Saturday, March 18, 2006

Lessons from the Sage.


St. Patricks Day for me has always been somewhat special where I reflect on all the lessons my old man taught me growing up. I am not sure what our heritiage is exactly but I am positive we have some Irish in us, dear old dad drinks like a fish but I have never seen him hit mom or talk about God so i am guessing that makes us close to about 40 or so percent. At any rate on this glorious St. Patties day I am reminded of the time dad had me and my twin bro go and pick up some sticks. Well after gathering these sticks he told us to try and break the stick by hitting eachother with them. So of course we complied and broke our little wooden sticks. Next he told us to to tie a bundle of sticks together and then try to break them on each other. So we comenced to do so only this was much more difficult and we could not break the bundle. He made us stop before we killed each other and told us that each of those sticks represented one of us and the bundle represented family, alone we could easily break but if we held together nothing could break us.

2 comments:

Phred said...

Aye, I agree.

One of my old football coachs told us the story of a boy whose father told him...''Take this hammer and these nails. Every time you do something bad, drive a nail into the barn door''.
The boy came back after a time and told his father, ''the door is full of nails, there is no more room'' .
His father told him, ''You go back and every time you do something good , pull a nail out''.
After a time , the boy came back and said, father,'' all the nails are gone''.
''Let`s go look ''said the old man.
When they got to the barn, the old man asked... ''Son ,what do you see''? ''A bunch of holes ''answered the boy.
''That`s right'' said the old man.''You did alot of good to remove all those nails...but the hole are still there''.

GrapeApe said...

Either I completely zoned out or I forgot you guys were twins! LOL I gotta remember that story for my kids! Good one Dan!