Teal Book of Wisdom

By Rick Roth

What wisdom would you want to pass on to those you love?

On the day of his grandfather's funeral, Rick was handed a very special gift: an old weathered teal journal. Inside were pages upon pages of musings, lessons, experiences, quotes, and wisdom from the very man he had just laid to rest. Unbeknownst to him, his grandfather h

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Nov 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885048286

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Teal Book

of Wisdom

Teal Book of Wisdom

TIMELESS LESSONS FOR THOSE YOU CARE ABOUT

Rick Roth

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2022 Rick Roth

All rights reserved.

Teal Book of Wisdom

Timeless Lessons for Those You Care About

ISBN

979-8-88504-594-0 Paperback

979-8-88504-940-5 Kindle Ebook

979-8-88504-828-6 Ebook

To Robbie and Anne, this book was written for you.

To Jennifer, thank you for your love and support with this book.

Contents

Introduction:

The Teal Book of Timeless Wisdom for You

Chapter One:

The Black Walnut Tree

Chapter Two:

Finding Peace

Chuck and Lorraine’s Story

Chapter Three:

Learn to Hear Yourself—Not Others

Chapter Four:

Learning to Compound

Denny Stanek Story

Chapter Five:

I Want to Be an Archeologist

Dave Schmid Story

Chapter Six:

The Harder You Work, the Luckier You Get

Edmund Moy Story

Chapter Seven:

Listen for the Path

Chris Long Story

Chapter Eight:

Keep Climbing

Todd Grossman Story

Chapter Nine:

Finding Your Partner

Our Marriage Story

Chapter Ten:

From Idea to Completing the Goal—Get Moving

Chapter Eleven:

9/11—Our Story

Chapter Twelve:

Unconditional Love

Thirty Major League Baseball Parks

Chapter Thirteen:

Letters to Santa

Chapter Fourteen:

Health, Doctors, and Faith

Chapter Fifteen:

Thinking about Your Future Education and Not Quitting

Chapter Sixteen:

Drinking and Drugs Destroy Dreams, While Faith Helps Build Them

Jeff Grant Story

Chapter Seventeen:

Making Lists and a Road Map to Happiness

Ted Leonis Story

Chapter Eighteen:

Through Love, All Things Are Possible

Chip Skowron Story

Chapter Nineteen:

Finding Your Calling

Kevin Longino Story

Chapter Twenty:

When to Retire?

Chapter Twenty-One:

Positive Leadership

Larry McHugh Story

Chapter Twenty-Two:

The Power of Positivity

My Grandmother Ann’s Story

Chapter Twenty-Three:

Ever Love

My Final Reflections for You on the Teal Book of Wisdom

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Introduction:

The Teal Book of Timeless Wisdom for You

Life’s tragedy is we get old too soon and wise too late.

—Ben Franklin

What would you want to know from your future eighty-year-old self?

And what wisdom would you want to know so you have a better life with fewer regrets?

I started to discover my answers to these questions on a raw, overcast November day in 1992—less than a year after I graduated college.

I stood in a suit and tie in a cemetery. The tie felt tight, and I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands. My family and friends were gathered and waiting for me to speak. I had written down some thoughts to say after the minister briefly spoke, but once it was my turn, my words sprung from deep within my soul about my grandfather who had recently passed away. As I stood next to the tombstone with my grandfather and grandmother’s names on it, I noticed our family and friends with very wet eyes as I shared that my grandfather’s spirit lives on while I am alive now.

I was close with my grandfather. I saw him most weeks of my life until he died. He was an only child, his son (my dad) is an only child, and I am an only child too. Maybe that unique characteristic made us that much closer. I had a special bond and closeness with my grandfather from both being his only grandchild and spending time together. We had unconditional love.

After the graveside service, my dad handed me a worn, teal-colored, older hardcover journal with somewhat yellowing pages.

Grampy wanted you to have this.

I wasn’t sure what to do. I was very curious and opened the teal book. The journal was filled with handwritten passages, starting just after I was born. He wrote entries throughout the last part of his life, from his late fifties to his final year of life at eighty years of age.

Once I opened the book, I was eager to see what he had written to me over the first twenty years of my life and the last twenty years of his. I could smell the unique tobacco from the pipe he occasionally smoked on the pages of the worn, teal-colored journal.

I imagined the pages would contain his reflections on seminars he attended on the latest medicine and science and maybe even thoughts on meeting scientists like Albert Einstein and Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin. And I was sure I would find his thoughts and feelings about the death of his long-time wife, my grandmother.

But what would his message be to me? What wisdom would he want me to have? What lessons did he want me to learn?

My grandfather was the son of a New York City firefighter, who was badly injured on a call at which his firefighter friend was killed. My grandfather told me life was difficult for him and his family during the Great Depression, and his father’s injury made it even harder.

My grandfather was a bright person who was a good conversationalist, and his friends later in life called him Doc. He was a thinker who got to meet some famous scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York, where he worked for many years. He once told me a story of briefly listening to Einstein. Einstein said, Don’t measure a cow’s tail with a micrometer. A micrometer measures something very small; my grandfather told me this meant Einstein was saying to look at the much bigger picture.

