Pennie and I had a difficult week a long way from home.

It began with a piece of gravel that cracked her windshield.

Looking back, we should have just lived with it. But we didn’t know that at the time.

We dropped her car off at the appointed time on the appointed day. When Pennie picked it up, the upper-left corner of her new windshield whistled loudly at speeds above 30mph. She called the windshield people. They gave her a new appointment.

When we picked it up for the second time, the whistle was a little less loud than it had been, but she decided to live with it. There are a lot of things in life more annoying than a whistling windshield.

We didn’t know it, but we were about to experience several of them.

Driving for 4 hours in a rainstorm to see your mother in the hospital is not a bad experience unless your previously-whistling windshield is now pouring quarts of water into your car.

Things went downhill from there for several days.

I won’t bore you with the details because the real purpose of this note is to tell you what happened that turned everything around for us.

We discovered a wonderful French cafe just two blocks from Clearfork Hospital in Ft. Worth. Halfway through the meal, I went to their website to see if they had a location in Austin. They don’t, but I’m sure they soon will.

Meanwhile, Pennie went to romanticspotsfortworth.com to see if Clarissa had discovered and listed this amazing cafe.

Of course, she had. Clarissa is really good at her job.

Angela brought our next course to the table.

I said, “We found out about you at romanticspotsfortworth.”

To our delight, Angela said, “Yes! They sent us an award with the cutest logo on it! Everyone was excited.”

Pennie and I chose not to mention that we own the romanticspots websites.

When Angela departed, I scrolled all the way to the bottom of the cafe’s website where I encountered a carousel of remarkable quotes.

“People who love to eat are always the best people.”

– Julia Child

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

– J.R.R. Tolkien, from “The Hobbit”, spoken by Thorin Oakenshield

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”

– Aesop, “The Lion and The Mouse”

“Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.”

– Andre Gide

Having been distracted by every bad thing that had happened since our 4-hour trip in a flooded car, these next two quotes hit me pretty hard.

“You’ll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut.”

– Dr. Seuss

“The flower that blooms in adversity is the most beautiful of all.”

– Walt Disney

Each of the remaining quotes at the bottom of that menu lifted me a little bit higher.

“All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.”

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “The Little Prince”

“Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow.”

– Frances Hodgson Burnett, “The Secret Garden”

“True love is like a fine wine, the older the better.”

– Fred Jacob

“It is better to know how to learn than to know.”

– Dr. Seuss

“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

And then this line lifted from “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Wolf made me smile and remember where I was.

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

And then Andre Gide encouraged me to quit looking at what was behind me.

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the...

“If people were paid according to how hard they work, the richest people on earth would be the ones digging ditches with a shovel in the hot summertime.”

That’s what my mother told me when I was a boy. When she saw the puzzled look on my face, she continued.

“People who make a lot of money are paid according to the weight of the responsibility they carry and the quality of the decisions they make.”

Second only to grief, the weight of responsibility is the heaviest burden that a person can carry. Compared to those, a shovel full of dirt feels as light as feathers on a windy day.

When forced to choose between two evils, it brings a good person no joy to choose the lesser evil. Fewer people will be hurt, but the pain those people feel will be real.

A person who is not wounded by the pain they cause others is a sociopath.

Authority is power, and power is attractive. Tear away the tinsel. Scrape away the glitter and you will see that authority is just a fancy costume. You wear it when you are about to cause someone pain.

Every good person in authority has scars on their heart, memories of the pain they know they have caused others.

Sociopaths don’t care about the pain of others. They crave authority because they are weak, and the fancy costume lets them pretend they are strong.

Things get ugly when a sociopath has power.

“In the alchemy of man’s soul almost all noble attributes – courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, etc. – can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.”

– Eric Hoffer, “Reflections on the Human Condition” (1973)

A person in authority who lacks compassion is a very small person wearing a badge.

As a young man, I admired cleverness. But I have lived enough years and cried enough tears that now I see the world differently. Today, I admire goodness. This shift in perspective helped me understand what Viktor Frankl wrote in his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning.”

“Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth… In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.”

Viktor Frankl was a medical doctor, a psychologist, and a survivor of the holocaust. He was imprisoned in four different concentration camps: Theresienstadt, Auschwitz where his mother was murdered, Dachau,and then Türkheim.

Viktor Frankl believed in freedom, but he refused to see it as a license to do whatever you want. To him, freedom without responsibility was an idiotic idea.

Isabella Bird was a well-educated woman who left Victorian England to explore the world in 1854.

When she arrived in the United States in 1873, she bought a horse and rode alone more than 800 miles to Colorado. In her book, “A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains,” (1879), Isabella wrote,

“In America the almighty dollar is the true divinity, and its worship is universal. ‘Smartness’ is the quality thought most of. The boy who ‘gets on’ by cheating at his lessons is praised for being a ‘smart boy,’ and his satisfied parents foretell that he will make a ‘great man.'”

“A man who overreaches his neighbor, but who does it so cleverly that the law cannot take hold of him, wins an envied reputation as a ‘smart man,’ and stories of this species of ‘smartness’ are told admiringly...

His name was Rab. He died in Bengal, the land of tigers, in 1941. On his way out the door, he said, “Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.”

When Rab was sixteen, he published a book of poetry under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha, which means “Sun Lion.” Those poems were seized upon by literary authorities as “long-lost classics.”

Where do you hurry with your basket

this late evening when the marketing is over?

They all have come home with their burdens;

The moon peeps from above the village trees.

The echoes of the voices calling for the ferry

run across the dark water to the distant swamp

where wild ducks sleep.

Where do you hurry with your basket

when the marketing is over?

Sleep has laid her fingers

upon the eyes of the earth.

The nests of the crows have become silent,

and the murmurs of the bamboo leaves are silent.

The labourers home from their fields

spread their mats in the courtyards.

Where do you hurry with your basket

when the marketing is over?

Rab wrote this in 1913,

Free me from the bonds of your sweetness, my love!

No more of this wine of kisses.

This mist of heavy incense stifles my heart.

Open the doors, make room for the morning light.

I am lost in you, wrapped in the folds of your caresses.

Free me from your spells, and give me back the manhood

to offer you my freed heart.

Famous for his role as President Jed Bartlet, Martin Sheen spoke several months ago at a White House event celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the debut of “The West Wing” on television. He wrapped up his short speech by reciting a poem that Rab had written more than 100 years earlier.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

Where knowledge is free

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments

By narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Rab knew that you and I would be here today, and he left us a message.

Who are you, reader,

reading my poems a hundred years hence?

I cannot send you one single flower

from this wealth of the spring,

one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.

Open your doors and look abroad.

From your blossoming garden

gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers

of a hundred years before.

In the joy of your heart may you feel

the living joy that sang one spring morning,

sending its glad voice across a hundred years.

Rab – Rabindranath Tagore – was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.

He was the first non-European ever to win a Nobel Prize.

Roy H. Williams

NOTE FROM INDY: Speaking of Martin Sheen, his name has recently been mentioned in association with the book, “When Rabbis Bless Congress: The Great American Story of Jewish Prayers on Capitol Hill.” Aroo.

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