By Tom Jenkins on 5/29/2008 2:07 PM

One of my teachers from long ago said that we couldn’t control all the circumstances that happen to us but we can control our responses to the circumstances. Take the weather for an example. It’s easy to allow the weather to affect our mood. Today is a bright, beautiful day and it’s easy to feel good and be cheerful. I saw people at lunchtime walking the sidewalks of Creedmoor laughing and talking and enjoying the beautiful day. Yesterday, however, was cool, overcast and filled with scattered showers. It made you feel like staying in and reading a good book or catching up on that stack of DVDs you haven’t watched. The weather doesn’t affect us unless we allow it to. People who have positive control over their emotions carry weather around inside of them. They are not influenced by the weather, except that they are smart enough to know when to wrap up and carry an umbrella,  because they have inner peace and harmony. We ultimately choose, consciously or not, the influence that we allow uncontrollable circumstances...

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By Tom Jenkins on 5/22/2008 7:29 AM

Walt Disney’s hometown of Marceline, Missouri with its prominent Main Street inspired his theme parks. Disney’s first theme park, Disneyland, opened in 1955 with street cars, early automobiles and buildings that could have appeared on thousands of Main Streets in small towns in America in the 1940’s and 1950’s. My hometown, Jesup, Georgia had a Main Street intersected by Cherry Street. There is where you learned everything you wanted to know about events in our hometown. I hurried to Main Street on Saturdays to watch a double feature at the Strand Theater. Located around the corner from the theater was the barbershop where I got my weekly haircut and nearby were two drugstores where you could get real Coke drinks mixed by the “soda jerk”, not the pre-packaged stuff, for ten cents. I spent one summer working as a soda jerk in Smith’s Drugstore mixing and selling Cokes along with patent medicines. I could walk outside the drugstore on Saturday...

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By Tom Jenkins on 5/8/2008 8:57 AM

Frances Lea, a church member for many years and lifelong native of Creedmoor, died last Sunday. She spent the last years of her life in a nursing home. Her nephew, Patrick Robertson, was in charge of arrangements for the service and asked me to speak. He and I talked about his Aunt Frances and her love for simple things like ruby red lipstick. Patrick made some phone calls and secured a tube for the undertaker to use. Besides ruby red lipstick, Frances found pleasure in visiting with friends and family, and her weekly trips to the beauty parlor, as shops for hairdressers used to be called. Her greatest pleasures were gained from simple things.

 

At her service Tuesday I mentioned Frances’ enjoyment for simple things in life, like ruby red lipstick, and suggested that we all buy a tube of it and look at it and roll it around in our hands every so often to remind us that life’s greatest pleasures come from simple things. We Americans tend to think that life’s pleasures and, indeed, the measure of success,...

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