Month: January 2019

ome of these days, Oh, you’ll miss me honey… your big fat mamma!’ ‘Dr.’ Leslie Berlowitz’ nonexistent doctorate roils one of the nation’s most respected institutions and the ‘little people’ get their revenge.

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant.

Author’s program note. Remember Leona Helmsley (1920-2007), widely known as “the Queen of Mean”? She had the great good fortune to marry one of the Great Republic’s richest men, hotelier Harry Helmsley… which she thought conferred on her God’s permission to belittle, disdain, demean, denigrate all the “little people” of her big bath towel empire; oh, and skip taxes, too, a point of view with which the IRS did not concur…
… and so sent her to the pokey where she tried to bribe her cell-mate to do her prescribed tasks. She vowed not repentance (that was definitely for the “little people”) but revenge. And so she left her dog Trouble a twelve million dollar fortune (later reduced as excessive by the court to a mere two million), and so burnished her well-earned reputation as the unchallenged sovereign of gratuitous nastiness, “unchallenged” that is until now, for “Dr.” Leslie Berlowitz, (born 1944), gives even Leona a run for the money and that really is saying something given Madame Helmsley’s mastery of the stinging put-down and designed-to-hurt insult. But even here “Dr.” Berlowitz excels.

The scene of hurtful outrage.
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Appalling though this is, you have probably lived every one of your days in complete and total ignorance about the august American Academy of Arts and Sciences, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a comfortable walk from where I am writing you today. It occupies spacious digs on five leafy acres in one of the most desirable areas on Earth, hard by Harvard and its unparalleled ability to lift the hitherto obscure to universal prominence and acclaim. Once there, and not a minute sooner, your invitation to membership in the Academy was sure to be in the next post and so it had gone on since this pantheon of certified worthies was established in 1780 by three of the American Revolution’s greatest leaders, scholar-patriots John Adams, John Hancock, and James Bowdoin.
This was their noble mission, “To cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honour, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” Since then, and upon this laudable basis, over 10,000 fellows have been inducted, including Thomas Jefferson, John James Audubon, Washington Irving, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Willa Cather, T.S. Eliot, Edward R. Murrow, Jonas Salk, Eudora Welty, Duke Ellington… whilst among the distinguished foreign Honorary Members you find M. le marquis de Lafayette, Charles Darwin and Alec Guinness. It was an unmatched constellation of the legendary, the immortal, and the merely great and celebrated.
In 1996, “Dr.” Leslie Berlowitz became the Academy’s 45th president, with an endowed chair, the William T. Golden Chair, granted to give the lady a suitably comfortable place to ensconce her embonpoint. Only problem was… as reported by The Boston Globe, June 3, 2013, she had falsely claimed — on documents submitted to federal authorities on grant applications and elsewhere — that she had an earned doctorate in English from New York University, which she certainly did not, according to NYU sources.
But “Dr.” Berlowitz was a woman in a hurry, and she wasn’t about to let lack of a simple sheepskin hold her back. No way! So… she invented a character called “Dr.” Leslie Berlowitz. Here was a woman of consequence who put the actual woman with her comparatively meager credentials in the shade. These included a master’s degree from Columbia University and her duties as an administrator at NYU. There are questions about both of these.
Her master’s from Columbia, absent any subsequent doctorate, suggests what is known in the trade as a “terminal master’s”. Here people who are told they are not doctoral material are given the distinctly inferior consolation prize of the Master of Arts degree and advised to go back to Dog Patch whilst their more favored classmates advance to the eminence of the earned Ph.D. Odds are this is what happened to “Dr.” Berlowitz.
As for her work experience at NYU, it too is questionable and under scrutiny. NYU sources said that what “Dr.” Berlowitz claimed on her resume and the facts do not add up. NYU employment records show that she held a different, lesser job title in one case and held another job for far fewer years than stated in another. It was, in short, a pattern of prevarications, misrepresentations, and deliberate deceits.
On this basis she presented herself as a candidate for President of the Academy and was selected. Incredibly, no one on the selection committee seemed to ask about that all-important doctoral dissertation. She was now “Dr.” Icarus, with her own Daedalus (the Academy’s quarterly journal since 1955), and she flew high… for 17 increasingly dazzling, opulent years.
Item. Her total compensation package for 2012 was $598,000, 3 times what her peers in similar organizations were paid; far more than most college presidents.
Item: She always dined first class as a matter of course, and of course always flew first class, economy being a word she never countenanced.
Item: Her staff kow-towed and catered to her, picking her up at her superb residence overlooking the scenic Charles River, returning her thither of an evening.
It was exactly the life fictional “Dr.” Berlowitz would have had. OK, she must have constantly rationalized to herself, I lied. But I deserve everything I got. I earned everything. This must have been her constant belief, refrain, and creed. As such it certainly trumped the petty fact that she was every single day living a lie. Results, after all, were more important than mere honesty and integrity. And it must be said, she was a titanic worker, the ultimate micro-manager.
As such she had two key constituencies crucial to her success: her board of directors and her staff. She succeeded brilliantly with the first and miserably with the second… and herein lies the crux of the matter, the reason “Dr.” Icarus has fallen and will fall further.
The Board of Directors, seduced, enfeebled, hobbled, clueless.
In theory the designated CEO of any nonprofit organization is subservient to the Board of Directors. In practice, however, every CEO works overtime to ensure that the Board of Directors is subservient to her. This ensures her power, her position and, most important, her pay and perqs. Here “Dr.” Berlowitz excelled as we can easily see. When, for instance, a “palace revolution” brought on by staff complaints of her abusive and abrasive treatment almost brought her down just about one year after her appointment, the Board sustained her… and “Dr.” Berlowitz got the message: romance the Board morning, noon, and night. It worked.
So did doing everything possible to ensure her board candidates were elected… Thus when the current scandal broke, the Board was her poodle… immediately issuing a statement of unqualified support; only very slowly and with obvious reluctance distancing themselves from the “Dr.” who had catered to their every wish and whim… something the Board had valued above all, including the humane values they were in business to promote.
“Dr.” Berlowitz would take care of everything, and if a few of the “little people” complained, well, you can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs. And so we arrive at the “little people”, the Academy’s staff, in constant turnover humiliated, ignored, angry, aggrieved., resentful, smoldering. Their moment in the drama has now arrived…
Right from the time when The Boston Globe broke the first news it was obvious that Academy staff past and present, with their appalling stories of how mauled and mistreated they were, would be a factor as important and influential as her misuse of a non-existent doctoral degree. And here “Dr.” Berlowitz did herself in, treating the staff with constant disrespect, no day complete without its hurtful quota of abuse, snide commentary and disparagements, all public, all played out before their colleagues. Thus did the malice and contempt of “Dr.” Berlowitz turn the ancient Academy into a snake pit of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear.
In this pernicious environment, “Dr.” Berlowitz, micro-manager, ruled all. Not a paper left her office that she had not seen. Thus, when she claimed that her negligent staff was responsible for the misuse and misstatement of her bogus credentials, there was a gasp of disbelief at the Academy; the “doctor” had brass, no doubt about it. She had spent decades lying; if one more lie, more or less, was necessary to prevail at this crucial moment in her dissembling career, so be it.
This time, however, the lady is sore beset on all sides… by past and present staff who have bided their time and are tumbling over themselves to tell the now attending media about their particular woes… by Board members who begin to see how to get peace and quiet they enabled their creature to outrage their core values and the clear mission of the Founders… and by state and federal authorities set to discover whether and how “Dr.” Berlowitz broke the law and may be deserving of a punishment long days coming. All that will come out in the wash as further details emerge.
For now her petted directors have put her on leave, whether with her bloated stipend or not was not announced. “Dr.” Berlowitz, of course, will fight, and pertinaciously, too, for every penny and privilege until her effete Board says, “basta”, whereupon Miss Berlowitz, as the world will then know her, will no doubt take a copy of her book on management and climb the great steps of Harvard’s Widener Library, there to read from her business insights found in her deliciously titled tome ,”Restoring Trust in American Business”: Then to belt out Sophie Tucker’s anthem for brassy dames everywhere, dames who will do anything, absolutely anything to prevail.
It’s “Some of These Days”, first recorded in 1911. Go now to any search engine and listen to these acid lyrics, perfect for Miss Berlowitz and her affecting case of chagrin and rue :
“Some of these days/ You’ll miss me, honey/Some of these days/ You’re gonna be so lonely.
You’ll miss my hugging/ You’ll gonna miss my kisses/ You’ll gonna miss me, honey/When I’m far away…
Gonna miss your big fat mamma, yo’ mamma/ some of these days.” It might even work…

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On collecting political autographs. Downers Grove, Illinois, 1960, age 13.

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Author’s program note. Her name was Phoebe H. Dutcher, and she occupied the exalted elected office of Recorder of Deeds in DuPage County, Illinois circa 1960. As such she was an important part of the Republican Party apparatus in what was arguably one of the two most important counties (the other being Cook) in the key state of Illinois, the state that (in the event) determined who would become “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the next President of the United States…”

Phoebe and my grandfather Walt Lauing were political pals. Grampie, a blunt, plain-spoken man of Hanoverian provenance was a pillar of the GOP, knew all the wheels therein, had them all visit the house he built out of good Midwestern flagstones, about the only thing as tenacious and unyielding as he was. His habits were exemplary; his word was his bond; and he never watered his liquor for himself or any man he respected and befriended, especially if that fortunate one was a Republican.

