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Short stories that will change you |
2009-07-18 |
By Robert Tribble |
She was born Anna Mary Robertson in Greenwich, New York in 1860. At the age of 12 she left home to work as a hired girl on a neighboring farm. She married Thomas Moses in 1887 and moved to Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. She returned to New York with her husband and five children in 1905 and settled in Eagle Bridge.
In the 1930’s she began making embroidered pictures and paintings for friends and family. A display of her paintings at Thomas’ Drug Store in Hoosick Falls attracted the attention of Louis Caldor an art critic. She had a one woman exhibition in New York and a special presentation at Gimbels Department Store
In 1949 she received an award from President Harry Truman and was interviewed for CBS by Edward R. Murrow. Grandma Moses died at the age of 101 in Hoosick Falls.
In another story British novelist H.G. Wells, author of The War of the Worlds, had a lighter side. On leaving a Cambridge party Wells accidentally picked up a hat that did not belong to him. Discovering his mistake he decided not to return the hat to its rightful owner whose label was inside the brim.
The hat fit Wells comfortably and he had grown to like it so he wrote to the former owner: “I stole your hat; I like your hat; I shall keep your hat. When I look inside it I will think of you and your excellent sherry and of the town of Cambridge. I take off your hat to you.”
Sam Roberts once wrote that when a man is determined what can stop him? Cripple him and you have a Sir Walter Scott. Put him in a prison cell and you have a John Bunyan. Bury him in the snow of Valley Forge and you have a George Washington.
Have him born in poverty and you have an Abraham Lincoln. Put him in the grease pit of a locomotive round house and you have a Walter Chrysler. Make him second fiddle in an obscure South African orchestra and you have an Arturo Toscanini. The hardships of life are sent not by an unkind destiny to crush but rather to challenge.
Gene Bluhm wrote the following about smiling. A smile costs nothing but creates much. It enriches those who receive without impoverishing those who give. It happens in a flash and the memory of it sometimes lasts forever.
None are so rich they can get along without it and none so poor that they can’t be enriched by its benefits. It creates happiness in the home, fosters good will in a business and is the countersign of friends. It is rest to the weary, daylight to the discouraged, sunshine to the sad and nature’s best antidote for trouble.
Yet it cannot be bought, begged, borrowed or stolen for it is something that is no earthly good to anybody until it is given away. Nobody needs a smile so much as those who have none left to give.
Think about this, make one person happy each day and in 40 years you will have made 14,600 human beings happy for a little time at least
Thought for today: Our business in life should not be to get ahead of others but to get ahead of ourselves, to break our own records, to outstrip our yesterdays by our today, to do the small parts of our work with more force than ever before.
(Tribble is the owner of Fayette Newspapers, Inc.)
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