Yes, dear and I’m very proud of you,” I muttered back. Then looking the authority figure directly in the eye I tersely proclaimed, “So, we’ll just be heading on home now.”

With this lame pronouncement fresh off my lips, I snatched up Taylor and retreated out of the massive building.

“Do we tell Mommy the secret?” Christine asked as we walked back to the car.

“No!” I blurted. “We mustn’t tell Mommy that I bought her a variable speed blender, complete with pulse control. It would spoil the surprise and we don’t want to spoil the surprise.”

“I mean. . . how you left Taylor in the middle of the store and then got locked out?”

I was doomed. There was no way I was going to be able to keep the two girls from tattling on me. And sure enough, a few minutes later when we pulled up in front of our apartment, the girls bolted from the car as they rushed to tell mom the exciting news. They kept the blender a secret, but not the fact that I had left their baby brother in a big, scary store. That part of our little escapade they told with great relish.

“You left him in the store and then got locked out?” Louise asked incredulously as I presented her a brightly-wrapped gift.

“True,” I explained, “but you haven’t had a chance to see the gift I bought for you. I was so focused on expressing my love for you with this truly special household item—complete with pulse control—that I lost focus for a second.”

“You didn’t lose focus,” Louise accused, “you lost Taylor!”

“I didn’t lose my Raggedy Ann,” Christine offered.

And so there you have it my friends—my present to you. Never again did I leave a child locked in a department store. I learned my lesson. I learned to stay focused on what really matters.

In addition, I freely admit to my idiocy. That’s the whole point of this story. One day when you’re feeling bad because you missed a deadline at work or maybe you were late picking up your daughter at soccer practice, think of me and my Valentine’s Day debacle. Compared to me, you’ll be a saint. And should a loved one become angry at you for not flossing your kids’ teeth adequately or keeping them from getting hurt on a see-saw, you can say: “True, I messed up. But at least I’m not as bad as that idiot who left his baby in the middle of a blender display!”

That’s my present to you.