On this basis his construction company prospered… and, bit by bit, he used some of its profits to build his network, keep the GOP green and flush, whilst keeping the free-spending socialist Democrats (tinged mit Communists no less) at bay, especially his arch nemesis Richard J. Daley, his honor of Chicagoland (mayor 1955-1976), the master of every political chicanery, including his legendary talent for voting the dead and voting them often, thereby sending John F. Kennedy to the Oval Office; one of the greatest swindles of all time and a matter of unending chagrin and the bluest of language from Grandpapa.

All that was ever required to see Grampie emerge as Hoch Deutsch, Gott Mit Uns was to whisper in his ear that well and fully hated name; an explosion was guaranteed, and of course knowing the means of producing it ensured that I, his oldest grandchild and the only one with political interests, would provoke it, but only after I had tormented his ridiculously coddled and slothful cat enough and needed something to amuse me.

Perhaps he thought the red leather autograph book he gave me in anticipation of a steady stream of Republican worthies would give me something to do and save Tommie from torment. It didn’t, for I was capable even then of multi-tasking as was soon apparent to all, angelic smile and demeanor always ready for covert action.

Thus did Phoebe H. Dutcher, whom I recall as a jolly soul not above a tasty toddy of my grandfather’s practised invention, visit the house where to visit meant autographing my book. She was in fact the first to do so and was promptly followed by Samuel Wittwer (soon-to-be unsuccessful) candidate for the Senate, then Congressman Elmer G. Hoffman, a man of consequence in Downers Grove, the safest of safe seats, a man whose true opinions on the issues confronting Fortress America were as pat, predictable, and pedestrian as a guaranteed lifetime position in Washington could ensure. His visit to the kitchen of Victoria Burgess Lauing was an event… and of course I had a prominent position and in due course an expansive autograph in my notable album.

Higher… and higher.

By now you may imagine that I loved my autograph book; more and more as each person of significance bent low over it, glad to sign, glad to have their importance recognized and confirmed by my respectful request and awe, for they were all entitled to that. This was particularly true with the next panjandrum who was, we knew, a great man indeed because hardly a day went by when his name (and photo too) were not found in Grampie’s newspaper, the “Chicago Tribune”.

The fine folks at “The Trib” knew their business, he averred over and over again; he followed their editorial line with punctilious and total regard. The fact that in 1948 they announced to the world that Dewey defeated Truman, the biggest media blooper in the annals of the Great Republic, was a fact never, ever to be mentioned… or even thought.

The man whose photo and stirring deeds were featured every day was, of course, William G. Stratton, now running for his third term as governor of the land of Lincoln. My grandfather was just as excited as I was when he told me that I as chairman of the Puffer Elementary School Republican Party would be greeting him and offering the remarks and sentiments thought de rigueur for such occasions. It was an honor to do this, as good as a telegram from on high that my future political career was a cinch, as good as launched.

It was late October of the year; Stratton, tired, gray, shop worn was running with the full burden of nearly eight years of governing on his care-worn shoulders. He was running on empty, but he was a seasoned pol and he knew the game. The helicopter containing the great man came into view, the entire Puffer School contingent was out, squealing students, teachers, administrators, our friends and neighbors, the most fervent Republicans…

And, of course, my grandfather who had helped build the school, not just as director of the project but with his own tough leathered hands and cunning fingers, laying bricks like a connoisseur. He was a man who believed in the virtues of work and spent a long lifetime displaying them. How proud he must have been when the most important citizen in the state, the most important Republican motioned to me that I was to come aboard.

“Local lad flies high” declared the Downers Grove Reporter newspaper, the “lad” a play on my middle name, Ladd. Stratton said, “Hold on, boy” and told me to smile and wave. Just 13 years old, I knew this was living, although I may not yet have understood its cost, why so many like Stratton give up so much to grasp the greasy poll, so ephemeral and unpredictable, so exciting and addictive.

“Smile and wave,” yeah, I could do that… and I did. I was flying high indeed with higher still to go. It turned out to be the only autograph I ever got off the ground… and was certainly the last time he was asked to sign anything other than an admission of guilt. For Governor Stratton was crushed by the restless and determined electorate and shortly thereafter found himself in federal prison on a fistful of charges, autographs derided, degraded, disdained. Had Grampie known this I wouldn’t have been allowed to get in that helicopter and imagine a possible future. Thus, knowing the future is not always a good thing.

Richard Milhous Nixon.

If you were alive and of voting age in 1960, would you have voted for Nixon or Kennedy? 97% of you would now say Kennedy, especially given the fact that I am writing this 50 years after President Kennedy’s assassination, his name, election and administration being much in the news. Of course you would voted for Kennedy; any other action would have been disloyal, disrespectful. But the first rule of history is that you must be willing and able to give up your clairvoyance and make your decisions and judgements solely based on the facts then known, incomplete though they were.

And so… “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the next president of these United States… Richard Milhous Nixon”… since 1946 servant of the people as Congressman, Senator from California and since 1953 Vice President to that most popular of presidents, Dwight David Eisenhower.

Nixon had oodles of relevant experience. Kennedy didn’t. Nixon was a prodigious worker. Kennedy was a party boy. Nixon was a devoted family man in love with a good woman. Kennedy was a scandal waiting to happen, in flagrante delicto a very real possibility. Nixon was plodding and cautious; the kind of guy to do your taxes. Kennedy was reckless, cute, fun on a date and…. very ill, dying in office a very real possibility, a fact virtually unknown.

The reasons went for Nixon… but Kennedy had an incomparable asset, his father Joseph P. Kennedy, a man of the deepest pockets and an axe to grind, the ultimate mick on the make. And this trumped everything…

That’s why my mother invited me to sit down at the kitchen table one day after the November 1960 election. She hand wrote her letter to Hannah Nixon, the Vice President’s mother, while I addressed my loyal sentiments to him. That started the process that showed me off to the world, the photo pictured above running in the Trib, an adamant Republican paper, a strong Nixon advocate. They ran my story with alacrity and pugnacious loyalty.

My smile was incandescent, Nixon’s signed campaign poster on the wall, a signed family portrait in hand, his message warm, honest and personal; the kind of letter almost no politician writes today; a small measure of our declension as a nation and our rampant political malignities, sharp, toxic, rancorous, all-consuming, pointless.

Had Nixon shown more of this, allowed himself to show more, how different the history of the Great Republic would have been… for Kennedy’s margin was tiny, his victory the result of Daley’s frauds and Nixon’s unwillingness to call him on them, so sparing the Great Republic from shocking insights into the electoral process.

I have often wondered if Nixon ever regretted this civic-spirited decision. Certainly no Kennedy with Papa Joe at hand would have done that. The Kennedys played politics the old-fashioned way, as the blood sport it was, vengeful, manor houses burnt at midnight, the howls of menacing banshees carried in the wind, a warning to lesser men; the single word “Remember” their charge for life, branded on every Irish heart, no mercy given, nothing forgiven, nothing forgotten. The presidency was worth all this and more…

Against this immemorial rage and fierce determination, Nixon hurled his inadequate weapons of fair play, integrity, the decency of his Quaker heritage; a campaign he refused to get dirty. Oh, yes, and one resounding, upbeat American melody, “Buckle Down, Winsocki”. You can find it in any search engine.

It was the parody of a typical collegiate gridiron tune, go-team-go, rah-rah-rah. Written for the 1941 Broadway show “One Step Forward” by Chris Hillman and Bill Wildes the Nixon camp altered the words to “We can win with Nixon/ If we buckle down.” But this wasn’t good enough to carry the day, not nearly good enough. Thus did events take their course, for good and ill.

Envoi.

My parents took me to a huge Nixon rally very near election day. The special guest was Mrs. (Pat) Nixon. To warm up the crowd on this typical Illinois fall day, the grayest of atmospheres, helpers handed out sheets with the updated “Buckle down, Winsocki” lyrics. It was sung rapturously by the partisans, the only time I ever heard the tune and felt the certainty of victory. I recall it all so clearly. No, sometimes it is not a good thing to know the future…

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Thoughts on Lord Tweedsmuir, the Primrose League, and me

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By- Dr. Jeffrey Lant

I have been researching for some items I need for my next article. And as it often happens, I have discovered another story as interesting as the original. Getting off the track is almost a certainty.

In this case it concerns an organization that no longer exists, and a peerage which is now extinct, and me quite possibly the only person still alive who could tell the tale. The organization in question was the Primrose League founded in 1883.

The Primrose League was a Conservative organization that met monthly in the House of Lords. Each month a well-known, usually aspiring politician came in black tie with a fulsome dinner speech in his pocket. The result was sure to be a rollicking evening and an illustration of why the British talk about being drunk as a lord for the good supply of that on hand.

I was the only American to be a member and never missed a monthly dinner or my chance to meet any number of peers and MPs. The members befriended me and overlooked the fact that I was a student at Harvard on the route of where Paul Revere galloped towards Concord. Let bygones be bygones.

One of the people I knew best was John Buchan, second Lord Tweedsmuir. His father had written the best-selling book, Thirty Nine Steps in 1915 and became Canada’s first Governor General in 1935.

Johnnie was born in 1911 and had a distinguished career. He was a colonial administrator and naturalist, but also a true-life adventurer. He has been described as a “brilliant fisherman and naturalist, a gallant soldier and fine writer of English, an explorer, colonial administrator and man of business.”
Dinners with him were always fun. The whiskeys flowed and so did the stories. I think he liked me because I had the mandatory awe-struck glint in my eye that Americans retain for members of the Royal family and glamorous peers of the realm. As a trustee of the Primrose League, he was expected to attend all the meetings and events sponsored by the organization and to make appropriate remarks.

This included an outing we made annually to Benjamin Disraeli’s home, Hughenden Manor where we placed a wreath of Primroses festooned with these three words, “His Favorite Flower.”

