Life's Ride or Fall...You Make the Call: Thoughts, Stories, Lessons Learned and Actionable Ideas to Help Create the Ride of Your Life!

By Gary Greenfield

A focused, multi-dimensional approach to help people searching for motivation and direction so they can connect where they have been and where they are to where they want to go in life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 7, 2008
• ISBN: 9781434361868

Book preview

Life’s Ride or Fall...

You Make the Call

Thoughts, Stories, Lessons Learned and Actionable Ideas to Help Create the Ride of Your Life!

by

Gary Greenfield

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AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive, Suite 200

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2008 Gary Greenfield. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 5/6/2008

ISBN: 978-1-4343-6186-8 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4343-6184-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4343-6185-1 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008903987

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

To Carolyn

Introduction

What will be the legacy of your life? If you don’t have any idea as to the answer to that question or reason why it may be important to you and those you care about, then you must read this book. My sole purpose in writing it is to help you answer the above question in a way that builds excitement and purpose into your life beyond what you might be thinking is possible.

The structure of the book is designed to capture your imagination and provoke you to think about your life in a dynamically different way. The uncomplicated chapter structure allows you to quickly and purposefully pinpoint your area of interest and motivation. The idea in each chapter is to first provoke your thinking about your life with a pithy thought. Next, support that thought with a part of my story that will help you connect with your own experiences to begin to put things in personal focus. Following the story is the lesson that you can learn that is relevant to your moving forward in your life. Finally, at the end of each chapter, I have outlined a series of actions you can take to apply the lesson to building your life’s legacy.

While you will gain the greatest rewards from reading the entire book and completing the suggested actions, the book is designed to help you focus quickly on your area(s) of interest. In short, each chapter is written to stand alone in its purpose of helping you build your legacy. If your intent is to pick and choose, then I suggest you begin by scanning the Table of Contents or the thoughts expressed at the beginning of each chapter and dive into the book at the point that peaks your greatest interest. It’s your compelling interest that will drive you to doing something with the insight into your life that you will gain.

I wish you well as you choose to make your life a wonderful ride rather than just a disappointing fall into eternity.

Gary Greenfield

www.garygreenfield.com

Chapter 1

The Ride Begins

The Thought

Successfully riding the twisting, turning, up-and-down trail of life is like riding a horse. Rough rides require you to slide deep in the saddle and take control so you don’t get bucked off. The fact is you can’t, at any time, allow the nature of the ride to lead to a premature trail’s end. Slide deep in the saddle . . . take control . . . keep riding. All will be well.

The Story

From my earliest thoughts about my life, I had a feeling I needed to learn to ride deep in the saddle very quickly and take control. My ride began on March 23, 1944, in Billings, Montana, at 4:18 in the afternoon. I was born to Cecil and Virginia Greenfield. Proud parents, I’m sure, but troubled as husband and wife.

Neither of my parents came from a background that was particularly nurturing. Their parents were hardscrabble people who fought every day of their relatively short lives just to survive. Wealth wasn’t an option. Poverty and the economic times demanded a fight for work and a roof over each large family. My mother had two brothers and three sisters. Dad’s siblings numbered three brothers and three sisters that lived. There were seven other siblings that died within a few days of birth.

The stresses of such an existence took their toll on my grandparents; so much so that three of the four were dead before I was born and my paternal grandmother died very shortly thereafter. The circumstances of each of their deaths would testify to the difficulties in their lives.

William Sylvester Greenfield, my paternal grandfather, killed himself with a gun. It was May 4, 1940, when the burdens of life became too much. He was 59 years old. The event left my father, at 16 years of age, to take care of his mother, Alta Frances, and little sister, Lucille. Suddenly, Cecil’s days were spent scratching out an existence as the assumed head of the household. Yes, life changed dramatically for my dad on that fateful day in 1940.

My paternal grandmother survived until 1944. The toll of her hard life as a poverty-stricken farmer’s wife was heavy. Those years of grinding out a miserable existence, as described to me by my dad, just wore her down. She died of a stroke when she, too, was 59.

On the maternal side, my grandmother, Belle Brendel, died when my mother was 15 years old. It was an unnecessary loss caused by the accidental choking on a chicken bone. It left my mother devastated and basically alone. If her self-image had not begun to spiral down before her mother’s death, it certainly did afterward.

My mother’s father, James Brendel, was alcoholic, abusive, jobless, and dirt poor. Family was not his priority . . . alcohol was. As a result, my mother was driven into an estrangement from him that was never reconciled.

His dependence on alcohol killed my grandfather when I was about 11 years old. I only met him once when he came to visit my mother shortly before his death. It was a tense meeting as I recall. My high-strung, nervous mother could barely be civil to her father. He gave me a small, furry toy. When he left, my mother threw it away because she said it would be infested with fleas.

