Nice Guys Finish First!

The suburban sprawl of the baby-boom years turned many farmlands into neighborhoods for young families in the 50′s and 60′s.  City dwellers who escaped the concrete surroundings of apartment buildings, row houses, front stoops and playgrounds reveled in the spacious surroundings of their newly erected free-standing colonial or ranch homes.  But there was one small price to pay.  For [...]

My dad had this idea and just wouldn’t give up on it.  He could be that way sometimes.  This time he wanted to organize a block party.  Mom and all of us kids were against it.  “Dad, it’s embarrassing,” we would argue.  “Nobody has block parties anymore.” And Dad would respond, “Yeah and that’s the [...]

This point is inarguable:  mankind is infatuated with domesticated animals.  The greatest evidence of this assertion can be found in most of our own homes.  From hamsters to Great Danes, we love the animals which we call our pets.  And as pet owners we’re often guilty of taking that “love” to extreme degrees.  We humanize [...]

There’s no shortage of discussion surrounding the subject of kids’ health.  And everywhere we turn the message seems to be the same:  our kids’ health is going down the tubes.  It’s a cynical consensus for sure, but it does seem hard to argue the facts.  According to the CDC, the childhood obesity rates in the U.S. [...]

You’re punished!  Go to your room!!   For those of us who grew up during the Leave-It-To-Beaver or Brady-Bunch generations, these words resonate as an all-too familiar admonishment for the wrong doings of Theodore Cleaver, Jan Brady and millions of other kids in America.  It was the common penalty for the common misdeeds of the day.  And [...]

The bible said that God created the universe in six days and on the seventh day he rested.  I’m no biblical historian, but I’ve always theorized that God needed that rest because He still had one more creation left to take care of.   And so on the eighth day God unleashed His most brilliantly complex creation of all…the [...]

I’ve seen the commercials and trailer for the new movie, “Dinner For Schmucks.”  It looks really funny.  But there’s been something bothering me since I first heard the title.  I always thought that the word “schmuck” was a dirty word.  At least that’s what my dad told me back in 1971 when I was about 12 years old.  [...]

Humbling.  Yep, that’s the one word I would choose above all others to capture the experience of parenting.  Every other word – at least within my limited vocabulary – seems inadequate or too narrow, leading us to choose between overt superlatives (amazing, incredible, fantastic, rewarding), and noteworthy cynicisms (challenging, trying, fatiguing, frustrating).  For me, humbling captures the full range [...]

My own father was a quintessential Nice Guy himself, and he gathered his Nice Guy traits throughout his lifetime, one influence at a time.   One of the tools Dad had learned to use with great effectiveness was the art of self restraint; he had the uncanny ability to repress his emotions in situations where most [...]

In reflecting upon the Nice Guy influences within my family history, the great personality contrasts between my ever-affable Grandpa Tony and my no-nonsense Grandma Mac raised some interesting and perplexing questions.  I found myself right in the middle of the classic “nature-versus-nurture” debate, wondering just how much of their personalities were driven by genetic predisposition versus being shaped by their respective [...]