I knew a secret about this wreath that I learned in Windsor Castle where I was then working in the Royal Archives. Even Lord Tweedsmuir didn’t know. It was generally thought that the wreath and flowers were placed by Queen Victoria in memory of her favorite Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. However, they were actually placed in honor of her husband Prince Albert. Hence “His Favorite Flower.” How could it be anyone but Albert?

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                              John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir
​Tweedsmuir laughed, gave me a swig of whiskey and laughed again. He didn’t mind the inaccuracy so long he didn’t have to talk about it in public. He minded that quite a lot because our excursions to Disraeli’s home were 99% women who liked to fuss over him, after all he was a Lord of the Realm. I was a good shield.

The Primrose League exists no longer and there are no more dinner in House of Lords no matter how much they love the UK. Started by Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill’s mother, it was kept going largely because of Evelyn Hawley, CBE. She worked hard for this decoration and she wore it daily. Then after 45 years of loyalty, she stopped and the Primrose League did too.

Now it is all gone, all except for me. I miss the comradery, the deep belly laughs that came so often, and the chance to meet even the highest Cabinet members and quiz them affably.
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Johnie is gone, and there is no heir. Who places the wreath at Hughenden now?

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Cambridge senior citizen releases stunning manuscript of Herod, King of the Jews. Astonishing revelations from the man accused of ‘The Slaughter of the Innocents’ and intended murder of Jesus The Christ.

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant.

Author’s note: I have held this story privily unto myself for over four decades now. Not a day goes by, not an hour, that I have failed to examine this manuscript, touch it, venerate it, until I have come to know each sentence, every word, indeed every smudge and discoloration.

Since the very day this story begins, so many years ago, this document has determined the course of my life. Instead of merely discovering perhaps the most important of historical documents — the apologia pro vita sua of Herod, King of the Jews, archetype of majesty, I have found a master… for whatever role I have played in this matter, it has always been Herod who has called all the shots, just as he called them every day of his life, as much a King in death as he was most assuredly King in life.

This papyrus clearly marked with the royal seal of Herod, King has held me in thrall. I have wondered, indeed dwelt on the matter with near manic intensity, whether I was right to withhold notifying my dissertation advisor of a find I knew almost instantly was a matter of the first importance, a certain wonder to the world, significant to people everywhere.

I was, however, just a second-year graduate student at the time and was as such unsure of my way; of no consequence or standing whatsoever. I decided then, and have lived with the consequences of this decision ever since, that when I was “ready” I would release the fateful document I have always known would make my career, guarantee a plum academic appointment, respect and admiration my certain portion…

… along, of course, with the jealous denunciations, painful abuses, and hurtful execrations of those who were determined to bring low anyone who threatens, as I and this seminal document would most certainly threaten, the version of events they had propounded and rested their careers, well being and reputations upon.

I was convinced then that I was not ready to withstand such abuse, which I knew was certain and so made the far-reaching decision to be silent and maintain this silence. Each time thereafter I determined I was at last “ready” for the world to know and take my rightful place amongst today’s Sadducees, I paused knowing the first query I would be universally subjected to was “why?”…. why had I waited even a single minute for revelation, the fateful query which even I recognized would undercut my case and make its acceptance even more difficult than I knew it would be.

Thus from the moment I determined I would not inform my advisor, would not inform anyone, my fate was sealed. Herod gained a loyal servant… I gained a boot on my neck, for I lived no longer my life; I lived only the life Herod, King permitted me. Here’s how it all began…

In Widener’s stacks, a bomb shell.

I was, I admit, a diligent, more plodding than brilliant student for all that Fair Harvard selected me. As such I was guaranteed a “good” job, at a “respectable” university… secured sustenance, but not one scintilla of the glory, fame and fanfare I yearned for. To avoid this fate, one known by most graduate students and the average Academician, I needed a dissertation that was at once meal ticket and masterpiece. And for that I needed just the right topic.

After discussion, I was given permission to write on the role of the “Slaughter of the Innocents” in the development of Christian theology, iconography, hagiography, and belief… and as such was immediately introduced to Herod, King, the designated villain of the matter.

Herod, scoundrel, murderer, infanticide, scourge of every decency, infamous traducer of every humane value, King.

The point of a dissertation, a doctoral thesis, is for the designated educational authorities to determine if you, aspirant to the Academy, can advance the cause of truth (“Veritas” as they simply say at Harvard) and, having advanced your point of view, defend it against all comers, and so enrich humanity.

It is the noblest occupation of all, the process through which assertions, however audacious and astonishing, shine out not as opinions but as Truth… thereby taking the place of mere arguments once regarded as important, now instead to be regarded as untenable propositions; no longer regarded as anything but the quaint beliefs of earlier, less enlightened times. All true scholars participate in this crucial work, indeed it is the major reason for the very existence of the Academy, where all work hard for wages ample but not excessive, shaping society, enriching society, advancing society word by careful word, idea by new idea.

I was proud to walk this road, honored, humble before such a great goal, determined to be worthy of the name Scholar. And so I opened my research on Herod (born 73/74 BCE, died 4 BCE aged 70); his reign (37-4 BCE), his wives (10), his children (at least 10), his vast achievements (particularly the construction of the Second Temple of Judaism and the astonishing engineering feat that was Caesarea Maritima and its breathtaking port, the envy of every governor and autocrat necessitous of tax revenues and wishing new ways to tap into the never ending bounty that was the trade of the Orient. Herod was the envy and inspiration of all, even unto the reigning Roman emperor himself.

The dark, sinister, paranoid, sleepless, fearful ruler, murder always at the ready to ease his uneasy spirit.

Then there was the “other” Herod, the one whose violent deeds continue to shock, disquiet, and disgust. This was a man of dark thoughts and darker deeds, a man whose penchant for murder as statecraft still reeks two millennia later. This was the man who killed his second wife Queen Mariamne, likely the only woman he ever loved; who then roamed the corridors of his many palaces calling her name, summoning her back to the life he had summarily ended.

He likewise killed his three sons by this queen as well as unnumbered officials, soldiers, priests, subjects, and nobles. Such a man well knew there would be jubilation at his death and so ordained that the leading men of every family, tribe, and section should die with him, thereby producing distress, lamentation and grief suitable for his stature and majesty.

Such a man could easily be thought to commit the unthinkable, the one act universally regarded as unmitigated evil, the act known to history as “The Slaughter of the Innocents”, enshrined for all the world to know and judge in The Holy Bible (St Matthew, 3,13-16)

“Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years and older, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.”
This was and has always been the gravamen against this notorious sovereign, a grave charge found no where else. Even so, this heinous deed was accepted by all, historical fact, the very gospel. My diligent researches revealed nothing more… until one unforgettable afternoon in the cool recesses of Widener Library.

There at the bottom of a dusty box, tied in heavy string, marked as a previously unopened, uncataloged bequest of Judaica was destiny in the form of a seal, the kind of official marking on the correspondence of some great man indicating a matter of significance. And so it most assuredly was…

The Gospel according to Herod, King of the Jews.

I would have removed the document from the box in any case. The shear beauty and intricacy of the seal, remarkably intact, assured that. Its design I later identified as an element from the facade of Herod’s masterwork, the Great Temple of the Jews. The document that followed was in Greek, a language Herod knew well from his extensive classical education. Here, too, he had the advantage of me…

But I knew enough to know the salutation was the king’s own. It said “Attend! To Herod, King!” He used the Greek word, “Basileus.”

Soon I was giving every moment that I could enter the stacks to this document; early and late I thought of nothing but its translation. But this was not enough. My poor Greek made for slow progress…. and so I determined to “borrow” this document from the library, promising to return it as soon as I had finished, but of course that day never dawned. I am looking at it now…

Obsession, a secret life, Herod rules my life.

Over the course of the next months, which ultimately turned into long years, my entire attention was focused on the document, which in due time proved to be a death-bed justification of the events of his momentous reign. The drift was always the same, I did such and such a thing because I was King, not saint.

Yes, he killed Queen Mariamne “a tiresome woman who would not keep to her place”. Yes, he murdered her brother the High Priest “an ambitious man with his eye on my crown and the head in it.”

Yes, he murdered his three sons by Mariamne “useless drones with only one interest in life… seeing me dead.”

The document, running some 5,000 words in the most elegant and sophisticated Greek imaginable, was a treasure trove of valuable insights. He made it clear each word was the word of a king, as such sacrosanct; that he would not deign to dissemble even if it were to his interest. And so he produced a document only the ultimate insider could have produced. That is why his remarks about “The Slaughter of the Innocents” disturbed me so…

In whose interest?

Herod, King, so renowned and powerful even on his bier that he could afford to tell the whole truth about himself, was forthright on this matter, too. He never saw any “wise men” (characteristically saying that he had been looking for such men quite unsuccessfully for his entire life); never received them; was never told that they sought the infant “King of the Jews”. If they had he could have directed them to dozens of such people in and around his kingdom, claimants to the throne being “common as dust”.

Moreover, should he have wished to kill the children of Bethlehem as the legend states, he could easily have found methods at once less flamboyant and more effective, starting a pest house there for instance, thereby introducing new plagues and contagions. He then went on to another matter. But before he did, he asked his reader to consider in whose interest such a canard might be. Certainly not his.

Over time the likely answer to Herod’s sharp question emerged. The early Christians lacked credibility and needed as many “miracles” as quickly as possible, to grow and prosper. Casting Herod as the certain cause for one of history’s most tragic and cruel events allowed the early fathers to dazzle by claiming miracles, indeed the very involvement of God Himself on their behalf, never mind it was untrue. Thus instead of this Biblical “truth”, I came to adhere to Herod’s no nonsense conclusion; that the entire matter of this slaughter was fraudulent, a pack of convenient lies composed for their own purposes.