No wonder my parents were troubled as a couple. Their childhood had not served as a great example of how families should live and grow together. It was more about each member of the family doing their share of work and if earning a penny meant missing school, then so be it. As a result, neither of my parents was able to graduate from high school.

At the time of their very youthful marriage—Mother was 18 and Dad was 19—they weren’t ignorant, but they were simply lacking in strong family values and teaching supported by a formal education. It seems to me my parents’ marriage was an escape from family miseries to family miseries. They really weren’t able to sink deep in the saddle and keep riding together. Rather, they were like two wild horses kicking and biting to be free of one another.

As I reflect on the above family background, I recall a few brief flashes of my early childhood. For example, I have a vague memory of the apartment we lived in and I don’t recall liking it. It seemed to me to be old and rundown. I remember it was on the second floor of a tenement-like building and there was a small corner grocery store in part of the first floor.

I recall one piece of furniture, and that was the coffee table. It was made of some kind of wood and had a piece of glass inset on the top. It was dark in color, kind of like mahogany but it wasn’t of that quality. It seemed to me to be rather flimsy looking. There were wooden stairs outside the back door of the apartment, which was on the alley end of the building. These stairs were primarily for fire escape purposes. They were weathered and looked as flimsy as the coffee table. Standing at the top gave me vertigo. I didn’t know at the time what the word was to describe my feelings of instability but I’ve since learned. Given my impression of the whole building being flimsy, I’m surprised we never used those stairs to escape from a fire!

The store in the building was a classic American corner grocery store. It had creaky old wooden floors that would almost howl as I walked across them. There was a traditional candy counter that I remember leaning against and staring at the candy through the glass. I longed for a piece of licorice, but poverty precluded such an extravagance. It’s not a sad recollection. It’s more like Norman Rockwell painted a picture of an all-American little kid salivating over the prospect of eating some candy.

The owner of the building and the store was old and very heavy. It seems to me he always had a big, fat cigar sticking out of his mouth. He usually wore a sleeveless undershirt that always seemed to look grimy. For some reason, I also remember he used to not only eat the meat of a banana but also the banana peels. He was a gruff, unpleasant person—not the grandfatherly type that might give a little kid a free piece of candy.

Frankly, I don’t remember any happy times in that apartment. In fact, the only two occasions I seem to clearly remember were unhappy. One occasion was having my mouth washed out with soap. I don’t remember what I did to deserve that but I do remember crawling under the coffee table to avoid the inevitable. Maybe that’s the reason why the coffee table is the only furniture I remember from that apartment.

The other occasion was when my mother and father separated. I remember my father returning from his work at the end of the day and coming up the stairs in the front of the apartment building. His suitcase was sitting at the top of those stairs just outside our door. It was already packed. My mother was screaming obscenities at him. Her background helped her develop the mouth of a truck driver. She could use all the coarsest words in the most vitriolic and appropriate way. The moment at the top of the stairs was a perfect example of this verbal skill that she exercised frequently throughout her entire life.

I remember the look of shock on my dad’s face. It looked like he had been kicked in the stomach by an out-of-control horse. He was pleading with my mother to reconsider and allow reason to prevail. Relatively quickly the shock and pleading turned to a demeanor of resignation. He grabbed the suitcase, turned quickly down the stairs, and was gone.

I don’t remember him riding off into a glorious Montana sunset waving back at a loving family aching for his speedy return. It was poof and he was gone. I felt like my gut was wrenched from me and my soul had been thrown down those same stairs my dad had just gone down. Feelings of confusion, anger, desperation, fear, and heartbreak tore through my 4-year-old body. Even at that young age, I knew this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. I also knew that whatever my life had offered before, in terms of a traditional American family, would never be offered again.

In late 1948, my mother and father were divorced. My mother and I never had long talks about those early days. The emotion and misery for her precluded a discussion or explanation. I really do think she would have liked to explain but she was never very good at getting in touch with her feelings and sharing them. I think it must have been the miseries of her childhood that steeled her from ever really opening up about what happened. Generally, hers was a defensive approach to life.

After the divorce, there are only a few flashes of seeing my natural father. Once he took me for a few days’ visit to a ranch where my aunt and uncle worked. I remember only one thing from that visit. It was the fun I had playing with my cousin, Marjie. We would hit pipes with sticks or something and then try to reproduce the sound with our mouths. The best we could do was doy-yoy-yoy-yoying. Marjie had long curls that I thought were beautiful. She is the only cousin with whom I have a continuing relationship.

I seem to recall only a couple of other times when I saw my father during those early years of my mother’s second marriage. Once, I remember driving up Washington Avenue (a street near our house in town) with my mother and stepfather and as we approached the driveway to the house, I saw my father waiting there with one foot propped up on the banister by the back door. I was excited to see him, but my mother was distraught and rude. I hated my mother to be that way toward my father.

On that visit, he took me to a drive-in movie. I remember I had a mixture of excitement and trepidation. I was a shy