CHAPTER 17

My Bucket

How is your life working for the people around you?

I’ve been asked quite a few times how my life is working for me. It’s a

fair question, I suppose. More than just small talk, what my friends really
want to know is how things are going for me. I think a better question to
ask is, How is your life working for the people around you? Because if
our lives aren’t working for the people around us, our lives aren’t
working for us.
I have a friend whose home got toilet-papered. It was an ecological
disaster, kind of like the Charmin version of the Exxon Valdez. It was
really an unbelievable job. Hundreds of rolls of toilet paper had been
spread over the lawn and the shrubs. Someone must have been the
quarterback for the local high school football team, because there were
toilet-paper streamers hanging a hundred feet long from the branches of
the huge pine tree.
I wondered how my friend would get the highest streamers down from
the tree, and I learned a short time later he got a book of matches and lit
the end of one of the long toilet-paper strands. Bad idea. It was like a
fuse. The flame leapfrogged up the toilet paper, catching every
intersecting strand on fire along the way. Within seconds, parts of the tree
had caught fire. One of the branches fell on the neighbor’s garage roof,
which was three feet deep in pine needles from the tree, and it caught on
fire. My friend’s life was not working for the people around him.
How’s your life working for the people who are closest to you?
I’m always in a hurry. I put on my socks two at a time. I lace up my