Chapter Ten. Kindness: Starting the Revolution

“Kind words can be short and easy to speak but their echoes are truly endless.”

—MOTHER TERESA

HERE’S A BIT of personal history on the subject of kindness. I was raised the son of a kind man. I can’t even begin to describe the number of times that someone who knew my father has said, “Your dad was the nicest man I have ever known.”

The law of attraction was in full force when it brought my dad to my mother, who likewise was a kind woman. She loved my father, but it never showed more than during World War II, before they were married, when Dad was injured in a freak war accident that left him close to death, hospitalized for a year and then returning with 90 percent of his vision gone. From an attorney to a furniture salesman in the flash of a gunshot, my dad stood on his feet and sold furniture for 35 years and never complained . . . never spoke of what could have been.

I’m going to do that for him now.