Gold Coin, Golden Friends

Copyright, Terry Turner, 2009

When I think about the people across my life who have helped me, I shall be resolved to recall all of them and record the varied and many ways in which they helped me.

There are people who have helped so much, so often, and over such a long period of time that it would require Gone with the Wind volumes to try to thank them.

Today, I am thinking about various to aid or not aid decisions I made and whether I did the right thing. It is often hard to know if you were right or wrong or whether something was in your own best interest or, for example, in the best interest of the person you were trying to help.

Around 1982, Susan and I were hard pressed financially as a result of a severe strain on our resources which involved trying to keep a Colorado gold mine afloat. During that time a young mother with two relatively small children, a friend and business acquaintance of mine, called on us in our offices and explained that she was basically homeless, jobless, and had no way of feeding her children. Her name was Hope and I do recall what a tremendous optimist she was and had always been. Susan and I were nearly in the same condition as she at that time, but we did have around $1200 in cash.

What to do? What to do? We elected to give her our remaining cash and hope for the best ... while we did not regret the decision then or now, it led in an infinite number of problems for us because we became the sourceless ones. Perhaps we should have advanced her less and kept more... who can know?

Some four or five years later, Suzi and I found ourselves in a situation in which we could not manage to pay our own rent for, I suppose, the first time in our lives. It was an alarming situation which we had tried to resolve by reducing our rates for typesetting to nearly zero but there was just no income to be had... the personal computer had arrived and typography was dying like the very last leaves before a December storm.

At that time we had the custom, one of our "luxuries," of having a home cooked meal on Thursday evening with an old friend. We enjoyed the cooking and the fellowship, and the chance to think of anything except business and money. In those days, we will still in the burger era and often enjoyed huge burgers and sometimes with rice and huge bowls of gravy ... our appetites were hearty and the thought of a "healthy diet" did not interest or repress us. Our conversations usually ran the gamut of everything from the effect of retrograde planets to the reflective questions that surrounded meditation or even structured water and vibrational theories of one sort or another.

Our guest was always Greg, an old friend of many years who probably knows more about my life than any man alive. As we made our way through dinner it was quiet clear that finances would not be kept from the dining table. As Greg came to understand our plight, I have no doubt that he had reservations about what he could or should do. He had a wife, he had obligations, and he knew whatever he advanced us would, at the time, be far beyond our ability to repay.

Whatever his own thoughts may have been, however great my humiliation may have felt, when
Greg took his leave for the evening, a bright gold coin lay on the dining table between Susan and I.

If you have never been in similar circumstances, you cannot imagine how big such a coin looks, you cannot image how it seems to flash and glow as from an inner fire, you cannot imagine how heavy, how solid, how reliable, how substantial it seems to be. There lay our immediate rescue, a bright golden circle of power holding our landlord at bay.

The next day we had to cash it in for paper money.... gosh, how we wished we could have kept the coin as opposed to trading it for paper, but we had to have the cash that would pay our rent and still buy a bit of food and gasoline, and the precious time to get ourselves reorganized and moving in a viable direction.

Years would go by, businesses would come and go, until finally, one fine day, Suzi and I were able to drive up to Montrose, Colorado and purchase a fine golden coin to return to Greg and his beautiful Catherine. It went to him by mail from Colorado to Texas. We did not send interest nor, I am sure did he expect it, but at least the coin made its full circle. I have not seen Greg in years but across time and space we are yet good and strong friends and, believe me, time will never diminish the importance of that particular gold coin in our lives.

How often do we find ourselves calling for help or being able to offer help in a lifetime? More often than most of us would think. And, how many people, friends, do you suppose desperately need help and cannot find the voice to ask for that same help? There are many.

I am now headed toward my 71st birthday and, recently. due to an unsuspected cancer attack which nearly cost me my life, I found my self liquidating whatever assets I could put a hand to, and quickly leaving Texas oncology behind to seek the alternative treatment in California that I hope and believe will save my life and spare my spine, already invaded by my silent attacker.

As I write you, I am midstream in my battle to overcome this cancer, feeling fully humbled, actually feeling embarrassed and humiliated to once again be dependent on donors, gifts, and loans of every stripe.

Thanks to God for my many benefactors among family, friends, and even people that I do not know, who have come to my aid, whether with cash products, transportation, or other resources which allow me to continue purchasing the great services of the Issels Medical Center in Santa Barbara, California.

