First Tony’s parents divorced, then his mother underwent shock therapy. He begged his mom to set aside part of her alimony money for food, but she burned it up in cigarettes.
     Our friend Tony decided that if he was going to make it, “I had to make it on my own.” So he left home at thirteen and moved in with older guys. That dropped him into a culture of pot and alcohol.
     Yet he persisted in school, attending classes during the day and working at a Chinese restaurant at night (“I was the only white guy there.”). He graduated, married, had three kids, attended college, and joined the energy industry. Fast forward: Tony’s wife left, and he finished raising their youngest child. He remarried, welcoming his new wife’s family. Meanwhile, his expanding career moved him around fifteen countries on five continents.
    Then the bottom fell out, and Tony learned he couldn’t make it on his own. Work-related social drinking had drowned him. His greatest accomplishment occurred then when he “turned it all over to The Man, Jesus Christ,” he says. “There’s got to be a word above gratefulness to describe what I feel.”
     So how did Tony survive the odds stacked against him? As he told us about his life, I observed he never blamed others. He took responsibility. And he realized he couldn’t make it on his own.
​     That’s a wise man.

    Tony joked it was okay to tell his story
“as long as it includes that I love my God,
​rock and roll, and all people.”

     Do immigrants leech off our economy and threaten our culture? That’s what many believe. But look at my grandparents. Three of them were among the homeless, tempest-tost who knocked on Lady Liberty’s door. They arrived dirt poor, yet their descendants increased our gross national product and improved society by becoming educators, agriculturalists, pharmacists, a hospital administrator, interior designers, writers, business entrepreneurs, a therapist, a pianist, a pastor, a computer specialist, a photographer, a missionary, and an award-winning college baseball coach (can’t get much more American than that). They weren’t a drain on our country; they were a gain.
      Yet some claim that the new wave of immigrants are alien riffraff bottom feeding off our economy. Not according to recent studies:
     * Crime? Immigrants, including undocumented ones, commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans, according to the Cato Institute.  It’s no surprise then that states with larger shares of undocumented immigrants often have lower crime rates, as the journal “Criminology” reported.
     * Economics? Both authorized and unauthorized immigration boosts wages and reduces unemployment for native-born Americans. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reported that the children of immigrants are “among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the U.S. population, contributing more in taxes than either their parents or the rest of the native-born population.”
     Even destitute refugees don’t suck our coffers empty. A report commissioned by President Trump determined that refugees brought in $63 billion more in tax revenue during the past decade than they cost the government.
     So let’s drop the fear hysteria. It’s not only humanitarian to welcome these newcomers, it enhances our country because they are law-abiding, economic engines.
​     Immigrants aren’t costly, they’re priceless.

     Question: Besides being pictured on nickels, what do Thomas Jefferson and this unknown Native American have in common?
    Answer: They each believed that all men are created equal with the right to choose their own leaders. And here’s the kicker: Jefferson, who incorporated these beliefs into our Declaration of Independence, adopted them from Native American culture, according to historian Tom Embert Phillips.
     Phillips, a Chickasaw artist and student of American Indians, writes that Jefferson adopted these principles from John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, where Locke states that these liberties are part of the “natural law” in Native American culture.
     “Two basic concepts of democratic government - that all men are created in some respect equal with inherent human rights, and that the concept of just power derives from the consent of the people…were inspired directly by the Native American Indians,” Phillips says.
     So as we wave the red, white, and blue on this Fourth of July, let’s remember that these liberties came into our national DNA through the example of the first Americans, not the transplanted ones. And we ought to mourn that those first Americans lost those freedoms when the transplanted Americans claimed their land, rounded them up, and forced them onto reservations.
​     Not a nickel’s worth of liberty and justice went to them.

     I spotted these charred remains of a car in front of a house that was reduced to ashes. Someone’s dream home on an island off the Gulf Coast gone up in smoke in a few scorching minutes.
     I’ve had dreams turn to ashes, too. My dream of being a great singer - my voice didn’t cooperate with that. My dream of buying a house on a hill with a mountain view - the real estate market didn’t cooperate with that.
     Other dreams have come true. The dream of having a family - my husband willingly cooperated in the process. The dream of owning a red Miata convertible - it was a blast until I decided I’d better sell it before I got stuck inside and we had to use a crane to extricate me.
     Some of my dreams weren’t worth pursuing. They were like the New Yorker cartoon I saw in which one woman tells another, “I got what I wanted, but it’s not what I wanted.” Reality didn’t live up to the dreaminess.
     Life’s a tightrope walk - the tension between striving and gratitude. I don’t always navigate the tightrope gracefully.
​     But a friend reminded me that this life isn’t the entire script. It’s only the first act in a never ending production where the best of dreams may come true in the second act.

     Sometimes these days I’m a jumble of jitters because I’m meeting lots of new people and first impressions leave lasting impressions, right? I don’t want to blow it.
     So here’s a new person. I suck in a deep breath, tentatively offer my hand, and ask the woman her name. Now will I remember it?
     A week later I see her again and don’t. “I’m still Trish.” I say awkwardly, “and you’re still….?”
     She reintroduces herself. We make small talk. But nothing meaningful happens.
     I remind myself of a motto I’ve drilled into my core: “In this situation, I have nothing to hide, nothing to seek, nothing to prove.” When I remember that, I forget the posturing and pretenses.
     We make more small talk, but still nothing happens. Then I think about the wisdom of John Maxwell: “People never care how much you know until they know how much you care.” So I ask her a question.
     Now something marvelous occurs - we find a connection.     And as Rick Blaine speculated at the end of the movie “Casablanca,” I wonder whether this might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
​     I hope so.