What was I to do? I had by now been expelled from Harvard, not for the theft of one of history’s most important documents; that was child’s play. Rather for neglecting my other work and classes. Thus, I had even less standing than before. And so the matter rested for all these years. Thus, I allowed the selfish beneficiaries of the hoax known as “The Slaughter of the Innocents” to continue their falsehood and deception.

A special message from Dr. Lant.

Three months ago, I found in the lobby of the building where I live a hand-delivered package hand-addressed to me. I noticed at once it had no return address. Per my invariable custom, I opened the box at once, only to find all the documents collected by the ex-Harvard graduate student whose research on the matter has been so meticulous and invaluable. It even contained the headline he once expected to appear upon publication of his discovery.

However while I have used this headline above, I am by no means sure I shall ever publish this article, much less the poor man’s work, acute discoveries and conclusions as he clearly expected me to do. Here’s the rub…

Myths are important, you see, none more so than this one. For, yes, I am fully persuaded King Herod, not the single reference found in The Holy Bible, was right, that the research of our scholar was right. However their conclusions are inconvenient, to say nothing more, to churches and Christians everywhere. They need belief and Herod’s truth would only unsettle them so, especially at Christmas. For the story of Christmas relies on Herod, the three wise men, the dream God gave Joseph to flee into Egypt, and “the slaughter of the Innocents’. You see my dilemma….

Howard Martell is the Owner of http://HomeProfitCoach.com/silver . Check us out anytime for marketing tips and a free subscription to our cutting edge newsletter.

 

Summer Ends, Fall Begins, Back To School In The Heartland, Over 60 Years Ago.

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant.
 
Author’s Program Note
 
All of a sudden things are radically different. A week ago, even just a day or so, the implacable summer sun reigned supreme, turning even the most energetic and equitable into sweat soaked complainers, facing even the least demanding task as if it were a firing squad.
 
Then, on a morning like this one, you know, you sense, you feel that that sun, with all his dictating of every particular, has passed into long-gone history. You remember him without regret, though his leaving brings the incorrigible winter into plain sight. Thrifty housewives catch themselves
while sweeping the porch, “My, my Christmas will be here before you know it. How time does fly.” And she shakes her broom with a vigor that no one in the whole town had just the day before.
 
She shakes again to be sure things will be just so, ship shape. She didn’t feel this way a single moment of the summer. But she feels that way now. She catches herself, “Oh Come All Yea Faithful” her favorite Christmas song; she must check the attic. That’s where she’ll find the seasonal necessities. Then she smiles. It really is good to look early… she can’t help herself. The summer is gone, that’s for sure. And another line of “her” hymn slides out. She’ll check the attic today… just to be sure. It will never do to be unprepared… and she never is. That summer which ordered all just hours ago is gone. Dancing reindeer must follow.
 
One sure way you can tell the season has changed is the sound. You look quizzical, “Sound”? Yes, summer is full of Apollo’s happy music, the unbridled laughter of the young who pined for the summer, that May a million months ago, and  long ago tired of it; though they must be coaxed to admit to this dark heresy.
 
Whoops
 
Summer comes with whoops and shouts and slammed aluminium doors. Summer is boisterous and capable of rebuffing any amount of “Jeffrey, come in NOW!” But in summer no one means it, for everyone wants to linger in the last twilights of sun and nowhere to go. Fall is a very different thing. And so the sound is a very different thing, too.
 
Summer is pagan, sprawling, pocket full of secret treasures from tree limbs and swamps where the cattails are always just a few inches too far and ingenious methods are required to avoid the mud that laughs at your inadequacies. Fall is disciplined, organized, clean clothes and a new lunch box without a single scratch and extra supplies for trading.
 
Summer is full of sound and laughter. Fall is muted, quiet, a time of sacred spaces and promises; some of which will haunt you for a lifetime, too precious to disregard, too painful to remember, except alone, head bowed.
 
Summer slows, autumn speeds.
 
The summer sounds say “bide a while” and even if we cannot, we know we should. In autumn we are too focused on arranging the remainder of the year now swiftly ending. It is always going somewhere, and never takes us along. This is the definition of sadness, and it is the leitmotif of the season we cannot stop for even a moment of “Once upon a time.”
 
Autumn returns the people, our friends and neighbors, who slipped away one summer day wearing sun glasses and the battered heirloom that is a grampa’s straw hat with its unexpectly bright riband in a fanciful color called cerulean.
 
The children who shouted their boisterous adieux as they left the security of drive way for the great imperial highways which take them anywhere; these children are full to the brim with stories of acknowledgement and high adventure, including first love with a broken heart and blurred photos you must promise never to reveal, cross your heart…
 
Summer may accept no destination as acceptable. Autumn is nothing but destinations, all important, even the least of them. Summer dawdles and saunters. Autumn has a date, a time, a purpose. It is for those who want to move up, move fast, and never tarry.
 
In summer, we slow down to smell the flowers; in autumn we grab the few remaining flowers as we race by, never stopping to sniff; grabbing because we need to give our hostess a bouquet, thereby enhancing our reputation, even if we rip the blooms from her very own garden, unthinkable in autumn.
 
Back to School
 
I’ll become a septuagenarian my next birthday and yet I caught myself just yesterday telling a guest to go to bed at once, after all tomorrow was a “school day”, a day for improvement, dreams dreamed, defined, refined, improved, achieved and new ones launched to continue the process for life.
 
To so aspire I was taught soundly and well. For this my teachers of yore deserve an encomium they will not get unless from me, for when I was in the schoolyard God was in His heaven, and all was right with the world. And I have always ladled out ample pomp and circumstance to those treasured beings who made it so.
 
I waited for them impatiently through the days of high summer. Then one day in the dwindling days of summer, all these beings, all women, all graduates of Illinois teaching colleges came back, like so many macaws in flashes of color and insistent chatter. Now their serious endeavors could begin. I, for one, needed no encouragement.
 
Summer has no standards. Autumn reveals new standards with daunting regularity. My fellow students decry the new destinations, some so they will not be seen as “teacher’s pet”; some because they know these new standards push them down and under, another obstacle to their ever less certain advance. Summer, for these, was better. Then they had only to regale us with new formulations of mischief and frolic, traits in limited demand for the rest of their three score and ten, unmissed by everyone else.
 
The smells of summer are clean, fresh, the honest scents of the good earth, crucial, good for a thousand years. They are strong, uncompromising, too real for the fastidious whose well being rests
on the smells they seek to avoid at any cost. These waft down corridors enveloped in manly whiffs of Old Spice and Right Guard or, for the ladies, perfume like Chanel, No. 5 my mother’s scent.
 
One day when alone at my grandmother’s, I tried her Coty and understood its power at once. A single drop was enough to envelope you in a crowd of violets, wanton and beautiful, my favorite flower. I never tried this experiment again. I could not trust myself. I have seen the results when it is used without wisdom or restraint. It is where seduction ends and cruelty begins and never leaves.
 
Ammonia.
 
Without any effort whatsoever I can close my eyes and smell the workaday smell of mopped floors in the cafeteria where sticky linoleum did not preclude our dance class; boys awkward, girls already proficient at entrapment, perfecting skills they will use for a lifetime. If they married “well”, their parents could congratulate themselves — and the school.
 
A different smell permeated the floor of the new gymnasiusm, the pride of the parents who bought it and entirely believed that those who engaged in manly sports upon its lacquered surface would never do anything squalid or dishonorable, on the floor or off. We were shocked to the core when we found off differently.
 
I only remember one such game on that supremely polished floor. It was a basket ball encounter, and I was coerced to be there. The star in that pipsqueak league was Bobby Lucas, who at 13 or so already knew the full power of the word “suave”. Indeed the word and all its moves might have been invented for him.
 
As usual he dazzled with irresistible footwork, a junior Globe Trotter for sure. And then one of those thrusts calibrated by God himself brought the crowd to its feet, even me.
 
To celebrate, I threw my head back and hit Bobby’s dad squarely in the face. A trickle of blood ensued, enough to remind me these almost 60 years later of the astonished look I generated when I was young and careless, when everything worked and painful limps and uncertain organs were not my portion. I’d bump old man Lucas again and again if I could bring grace and agililty back, even for an hour. I’d even go to  basketball games and holler.
 
The trees in summer beguile and snooze under the humidity that slows all, then slows all again. Summer is happy to stay home. Fall can hardly wait for all the tickets it receives to gad about. Summer says “Come by whenever you like.” Fall makes it clear the event begins at 8 p.m. and don’t be late.
 
Transformation
 
The last days of summer now demand our full attention, demand but don’t get. All eyes are on the rising sun, where every colored leaf arrests the eye. We cannot remember summer when God’s arbor wafts such allure to our attention. And so the children pile all this windswept moribundity with rakes bigger than they are and jump in, youth and beauty in every jump; their laughter infectious.
 
Dappled with sunshine, bedecked in only the choisest leaves, life’s acolytes walk to the shrine, from Woodward Avenue, where Mom waves and waves again. “How fast they grow up”, the mantra on her lips and every other mother’s.
 
From Woodward they move to Prairie, cross Belmont Road to Puffer School, which my grandfather helped to build, brickwork his specialty and where Principal Hefty had been my mother’s teacher and lived across the street from my grandparents. Many a day I ate the mulberries that fell on her sidewalk. Delicious though they were, I was the only one who partook of their richness. Now I’ve always wondered why.
 
