Madden Mischief

We’ve all lost loved ones, people who’ve meant so much to us either from our personal lives or actors/film stars/entertainers we’ve long admired from Melvyn and Getta to Keaton and Hepburn, from Bob Hope to Rob Reiner.

But it’s so strange that only after we’ve lost them do we realize fully how much they truly meant.  We’d be like Holden on to Audry, but too often it would become painfully clear, strikingly evident, they were like our once majestic heroines and heroes, our Vivien’s and Clark’s, now all Goners with the Wind.  So, keep telling those whom you love how much they mean to you as there will come a time when the set becomes dark, the stage empty and they are not there! 

I’m happily married again, but it was that rocky period after I lost my first wife, Angela, who had so bravely battled breast cancer, did it fully hit me how integral she was and how profoundly I would miss her.  Thankfully, I found true love again with my Brazilian wife Rita whom I met in of all places, Duffy’s sports bar.  Funny!  I had met Angela too in a bar in Manhattan not too long after she had come to the US from her charming fishing village of Giovinazzo in Italy.  I was engaging in my favorite sport at that time, a form of night fishing known as bar hopping.

So much in life becomes acutely meaningful when we no longer have it, when it slips through our fingers, sinks out of sight.

Imagine all those serving life sentences in prisons, finally realizing how precious was that freedom they once had and now have forever lost. 

We think of cousins and friends with whom we grew up or hung out with in college who are no longer alive and suddenly we’ll recall the fun times we had together and miss them.

We fondly remember our moms and dads, how much they cared for us, all they did for us, unless they were concert violinists like my dad who seemed to be forever practicing his violin, when he wasn’t entertaining with his magic tricks.  And those memorable aunts and uncles who’d keep telling us to quiet down.

Much too slowly do we all come to realize we shouldn’t wait until we lose something or someone before we state how much we fully value her or him.   

The time is now to fully appreciate what we have, not wait until after it’s gone.

The time is now to recognize all that’s so meaningful in our lives and to tell those who are closest how much we care for them, how deeply we love them.

Don’t wait until we lose someone to cry out how much they meant to you.

Let’s be grateful NOW, always showing it NOW to those we love the most by telling them in the present tense how much they mean to us, and always will.

Be thankful to God for all we have NOW!  Live and love in NOW LAND and be wide open, vividly alive, ever pulsating in the bright present, not waiting for the dim past. 

TM

Tom Madden is a lover and an appreciator of those closest to him, his beautiful Brazilian wife Rita Pierotti-Madden, his daughters Adrienne and Angel and son Andrew, even though the latter two live many miles north of Florida, where he and Adrienne run TransMedia Group, a PR firm Madden started in Manhattan when he left NBC, but let’s not leave out his grandchildren, all spread out but forever lodged in his mind and heart, that is when he’s not writing articles, books and blogs, except this one saluting the two most beloved women in his life.