In this little tale, I mention Greg. I could mention others of heroic dimension, such as Marty, Caroline, Ann, Sandy, Ron, Wilbur, Kim, Brod, Mickie, Mark, Sizemore, Joan, Edna, Todd, Lou, Linda, and others, many, many others.

One of those whose name I have not sung for a long time was my deceased uncle William Laverne Turner. In World War II, a mysterious time for young children, a time when events left children feeling lost and at odds with things, I recall that Buddy, as we called him, was about to ship off to Egypt. I remember how "formal" he looked in starched golden khakis and I recall that he picked me before boarding a local West Texas bus and said a few words to me, and when he put down, he reached in his pocket and put a big silver dollar in my hand. "Terry Don," he said, "it is fine thing to have a little money in your pocket." Then he was gone, disappearing in the rumble and dust of the departing bus, to save the very America that is today being destroyed.

Many years later his sister, Dorothy, would hand me a Pick Wick grocery bag of shirts for my school year... they were rather shimmery and very colorful, I think they Hawaiian shirts and, as she was hard pressed to support her own children, I do not know how she manged to get the shirts for me.

The shirts were used, of course, but how colorful, shinny, and new they seemed to me. Long years later her sister, my aunt, Ollie Irene, would reach into her meager resources to keep me in freshly laundered and starched white shirts in order to help me in my quest to find work.

This story, as I write it, gives me an odd feeling... I sound like a person who never made pay day yet, looking back over the decades, I was a hard working successful executive. After my military service, I quickly became the most often promoted employee among junior executives at Southwestern Bell Telephone and served as staff trouble shooter for some time; from there I moved on become Business Manger, Materials Manger, and Industrial Engineer of Cessna Aircraft, then in short order I became the International Materials Manger, Purchasing Manger, and Senior Project Engineer of Whitaker Cable... all Fortune 500 companies, before I dropped from corporate business and became an entrepreneur involved in oil, mining, magazine and newspaper publishing and a wide array of other ventures. Even so, today, as you see, I am quite reduced in my prospects at the moment (please don't think I am "finished," I am simply regrouping for another attack).

Ah friend, if you could feel the white hot tears that rush down my cheeks now, propelled by feelings of gratitude, shame, humility, humbleness, and pain --- emotions that are simply excruciating as I wonder whether I thanked them well and good; and, of course, I must ask myself if I could have done more for them on other occasions. I am reminded of email I often get from a lady by the name of Sharon which, invariably, exhorts one and all to "Be kinder than necessary for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle."

If you can't pay it back, maybe you can pay it forward. If you can't pay in kind maybe you can pay in other ways but, in any case, in these and such things we can at least build a little of the fraternity and fellowship that we so desperately need in this world. I think also, that we need to always remember that for some much is little, for some a little is a great deal. I have a sister who devotes virtually all of her resources to animal rescue type activities. She has denied herself many joys, many treasures, for many years to fulfill her decision to help protect and care for defenseless animals; when such a person can also reach out beyond her immediate cause such a person reaches a long way and gives far more than you might imagine.

Materialism is a funny thing. Today one of my doctors mentioned to me that a one of the treatments he would like me take (just one of a variety which I need) will cost about six thousand dollars a pop!!! Can you imagine what I thought? Six grand for one treatment and we are bleeding $1500 a day already. Are pills and drops truly so dear, so costly?

He, the optimist, my doctor, thank you God, said he might be able to get me on an evaluation program which would provide the drug free. I have to love his thinking.

I suppose if God wants me to live the drug will be free. But what is the insane system that we have erected to cause the expenses associated with drug development to cost so much? How many sick and dying people can even consider the cost of medications in that price range?

I can only suppose that true cause is, as always, the fine hand of our increasingly incompetent government. The solution, of course, can only be better and less government. And, friend, what sort of criminal thinking creates a world in which insurance, more or less, will only pay for therapies that are conventional and that will almost certainly fail while totally refusing to support alternative methods which are succeeding and have, in some cases, been succeeding for decades? Is this insanity or simply intentional cruelty and profiteering?

Photo Credit, Ridgway evening sky, 2005, looking toward Red Mountain from Ridgway, Colorado, by Terry using an old Dimage X digital.