“… And to the Republic for which it stands…”
 
At last we were all assembled, rooms of Baby Boomers, the pride of the nation, our hope for years to come. “I pledge allegiance to the Flag…” and amongst us some did so with a fervor impossible to disguise.
 
These were the children and grandchildren of Europe’s internecine destruction, grateful every day to thank God for the Great Republic, “liberty and justice for all.” They more than anyone knew it wasn’t so everywhere. And soon, to our chagrin and peril, it wasn’t true here either. “O, say can you see…?”
 
Program note
 
The music for today’s program is the theme song for “Ding Dong School”, which ran on NBC from 1952 to 1956. You will remember Miss Frances (Horwich), the host. She was very low key and talked exceedingly slowly, perfect for small ears and hands and irritating to anyone over 6.
 
Her approach made her a star. For at the height of her popularity, she had 3 million rapt viewers, one of whom was me. I can remember so very clearly carrying Miss Frances’s messages to my mother, and leaving the television set when she said she had a private message for mom.
 
This approach was media magic, and led on to Mr. Rogers and his neighborhood, and “Sesame Street”, all gold mines. Now here is a link that will take you back to where it all started.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK5xsXa9LMw
 
About the author

Harvard educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant has been a “schoolboy” his entire life, his life ruled by the rhythms of the classroom. Using the knowledge gained and abiding by the commitment that produces results, Dr. Lant has written over 1,000 published articles, and over 55 books of merit and achievement. If you aim for success for yourself or your family, he is the man to connect with. Start with his autobiography “A Connoisseur’s Journey: Being the artful memoirs of a man of wit, discernment, pluck, and joy.”

Howard Martell is the Owner of http://HomeProfitCoach.com/silver . Check us out anytime for marketing tips and a free subscription to our cutting edge newsletter.

 

‘God rest you merry, gentlemen’. At my home that means preparing everything for the visit of the Prince of Peace. It’s a true labor of love.

By Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Author’s program note. Please note the date: Saturday October 13 for this is
the opening of the Christmas preparation season for 2012. Archeologists and cultural historians will be grateful to me in years hence when they get their government grants and write their learned tomes about the whys and wherefores of Christmas in this our particular era. Yes, I say they will be glad to have each salient fact, observation and deduction gathered by yours truly and herewith shared with the world.

For we are talking about the most joyous event of the Christian year, Christmas, and its preparations, staggering for some, meagre and tardy for others, but all acknowledging that this is and continues to be an event of significance to each of us.

How was October 13 selected as the commencement date for this event? Easy! It was the first day when your observant author was assailed by not one but a series of “the Christmas season has commenced” portents, signs which might easily be dismissed were there but one or even two, but which in their concerted numbers make it clear that the great count-down to Christmas, with its traditions, meanings, songs, poems, foods, displays, sentiments, travels, resolutions, friends, observances has now commenced in earnest and for the next 71 days until the day itself your life will be affected, influenced, shaped and to a greater or lesser extent determined by what our fellow travelers do or don’t do, buy or don’t buy, wear, stand in line, decorate… or don’t wear, stand in line, or decorate.

In other words, because of the birth of a child you may or may not believe was the Son of God your life and all its prosaic concerns and tasks will be hi-jacked; weeks of your life will be less yours, significantly influenced and directed by others you don’t know, will never meet, but who are nonetheless powers over you, determined you should listen to them… or else.

The first portents.

The thing about portents, that is a clue to future occurrences, is that they must for maximum impact take you completely unaware. One moment you’re doing such and such a task; considering such and such a thing; talking about such and such a topic. Then the portent arrives, preferably delivered by one or more appropriate gods of Olympus, all of whom seem to traffic in the dicey business of portents, omens, divinations, and auguries. The portent (often obscure and therefore more amusing to its deity deliverer) having arrived, pushes other quotidian topics to the bottom of your consciousness, pulling out the rug on what you were focused on a moment ago and substituting quite a different agenda.

Yesterday, October 13 mind, these portents arrived thick and fast; itself a sign that a seismic moment had arrived; actung! stop what you’re doing and pay attention. And unless you’re that hapless noodle the bored and therefore capricious gods have determined to make even more hapless and miserable, you do pay attention. Thus does your life cease to be as much yours as it was just a moment before. The gods know this, but they have kept this insightful observation for their own delectation and benefit ere now. They wouldn’t dream of imparting this intelligence to you; “free will” for humans being one of the most potent and popular of their shrewd devices for controlling the not so sapiens homo.

Let me make one thing clear, for sharing this with you I shall be persona non grata at Olympus tonight, for if mankind knew just how little true freedom their gods have allowed us, there would be such a revolution as has never been even imagined before, much less consummated. And the gods would surely have to make concessions, or they would never regain exalted position and control… and what would their excellencies do then to amuse themselves at our expense?

What is your portent saying?

Portents must be clear but capable of complete misunderstanding. In other words, when reviewing an event that could be a portent, two reasonably intelligent people must be capable of drawing two dramatically different conclusions, for a portent is not a directive… not a declaration… if it were the gods would be most unhappy… for if their signs could be so easily read by everyone the muddles beloved of these ancient deities would cease and the gods who already have to wrestle with the matter that is eternity…would fall into even deeper despair; for they already have too little to do and far too much time in which to do it. Remember, their irritation, ennui and pique become the basis for our misery. No wonder
they don’t want us to know.

Christmas portents by the hour.

The gods realize humans are short sighted, careless, capable of massive confusions and misunderstandings. Thus, the game becomes determining the precise formula that will give us clues (but not too many) and insight (but not too much). Even the Olympian gods are not born knowing these things; they must learn. And they do so at our expense, for what are we humans for if not to provide the wherewithal for their education and expertise?
We are just so many lab rats to divinity. Nice work if you can get it.

Store sightings, catalogs, email.

The first shop in my neighborhood to deck the halls was the smoking shop in Harvard Square. Given the fact that teen-age smoking has dropped dramatically; thereby proving that even heedless adolescents can get the message if we adults have the patience and deliberation to beat them about the head with it.

As a result, the revenues at the smoking shop have most probably dropped… whilst their Harvard-charged rent has undoubtedly done the reverse. It is therefore obvious why they want to weigh in with a cheery seasonable greeting and display. “Give the gift of cancer.”

Even the most knowledgeable of advertising executives might think twice before taking on this daunting account. Still, there they are, hoping that the dwindling number of young smokers will purchase their diminished life span from them, especially if they can do so in the name of Jesus, who promised the eternal life the smoking shop is doing so much
to curtail. Cool.

Catalog temptation (and ease) by mail and the ‘net.

Stores like the smoking shop need to lure you into their premises as early as possible before Christmas; their continuing survival depends on it. But catalogs live to remind you how difficult and irksome store shopping is in the age of catalogs and ‘net. Simply mentioning the invading hordes, the unending lines, the harassed staff, the parking difficulties is usually enough to tip the scales to catalog shopping online and off. That persuaded me. As a result the last several years such shopping constitutes all my shopping.

The problem is the proliferation of mail-order Christmas catalogs, especially after you become a proven buyer. Then you may expect to hear from each catalog at least 3-4 times before their last frenzied promotion, hitting about December 15. All prophesy consumer distress if you fail to ACT NOW, visit their website and ORDER!

But here the retail stores re-emerge as they reap the considerable advantages deriving from procrastinators like you. At this point you will most assuredly wish you had heeded their October warning. You will pledge to do better next year. You won’t, of course. And so you’ll keep your name on every list; a portent of things to come, especially purchases you’re
sure to make. They know that, even if you don’t.

Polishing the silver.

In my house there is one certain activity that indicates the coming of Christmas. That is polishing the silver. It is a very time-consuming task, taking a couple of days. Mercedes Joseph, so giving and warm in all her aspects, will take these traits and leave the silver burnished into eye-popping radiance. It’s a significant part of our invitation to the Prince of Peace, an invitation that will see us clambering up step ladders to clean the chandeliers in all the rooms to ensure that all is brilliant and every facet sparkles. So that there is not a single molecule of tracked in dirt or bunched carpet. We work hard to make it perfect; we work early and late to make it perfect… and we do it all because of the advent of this harbinger of our salvation; because we will do it, not because anyone tells us what to do or oversees our efforts, evaluating what we do.

We do it, because this is Christmas and the greatest gift we give is our voluntary adherence and a belief that starts in our hearts and has no ending whatsoever.

That is why October 13, I awoke to the strains of my favorite carol running through my head, “God rest you merry, gentlemen/Let nothing you dismay”, first released in 1760. In an instant I find Bing Crosby’s 1945 version; then in a search engine one other version after another, including a rendition by “Barenaked Ladies” (2004). Only the very young can find the sniggering humor in such sophomoric nomenclature, but today I don’t care.

For you see, every off key note I sing proves that I have become a portent myself of the great event en route “For Jesus Christ our Savior/Was born upon this Day”, and we rejoice in the Good News passed from me and mine, to you and yours, to a burdened world which needs “tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy”, the true meaning of Christmas and why we gentlemen and gentlewomen rest merry and shall remain so long past the day and season itself.

Howard Martell is the Owner of http://HomeProfitCoach.com/silver . Check us out anytime for marketing tips and a free subscription to our cutting edge newsletter.

 

Envoi, December 19, 2006, and beyond.

By Dr. Jeffrey Lant

My left hand had been shaking for some time, over a year or so. Dr. Chris Cordima, one of the most decent of men, treated it weekly, as if it were carpel tunnel syndrome; an easy guess given my daily residence at the computer keyboard and my duties as CEO at Worldprofit.com.

His treatments were intermittently productive; my hand, and it was principally my right hand and wrist which were affected, getting a bit better, never (yet) so very much worse.

