STORY 6......NO BAD DAYS

My dad and my mom, for many years, would rent a house in Mexico for four or five months near the beach. My mom did her thing......getting furniture, all kinds of things that she would later have to sell, but it didn't matter in the moment. She wanted it and she did her thing and she was very good at making any place just look and feel like home. It was a gift, her decorating and making stuff feel lived in somehow, even in Mexico. I don't know where she found this stuff, but she did, and she filled up the place and it would look like my parents' home somehow.

My dad was getting older and the property was fenced off for safety, so he would do what he could inside the fence. He'd rake the grass, clean up the dead leaves, sniff all the flowers, even the ones that had no scent. We tried to tell him, but it didn't matter to my dad. If it was a flower, in his brain he somehow could think it smelled pretty, and if you stood there with him long enough, you'd start to smell it pretty too. That's just the way he was.

There was a Mexican man who came along one day and asked him......hey, pay me a little bit of money, I'll do that for you. I'm looking for work. People would often leave garbage or abandon things by the side of the road outside the fence, and my dad couldn't safely get out there to deal with it. So my dad started up a relationship with this man. He said: listen, if you'll study the Bible with me, then I'll pay you to keep the outside of the property clean. I can't do all this work.

So that's what they did. Once or twice a week. Bible study and yard work. And they created quite a little friendship, the way my dad does. And finally one day my dad said.

Dad: "listen, you've been coming to my house for a couple of years now. I've never been where you live. Why don't we meet where you are?"

Man: "no, Rick, you can't come where I live. You don't want to come. It's probably not safe for you."

Dad: "listen, it's okay. I can take care of myself. We're friends now, right? Well, you know where I am. I want to know where you are."

My dad told me the story of how he went to this man's house. This man had a place. He had a wife and a little kid in there. And it looked more like a bomb shelter somewhere we might go to hide from a storm. Essentially a simple, one big room, cinder block structure with a rickety wood door and kind of a thatched roof and dirt for a floor. His furniture was mostly milk crates and things he had built out of skid wood. A simple big mattress where everybody slept. And he had a little pen that he had made, and he had some chickens.

And my dad was a bit in shock.

Dad: "this is how you live?"

Man: "Yeah."

Dad: "How do you eat? You don't even have a fridge."

Man: "Well, in the work I do with you, I do that for a few other people, and I buy my food every day that I need for my family. But sometimes if I can't find work, I've got my chickens."

My dad looks at the skinny chickens.

Dad: "what if they don't produce any eggs?"

Man: "Well, if they do produce eggs, that's a good day. I've got something to eat, I can provide for my family. But what if they don't produce eggs? Well, those are the days I go knocking on doors for people like you, and I go do a bit of work and they pay me a bit of money. And that's a good day too, as long as I can provide for my family."

I remember sitting there in Mexico talking to my dad about this story and about what a view of a good day is. You know, us in North America, we think a good day is a promotion at work, or enough money to buy a fancy car, or a nice new pair of shoes. In Mexico, where this man lived, a good day was his skinny chicken gave him an egg that he could share with his family.

And it's funny......I don't think my dad even knew the word gratitude, but I tell you, we sat there enjoying that beer and our chips and that may be the first time I ever experienced what gratitude really was. And my dad did too. And we came away with a different point of view, and that is something I've tried to adopt ever since then, and my dad did it the rest of his life. About the whole, hey, no bad days. We're here. Look around. It's beautiful. And if he had friends or someone he loved to laugh with and he had a beer and he had some chips, my dad was a pretty happy guy. And it doesn't take a lot. We don't have to be rich to be happy. But gratitude is a massive part of it. And I didn't know that my dad had that one figured out, but he did.

I didn't know that my dad had that one figured out.

But he did.

No bad days.