I was just invited to attend my high school class reunion. I don’t know why they would ask me, they are all normal, successful people. I say “all” there were only 13 to start with. I guess they just wanted to get a good look at the class failure. The teacher that I respect the most in my life made the comment that he always considered me his greatest failure because he couldn’t talk me into going to college. That got me to thinking about the past which is something I don’t spend much time doing.
I was raised on a farm. We had 30 milk cows. We sold cream so we had lots of skimmed milk that we used to raise calves. We had about 10 sows and up to about 200 sheep. We had 20 work horses, chickens, ducks, turkeys – it was a real farm, not a factory. We started milking at 5:00AM, then we separated the cream, fed the calves, pigs, horses and let the sheep out. The sheep had to be penned at night to protect them from coyotes. This took about 3-hours in the morning and 3-hours at night. I really enjoyed the work and the animals. In fact, from the time I was 5-years old nobody beat me to the milking barn. That was really important to me, no one else was going to get to work first.
From that, my life evolved into two major things. Work hard and be happy.
During this time I met Eunice (or she met me). This worked great, I liked to work hard and she liked for me to work hard. Of course, that meant that she also got to work hard. I was always happy or worked hard at being happy and Eunice was happy. Probably any woman would have been happy just to be with me, but that’s another story.
When I worked hard and was happy, the animals did better. It made me realize that animals like someone that likes to work hard. Not because they work hard, but because they like it. Most people are trying to find some way to not work. That means that they must not like to work. Animals don’t respond well to that. Because I like to work it is easy to be happy. Animals like it when you are happy. When someone doesn’t like to work or would rather be doing something else, they will not be happy. Animals don’t like this. Very simple – Happy People, Happy Animals – most problems are gone!
When the problems are gone, everything is good, even for the class failure. And he likes it that way!
Work hard, be happy. Smile and Mean it!