Then one day, as frustrated as I was by treatments which didn’t improve, rather offering hope that grew thinner and thinner, never a cure, at best a frustrating palliative , Chris raised the inevitable words; neurologist, specialist, tests. It was no longer his problem; he had done his best, but it was not good enough.

Thus it began… and I was soon on my way to a rendezvous with destiny, or at least the first part of destiny’s decisions for this date: December 19, 2006.

My appointment at Faulkner Hospital was early in a very busy day where I had people to meet, places to go. I was clipped, focused on the day ahead, no time, no worries for yet another doctor’s sure-to-be inconclusive opinion. However man proposes, God disposes.

I arrived on time, was directed to a nondescript cubicle where lives are shifted and redirected, and told to walk down the corridor and walk back. Nothing more, that was all. On the basis of this single “test” my fate was determined…

The physician, for no doubt there was some license on the wall asserting as much, spit out words indicating a new era was at hand; a very different era from the one about to expire. And so the daunting words came, Parkinson’s Disease and all the fixings that would distinguish me within the next five years or less, blindness, general paralysis of hands and arms and legs with tremoring to rock the Richter Scale. In short the very and complete implosion and rebirth of this Jeffrey Ladd Lant, as some lesser being of
acute helplessness and fatuity, a being I had never known, could not imagine, come to spread dismay and change everything, immediately and for worse.

It is time for music, thrilling, powerful music that challenges the greatest and most inimical of “truths” and screams for the will to win oneself back, whatever its flaws and imperfections. “God, give me me and the chance to save myself, not a miracle, but a chance”. And for this we need Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto Number 2 (1897). It is the music of defiance, of prayer, of determination and resolution, of soft reflection, and of a love that will find a way to persevere. Yes, it is all there in its inimitable colors, a nucleus of possibilities and dreams that can inspire and must come true.

In Just 5 Minutes.

The man in his white coat and licensed arrogance and condescension had done his joyful damndest, and I shall go to my grave believing this little man, this messenger of pain enjoyed his grievous news and its impact, not a whisper of humanity in look, delivery, touch. Only fact so casual to him, so acrid, so bitter to me.

“Would you like another opinion?” Would I?

Aime Joseph was waiting for me, but the transformation process had already begun from the man he had delivered to the one he was taking back. After such grim minutes whatever happens one is never the same again, and there must be sadness in this, profound and enduring.

I remember sitting quiet and pensive in the back of the cab, but even now I did not forget my manners. As he sped along the Jamaica Way filled with people who did not know and would not care, I was heading home to my safest place, now threatened, now shrouded. “I’m sorry to be so quiet, but I have some important news to consider.” And so Aime Joseph and his dear wife entered my life, to enhance that life, and keep the demons that will come — that have come already — at bay. Thus was the second portion of this momentous day set in place, for it is nothing less than the truth that God moves in mysterious ways… He had me, so He gave me Janissaries so I could fight and win against the greatest of odds, with valor, grace, and good heart.

“Live in 20 minutes”.

Worldprofit, Inc. is a most unusual company, not least because my two partners George Kosch and Sandi Hunter are Canadian, whilst I am a real live nephew of my Uncle Sam. They contact me only when the matter is important, and I like to think I do the same. Our roots grow deep, but we need not say so or wonder. We are tenacious one with the others, and that is sufficient. And so I did not tell them the elements of this tale… until now. They are learning it as you do. There was no need to say more before..

My head was in my hands, my thoughts full of rage and self pity. But God was not ready for this. We were far from that failing of the light that Dylan Thomas raged against, and which comforted POM in her turbulent struggles, her despair, and despondence that withered all.

Now I, too, would “rage, rage”, giving no quarter, asking for none; beaten back now and again, forced to give way inch by inch, but only by force. I might die but even en route to oblivion I would live, I would give, I would laugh, and I would love. Such was the Credo I made with myself, and I have kept this faith day by day, yes, I have kept it. Thus certainly I continue without either regret or recrimination.

“What’s a Live Business Center anyway?

George told me to rush out and get webcam and head set, and for the last time I ran,

for mad dashery and irresponsible capers are the first things Parkinson’s strips away. But this day I ran to Radio Shack and ran back, installing these crucial tools, too, all in just 20 minutes. “The last of life for which the first was made.” I had just seconds to go before the LBC was officially opened: Worldprofit, Inc.sailing into her next incarnation.

This occurred when George and Sandi were golfing in Mexico, leaving me firm instructions: If there were any questions or perplexities I was to email George who would solve them while waiting to tee off, for, yes, GK was living by that old USMC adage, “The difficult….” Very Gary
Cooperish indeed.

Within just 60 seconds.

It didn’t even take a minute before the LBC was packed with people from around the world; people, often desperately, needing help with the creation, growth, and development of their home-based business. And there was just one Monitor, me!, to assist them in their dozens, then in just minutes, in their hundreds and hundreds. I had no time for inward self reflection and the luxuries of despair. I was alive! I was helping people who needed the help. I was in the game, perhaps to lose, perhaps to win… and this was the best deal of all in those few days before Christmas and all the days thereafter.

Dr. Bonnie Hersch, hope.

The objective had changed, was very different now; not just about making the oodles of money I spent with joyous alacrity, always aware that however much was needed would be there, the produce of fertile mind and constant application. Now the focus was not on living well, opulently, the “Wow Factor” in every view, but on just plain living, now the sine qua non of absolutely everything.

Here’s where Dr. Hersh stepped in, “You’ll like her,” Dr.Zorn said, and I do. For one thing she told me the physician who had made the original diagnosis was notorious for injuring his male patients, happily delivering pain, not just fact. Some time later, his door open, he delivered in my perfect hearing a diagnosis almost exactly the same to a handsome patient in his salad days. I wanted to rush across the thin strip of corridor and tell the fellow to escape before the evil sorcerer blighted his life forever. But, of course, I did nothing, and despised myself, for evil rendering me discrete which is just another word for coward.

Let me tell you a bit about Dr. Hersh, for though I am her senior by twenty years or so, packing my own Doctorate, I never venture to call her “Bonnie”. She constantly runs behind, her dance card full of movers and shakers who come for betterment but get more than that, hope being the primary medicament of all.

In pursuit of this necessary drug of hope, she invited me to participate in a drug trial organized by a major Belgian pharmaceutical company. The goal was nothing short of obliterating the tremoring and its related deleterious effects. For participating I was to receive a life time’s supply of what I wanted most of all: normality, the thing so prized, desired and profoundly prayed for when lost.

Perfect again, for a minute.

My condition was perfect for what they wanted, and so I signed the hundreds of documents which absolved them of every responsibility, no matter what they did to me. Normality was worth the risk, all the risks, and no one wanted a most successful outcome than I did… what’s more for weeks it looked like my heart felt dream, the most zealous of my life, would come true, for after all…

“When you wish upon a star/ Makes no difference who you are/

Anything your heart desires/ Will come to you”…yes, no difference… “If your heart is in your dream/ No request is too extreme.” (from Walt Disney’s “Pinocchio”, written and composed by Ned Washington and Leigh Harline for the 1940 film).

Each week, they upped the dosage of this extremely powerful and expensive drug, and each week I improved, less shaking, more hope; I could see the future, recapturing my lithe and agile self.

Then one never-to-be-forgotten day my hand was perfect as the day I was born. I was myself again… and for the first time in months truly happy and grateful. “Like a bolt out of the blue/ Suddenly, it comes to you/ When you wish upon a star/ Your dreams come true.” As mine surely had.

“Is she menacing?”

As if I didn’t have enough on my plate, I was in the middle of a ridiculously expensive remodeling with a contractor who drank, whored, and lied like a trooper, all the while gulping my resources as if there was no tomorrow. He was a proven parasite and my escalating blood sugar (for let us not forget the diabetes I harbored) proved it. My home, packed with the artifacts which if not priceless were most assuredly pricey, was a study in dust covers.

It was late afternoon, and I knew immediately something was wrong, terribly wrong, menacing, foreboding. There was evil present, and it had settled everywhere in my hitherto joyous precincts, the whole now writhing, a scene of unexampled fright and terror.

The first thing I particularly noticed was a headless woman in the Red Drawing Room, her displaced head in hand. She was sinuous, twisting, a macabre picture of seductive undulation. As I looked at her, she stared at me with what nefarious schemes I could only imagine. I called Dr. Hersh at once. My life was about to take another notable turn.

For the music for this change, add the deep and unsettling theme from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 masterpiece, “The Birds”.

“Is she menacing you?” Dr. Hersh asked, the anxious word “yet” hanging in the air. Here’s where my precise use of language became invaluable, for over the next several weeks as the potent drug slowly waned, I described what was happening, clearly, precisely, with clinical exactitude, right up to and including the unforgiving days when monsters seen only by me, kept a paw on my shoulder during my daily on air program.

I could see the monster, the monster could see me and the audience, but the audience saw only me. Thus, I lived a dark parallel existence in which I was the focus of creatures who wished me no good, especially at night when my bed chamber was filled with creatures creeping closer, minute by minute, malice their agenda.

My home was alive with movement, my brain supplying the lurid, unthinkable, grotesque images; the drug designed to ameliorate and cure, now destroying my equanimity, a fearsome thing controlling me, awesome in its power, intimidating, replacing hope with despair. And I dared tell no one but Dr. Hersh and the drug company which begged me to continue the study into which they had invested so much; the study which she had removed me from at once… in so doing she took care of the immediate problem… but broke my heart… for with my withdrawal went any chance that I would ever be normal again. And this was bitter, so awfully bitter… I can only hope Jiminy Cricket is right:

“Fate is kind/ She brings to those who love/ The sweet fulfillment of/

Their secret longing.” From his lips….

