I can still remember when I was a kid and things didn’t go my way or somebody such as my mother said,

“No you cannot.”  I might say something like, Ah, Mom.  If I don’t my friends won’t think I’m cool.”

I still can hear her recite one of her favorites.

“ If a toad had wings, “she would say.  “He wouldn’t bump his backside so much.

That meant, “Don’t push for it because there is no alternative.  If you look up that word in the dictionary it will tell you this:

IF… a conjunction used to indicate the circumstances that would have to exist in order for an event to happen.

What my Mom was telling me was those circumstances were not about to exist.  Now I look back on my life and I see an awful lot of if’s and I cannot help but wonder.

When I graduated from high school I joined the U.S. Army for God and country like so many other young men.  I didn’t last long.  Five months and seventeen days later I came stumbling up the stairs to my parent’s apartment.  I had fallen arches.  I may look back and think what if I had not been discharged from the Army.  This was during the Vietnam War.  I may have been sent off to combat and possibly never made it home.

Because I now had a physical impairment, I was helped by the Maryland State Vocational rehabilitation Center.  I had graduated from High School with a Vocational Education diploma.   I graduated taking welding shop and I was not going to be able to make a living at that. 

Wouldn’t you know it would be my Mom whose advice was this?

“Why don’t you go into radio?” she said.  “You have the mouth for it!”  Mom never was one to mince words.

That is what I did.  I must say these were some of the happiest years of my life.  I became an announcer, production man, salesman and eventually sales manager for our local radio station.  During all this time, I met my wife, married her, fathered three children who have blessed us with five grandchildren, all of whom I love dearly.

My point is simple.  What if I had not been released from the Army with this physical problem?  Maybe my backside would be pretty bruised by now... What do you think?

Oh, by the way, that was only one if.  What if I were to go into all the ‘if’s’ in my life?  Such a small word.  Such a big meaning!