In the days before my grandfather’s graveside memorial service, he lay in a bed, on the hospice floor, in the same Connecticut hospital where I was born twenty-two years before. I would visit him there after getting off work at my first real job out of college.

My grandfather’s body began to naturally shut down.

As his passing drew near, I would sometimes read a poem that he liked out loud to him:

I dreamed that I had died. The Lord and I walked side by side, leaving two sets of footprints in the sand. Ahead in the distance, I could see the pearly gate of heaven. I took one last glance behind me, wanting to remember all the footsteps I had taken through my life. Behind me, over the smooth and easy paths of my life’s journey, there were two sets of footprints in the sand. But where the road was steep and difficult to travel, there appeared only one set of footprints. I asked the Lord this question, Lord, I believed that you would walk by my side through my life, during easy times and difficult times. But during the hard journeys, I see only one set of footprints. Why? The Lord answered, My child, I was with you all through your travels, but along the most difficult paths, I carried you.

As I read the poem, my grandfather’s breathing slowed. Sometimes he smiled. It was like he was more at peace as he heard my voice. Possibly the poem eased his own painful end-of-life circumstances—or, I believe, he knew he was sharing this poem with me.

In his final days, the hospice nurse would administer a little more morphine each day to make him more comfortable. If you have not been with someone in their last days, their consciousness and breathing can change in the final stage of life. When I got to the hospital that last day, my grandfather was still breathing. As I held his hand and talked to him, he took his final breaths with my dad and me there. My father felt he waited to leave us until I was there, to be with both of us one last time.

So, I opened the teal journal after the memorial service. The first two pages had handwritten quotes that my grandfather wanted to share with me.

•No matter how old you are, don’t ever stop learning. For this is a process I gather that goes on for eternity.

•May there never develop in me the notion that my education is complete but give me the strength, leisure, and zeal continually to enlarge my knowledge.

•All suffering is due to not knowing a way to unfold the divine glory present in oneself.

•Let me, oh Lord, by my knowledge, discover today what I did not know yesterday.

I shut the cover of the teal journal and closed my eyes. I recognized my own mortality. And maybe, if I could just understand the wisdom from my grandfather and other experienced people, I might live a better and more meaningful life.

~~~~~

In the thirty years since my grandfather’s death, I married my wonderful wife. We’ve been married for over twenty years and have two healthy children who we have done our best to raise. We have loving relationships with family and friends. I am like everyone in that I have times in life with difficult situations that are out of my control. By trying to gain and use the wisdom I have found, it may help you in different circumstances. I feel blessed and fortunate for the imperfect life I have had so far.

I gained wisdom from that original teal journal, and I have learned more wisdom along my life’s journey. I learned even more as I did research for this book and spent time interviewing some remarkably interesting people, some people well known and some not as well known. This book is dedicated to sharing these stories and experiences with you, my children, posterity, and others who may be searching for wisdom.

I hope you enjoy these true stories, and they give you some wisdom you may be searching for, just like I was. I am beyond grateful to share these stories with you.

Chapter One:

The Black Walnut Tree

Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom.

—Thomas Jefferson

The sky was blue and the grass was green on this particular hot, sunny day in Killingworth, Connecticut. I was sweaty from mowing the lawn and trimming around walls and trees of a forty-plus-acre estate. I had no idea what I would learn in the coming weeks as I mowed the green grass below the blue sky.

Other than a couple of brown, furry woodchucks in the nearby fields who ran when they heard the mower, I had the estate to myself as I walked behind a large lawn mower. I think it was only the second time I had mowed at this property. I remember looking around as I smelled the freshly cut grass and breathed deeply.

I was there because I had my own part-time lawn service in high school. The service was basically me, a lawn mower, and a beat-up pickup truck. I got this job through a family friend, Greg, the spring I was sixteen. Greg was a professional landscaper with a degree in landscape architecture. He had done landscape design work and installed various plants and walls on this particular estate for a wealthy, childless older couple. They only lived there part time; the rest of the time, they lived at their other residences in New York City or at a modern-style house on their own island off the Connecticut shoreline in the Long Island Sound.

Greg recommended me to the wife. He said I could mow their lawn and do some other landscaping maintenance during the warmer months of the year. Although homes like these were right next to homes like mine, this home was nothing like what I grew up in. The house I grew up in was about a thousand square feet and had one bathroom.

This home was an estate. It had a classic New England-style white clapboard farmhouse and numerous, brown-stained outbuildings. The old farmhouse had been extensively updated with a small, attached greenhouse, an inground lap pool with small pebbles, and various tropical plants and flowers around the pool. The greenhouse overlooked the private spacious backyard. One of the stained brown outbuildings was a three-car garage that housed an older silver Rolls Royce sedan and a new black Peugeot station wagon. Another brown-stained barn had been renovated into a personal art studio for painting and sculpting for the wife.

I remember exactly the feeling of awe I had when the wife, Greg, and I walked around the estate. My job was simple: mow and clean up some areas that had become overgrown over the years. The last area she showed me to