7:24 p.m.

Then through the open shutters, framing the deep, deep green of this perfect day, this perfect evening came divine song, “Casta Diva”, composed in 1830 by Vincenzo Bellini; most famously rendered by Maria Callas (1923-1977), who in comforting dreamscape came to me to sooth everything acrid, desolate, daunting, and corrosive.

Note by pleading note the power of this supplication filled the Red Drawing Room, bathing my sleeping form in the most resilient of sentiments, hope, sweet hope, hope enough for the whole world and one more.”Casta Diva, Virtuous Goddess, accept my ardent plea for this noble prince now sore oppressed, troubled of mind and spirit. Hear me Virtuous Goddess/ covering with silver/ these sacred ancient plants. Hear me that he may yet live and his worthy endeavors prosper. Hear me!”

So I awoke by soft stages, humbled by the sound, the pure and true sound rising for me to the great Cosmos beyond. and I found myself on prayerful knee in earnest beseeching, arrogantly repulsed in happier days, humbly offered now in these sadder hours.

“Ah, come back again as you were then/ then when I gave you my heart/ Ah, come back to me.”

“Your Excellency, wake up. Today is your special day.”

It was Max, of course, essential, anticipating, affectionate, the best of creatures, who so many years ago had called to me from Calliope on Brattle Street. I thought I had rescued him, but it was very much the reverse.

“Sir, I have taken the liberty of picking up these notes off the floor in the Blue Room. They look important.”

“Out of the tree of life…” (Quoted from Sinatra’s version of “The Best Is Yet To Come”; ) composed by Cy Coleman in 1969).

It is 12:52 p.m. I have been up for hours and hours. I demolish a colon and fret. I add a semi-colon… and fret. Today is the day. I have been through this 19 times before and 19 times I’ve grabbed the brass ring from the painted ponies that go up and down. Today is no different. I am giving birth again after the again and again and again that’s gone before and may well come again after today.

This is good, all good. It is, after all, “a real good bet, the best is yet to come.” Yes, it’s all good. I’ve had my way with the wayward words and the refractory subjects. I’ve caressed these pages… I’ve made these pages a slick of tears so that there was no escape until your heart was touched and your vision changed.

I’ve stopped along this so often, so difficult way when I saw, sometimes misplaced for decades, a pair of mischievous eyes that once upon a time, I loved to distraction, beyond reason, beyond even desire itself.

“The best is yet to come, and won’t it be fine.”

When Gibbon finished “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (1787)… he went into the chill evening air falling to his knees to sob. He had given birth to a masterpiece whilst knowing he could never produce such an astonishing opus again that would change the world… and he never did.

David McCullough sat at his well littered desk and wept over the body of the late John Adams, just killed by McCullough’s unerring thrust. He felt as if he had killed his best friend… and he had.

“Wait till you see that sunshine place.”

The shutters are all open, the green, green outside enhancing the brilliance of The Red Drawing Room within. Max’ work. I always know when he and his genius have been at work. There is then not only the spectacular. There is the humane, delicate and refined, things the more valued because so rare.

“We are stepping out, mon prince.”

Max stands before me, my battered Harvard cap in one hand, my unscarred, unused cane in the other. It is a moment of the utmost importance. I have not left the house in weeks, terrified of what another fall could mean. But Max, loving Max understands that being a self-incarcerated prisoner, no matter how comfortable and gilded the jail just won’t do. It is a moment of supremest decision, and the tension is palpable.

“The thousand mile journey starts with a single step.

 

  • A step? What is a single step to me who once bounded up the red-carpeted stairs of Buckingham Palace to smile at a Queen whose life would have been incomplete without it?


Who nimbly roamed the ancient isles of the Aegean in search of adventures and Odysseus, one bold, audacious step before the next?

Who stepped lively and with determined purpose through the corridors of power in a hundred jurisdictions, astonishing even himself, an agile empire the result?

A step can lead to all this and more, but it may also lead to an eternity of sickening descent, into impenetrable darkness and unease that becomes fearful disorientation and unwonted panic, dark and uncontrolled.

“Your excellency!”

This is the moment immediate reality becomes the stuff shaping all the future and all the denizens of my observant establishment know it… and waft hope my way. And so I, the boy, the man, who trusts with the greatest difficulty is forced to trust now.

It is Sinatra, “We’ve only tasted the wine/We’re going to drain that cup dry.”

Thus I take the step, small, uncertain, in anxiety…but achieved, amongst the greatest achievements of my life of achievements. “Lean on me, mon Prince, lean on me.” And I do… with doubt, with grave uncertainly, with just fragile conviction, but I do, I do… and this is everything. “You think you’ve flown before, but you ain’t left the ground.”

But now I am, each step however small fueling the next…and I am surrounded by joy, growing confidence, and the love which eclipses all.

Sinatra can do this. He is, after all, the Prince of Impertinence, iconoclastic, take no prisoners, do it my way guy. He could be — and often was — insolent, impudent, a master of the smirk and the put-down.

The timid world looked to him in longing, because for just a moment they, too, wanted to do what they wanted, critics be damned, elusive truth the grand goal, but so rarely achieved.

Sinatra shouts at me, “Do it! Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! Live life no matter how much or how little you have.” “You think you’ve seen the sun, but you ain’t seen it shine”… and you insist upon seeing it shine, whatever the cost.

Then he turns to the assembled company and flips the unmistakable bird, but whether at anyone in particular, or at the world in general, at what has gone before or what is now on its way, no one can say and even that most perfect courtier Sir Max gives way to a broad (but quickly suppressed) smile of the “thatsa my boy” variety.

With that Max in full regalia, holding the emblem of the Prince and his Principality of Tornavan, black, orange, and white with but a single word “CREDO” under a princely crown, claps his paws three times, instantly gathering the full attention of the distinguished company.

“Your Majesties, Your Imperial and Royal Highnesses, Your Graces, Milords, Ladies, and Gentlemen All, I give you the undoubted Prince of this realm.”

“Three cheers for the Prince”.

And with that the music of Giocomo Meyerbeer rises rhythmic, regal, imperial. It is the Torch Dance No. 3 in C-minor (1856), a dance which only princes may walk.

“The people are waiting, mon Prince. Reign for them and reign happy. Here is the secret”…whereupon Max hands me a golden box…. then its key. There are two words engraved on it, “Credo” and “Veritas.” It is locked.

Then the kiss of loyalty, fidelity, and love, left, right, left.

It is a new beginning… and I embrace it, for even life encumbered and difficult is life, and that is the most important thing of all.

Max remembers.

Thus, the Prince took up his cane and took the first step, strenuous, arduous, uncertain, essential, for from this single step all else must and would ensue. He would walk, and he would walk the Torch Dance, too, in all its intricate figures of dazzling fire. Fall or falter, he was a Prince and this royal walk was his birthright, and as he walked, the brilliant lights went on in the Green Room, in the Blue Room, in the Red Drawing Room, “Fiat Lux”, each one a summons to the world in acute need and growing desolation.

Thus take heed. Whatever your condition or status, this light is for us all, and so he progressed, humbled but determined, love his constant companion, though he might not always know it.

But the good people of Tornavan and everywhere else on Earth determined the Prince would know it. In a moment their collective good wishes began to rise high and ardent, “Ease on down, ease on down the road/ Come on, ease on down the road/ Don’t you carry nothing/ That might be a load”, and Prince Jeffrey knew for a certainty that he had everything he needed in a single phrase whispered in his ear by the Wiz (1978).

“Don’t you give up walkin’/ ‘Cause you gave up shoes, no.” And he stood suddenly at his full height again, bathed in the pure light emanating from the Red Drawing Room, and he raised his cane, a moment ago a tool of subservience and diminution, now one of defiance and life enhancement, and heard himself say what he had never said or even thought before, “I love you. I love you all.” With this, there wasn’t an eye still dry or a heart untouched, such was the undoubted power of unbridled affection and joy, and it all happened here. I was there. Max. Credo.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

June 1, 2015 in the Blue Room.

Howard Martell is the Owner of http://HomeProfitCoach.com/silver . Check us out anytime for marketing tips and a free subscription to our cutting edge newsletter.

“… our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Independence Day, 2013.

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by Dr. Jeffrey Lant.

Author’s program note. Aime’ Joseph never ceases to amaze me, and of the
foundations for lasting friendship that felicitous agility is surely one of the best.

Knowing my habits, the need to have everything about the new tale, the current article
readily at hand, even old napkins, smudged and ripped, valuable artifacts notwithstanding so long as they contain a single indecipherable letter, for my handwriting has never risen above the abashed level of execrable; given these habits, I say, I shouldn’t have been surprised that he had dropped over with a paper in one hand, a question in the other.

It’s the kind of good deed he does and why I permit him to raid the refrigerator with
impunity, leaving me to wail from time to time, “But I was saving that ginger beer…”,
giving the strongest possible impression that my bite is indeed worse than my bark,
but even I don’t believe it.

He knows this and at the earliest possible moment restarts his researches
into and acquisitions from the food and wine which I always purchase in far too
ample quantities for the amount I eat and the nullity I drink.

This, of course, provides the rationale he needs for raids which would impress a
Viking, though in truth the fact he is my constant helper and friend provides all the
reason he’ll ever need… although I do wish he’d ask before gallivanting home with the
last morsel or drop of any much craved delicacy.

“Do you need this?”

And, of course, I did… for this tale of Independence Day 2013 would never
have taken place — for me — without it and the grande dame who mailed it
and so literally made my day. Here is what it looked like. Here is what it said.

“Generations, Friends, Families. Please join us!”

There then followed explicit directions of what these generations, friends, and
families must do in the matter of furnishing food (“your favorite and a little extra
to share”), and drink (“Also your favorite and a little extra to share”)… with further
detailed instructions on such critical matters as “places to swim, eat, sit, chat,
rest, sing, ice, cups, plates, knives, forks, spoons”, and the most important directive
and admonition of all… to bring your crucial holiday spirit and so increase its already
ample measure stemming principally from our hostess, Diane Neal Emmons.

Distinctive right from the start.

Did you pronounce her first name DIE ANN. Of course you did. I did when first
introduced. The world does, but you, me and the wide generality of the planet,
all of us, are mistaken. For she pronounces it DEE ON and woe to thems who gets
it wrong, for as every Eskimo knows, a name is totemic, the thing that holds your
spirit and first tells the world who you are, where you have come from, and where
you are going.

In this way, with this subtle variation, Diane (did you pronounce it correctly this time?)
announced that she was not and would never be of the humdrum, prosaic or everyday
variety of mere Dianes, much less (horror of horrors) of the Dee Dees who derive
therefrom; that she was instead something quite different, distinguished, unique; though
as a lady to the manner born she couldn’t possibly tell you this. You’d have to find out for
yourself, if only you had the good sense and good manners to do so. And so are the real
gems separated and higher valued than the baubles who, at first, seem the same.

The happiest girl in the neighborhood, maybe the happiest girl in the world.

I don’t have any proof for what I am about to say, no proof at all. However, people
like me, called commentators are given wide latitude and what is called “the benefit
of the doubt” in advancing their cases; in other words so long as what we write is
not specious in the extreme or wildly implausible we may dream, wonder, ruminate
and speculate to our heart’s content. I am about to use that privilege here….

There is something larger than life about Diane, and this is especially true when
she first glimpses you. There is in that moment the ghost of Ezio Pinza singing
“Some enchanted evening.”

You sense rather than see that her eyes light up and she is no longer that woman of
a certain age, but a girl in flying dance slippers with bright pink ribbons in the much
considered hair of a twelve year old; the twelve year old who greets you like a favored
child greets her favorite relation with nothing more troubling on her youthful horizon
than who to ask to the Sadie Hawkins dance in just two weeks.

When you are the boy who receives this high energy treatment, you think, no you know
that you are the boy she’ll invite… and that you’ll have a spiffing good time, because Diane
knows to her fingertips how to make sure you — and everyone else — leaves happy and
recalls each event with a smile. It is her special secret, and you are glad she is lavishing
some on…you.

Fashionably late and better so.

People who run 24-hour-a-day Internet enterprises learn to be approximate in the
matter of time; technology, after all, is a capricious mistress, smooth running one
minute, causing mayhem the next, even on holidays when one is expected out of
town at a particular time. “Technology is great when it works.” Thus my party,
Mr. and Mrs. Joseph and I left late… and arrived as my grandmother used to say
“fashionably late.”  This proved to be a good thing, since many guests having
partaken of luncheon under a tent most often used at weddings and anniversaries
went home to laze the blistering afternoon away dozing in the shade. And thus both
Josephs and I were able to spend more time with the hostess, a happy result of
tardiness.

But first I had literally to sing for my supper.

“Songs to Sing When Two or Three or More are Gathered Together.”

Open upon my desk now is a thin volume of the name above, a volume compiled
by Diane and providing numerous clues to the lady and her metier. It is her personal
song book, and it is both curious and touching. Diane, you see, is of the generation
where people entertained each other by each being responsible (particularly young ladies
of good family like Diane) for an enjoyable rendezvous, with and for only the right people,
which for this lady and her friends, meant prep schools like Winsor and Groton,
colleges like Radcliffe and Harvard, social clubs like Chilton and Somerset, and
above all the Mayflower Club always remembering that if you must inquire about it,
you were most decidedly NOKD, “not our kind, dear.”

The Kennedys, not yet with a postal code in Camelot were in this category, and in the
Irish way their revenge was thorough and hurtful, not least because they soon shunted
the old families of the Commonwealth (called Brahmins) aside and to the rest of the world
portrayed themselves as Bay State aristocrats, which caused society matrons on
Commonwealtlh Avenue to fume… and plot revengeful motifs they no longer had the
money, power or unquestionable social position to dictate.

Diane Emmons was caught up in this sea change in Boston. She was born to
adorn a particular universe and that universe was changed beyond recognition.
It was a world into which you were born, where acceptance was automatic and
life long for those with the right surname and genetic code. Never mind It was often dull,
dowdy, smug and insular, none of which mattered to the people who wanted entree they
would probably never get until club revenues fell and provided a compelling reason
for new members mere equity could  never provide.

“In” could only be valuable in relation to who was “Out”, a fact which social novelist
Frances Parkinson Keyes (1885-1970) captured to a nuance, in books like “Joy Street”.
This street on Beacon Hill was cut in half, the top socially acceptable; the bottom mixed
and dubious. I wrote my first book in an apartment well down from the acme, yet adored
for all that.

She must have regretted at least some of the changes, but her Fairy Godmother
made sure she had the one essential feature she needed to live through such
massive change and come through it smiling, albeit saddened by the loss of what was
after all her birthright and cherished reality… now just so much ancient history, gone with
the wind. Her great attribute? She liked people and people liked her. In the truest tradition of real ladyship, Diane took pains to help when she didn’t have to; assisted beyond the call of duty so many charitable endeavors; and always, always had time for
that far-flung and heterogeneous group, her Friends, of which I proudly call myself
one.

With a song in my heart… and nowhere else.

Ever since I was a child at church, I have been rebellious and adamant on the matter
of group singing: quite simply, I hate it, not merely because I am unable to carry a tune
in a bucket, but because when one sings in any venue even remotely public one is
expected to boom out the song in question, your role (happy, amorous, joyous, sad,
whatever) determined by just what you’re singing and always overdone.

Instead of entering into the spirit of the enterprise, I did everything imaginable to ensure
that any such involvement would only be by force and after a masterful display of temper
and high volume obstinacy.

Diane, of course, loves to sing, never mind that her voice is reminiscent of a species of
frog found only in the swimming pools of the well heeled. She is awful… However, she
believes in the social utility of what she is doing… and, as hostess, she is unrelenting in
“persuading” her guests into her unyielding view that group singing on very hot holidays
is a privilege, not cruel and unusual punishment to be avoided at all cost, which is my
abiding take on the matter.

But I am a guest, I aim to please, even if I transgress against my core beliefs… and
so I sing… about 15 words or so of “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.”
It is one of the most insipid tunes ever composed, therefore popular with people for whom
their inexhaustible jauntiness and perkiness is a gift from on high, to be celebrated
whenever possible around those of a sarcastic and insufficiently civic spirited demeanor.

That would be me, and it is a measure of how highly I esteem my hostess and her chipper
orientation that I sang and clapped at all, never mind with tepid demeanor. I knew my rights and obligations as guest, and calibrated my finger movements and strain on my vocal chords accordingly. And so, obdurate, I listen to — but do not sing, warble or chant  — the eccentric litany in the song book that jumps from “Blue Moon” to “Chattanooga Choo Choo” to “Good Night, Irene.”

Diane was zealous but she had long odds against her, the day sultry, the repast generous,
delicious, ancient guests drowsy, eyes determined to close, collective nap time at hand.
Then there it was… the perfect song for the day, the hostess, every visitor and even
for me, hardened city dweller and professional scoffer determined to stay an anthropologist, watchful but disengaged.

“What would you think if I sang out of tune/Would you stand up and walk out on me?/
Lend me your ears and I’ll sing you a song/And I’ll try not to sing out of key”…

And then the words that define us all:

“Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends.”

Better because of DEE ON.

As I looked around the backyard of her rambling colonial-style home just blocks
from the well-known Singing Beach in Manchester-by-the-Sea (officially incorporated
in 1645) I saw it populated by her friends, old, young, some vibrant and running over
with high animal spirits, some for whom moving at all, especially on such a stifling
day, was a labor… I thought of how lucky the human is who can conjure so many
and make them sing this song first written in mid-March 1967 by John Lennon
and Paul McCartney.

Just click on the link below and hear it all over again and ask yourself if you’ve
been a good friend today, the kind of friend you’d like to have, the kind of friend well
deserving of your esteem and high regard, the kind of friend I am so lucky to have in
Diane Neal Emmons… the one person I am prepared to sing for, out of key of course,
but completely sincere… and grateful.

Howard Martell is the Owner of http://HomeProfitCoach.com/silver . Check us out anytime for marketing tips and a free subscription to our cutting edge newsletter.

Discussion: Worldprofit’s Silver Membership – an all inclusive Business package and marketing system

Discussion: Worldprofit‘s Silver Membership – an all inclusive Business package and marketing system
What it is and how you benefit from all that us available to you as a Worldprofit member.

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What it is and how it works for YOU our Members to help you make sales. It’s unique, universal and ONLY available at Worldprofit.
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2. Join Worldprofit‘s Facebook Group
http://www.facebook.com/groups/worldprofit

3. Bootcamp Training. If you haven’t started the bootcamp training, what are you waiting for?!
Advance to Lesson 3 to learn how to get your traffic BONUSES!

Here’s the link to watch the Jan 25, 2019  RECORDING 

https://www.worldprofittube.com/video.cfm?videoID=879

The next LIVE interactive training bootcamp with George Kosch is  Friday Feb 1,  2019.  Hope to see YOU there.

How to get help.

Worldprofit‘s Support Team is here to help you 7 days a week.
Submit a Support Ticket, link is on the TOP MENU click on SUPPORT.