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Mazgeen Press
Category:
Inspirational
Publisher: Mazgeen Press
ISBN-10: 0915330075
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 59
Copyright: Jan 1, 2010
ISBN-13: 9780915330072
48 short inspirational radio pieces
Some of these 48 experiences happened to me, others I witnessed as a fascinated bystander, and a few are anecdotes told to me by friends and acquaintances. They remain with me as life-enhancing lessons and valuable insights into the many facets of human and animal personality and character: kindness, generosity, prejudice, determination, courage, pain, sorrow, delight, love and the ability to reach beyond earthly limitations that brings us to our full human (and dolphin) potential.
I have shared these stories with listeners to RTÉ Radio One and readers of The Sacred Heart Messenger in Ireland, and I have collected them in this book so that others might find in them the same inspiration that they continue to bring to me.
Excerpt
The Balloon Man
I opened my door one day in Key West, Florida, to find a tall, stout, jolly man with blue eyes that twinkled behind old-fashioned rimless glasses. He had curly reddish hair and beard and a childlike toothy grin. Magic Marker stripes decorated his cheeks. He wore a tie-dyed T-shirt and khaki shorts.
A flock of large colourful balloons, which blossomed at the ends of multi-coloured strings fastened to his belt, peered curiously over his shoulder.
"Hi, I'm the Balloon Man," he announced.
I gave him my best counter-sales pitch, emphasising the tears when balloons inevitably break. I left out the part about balloons being useless. He looked harmless, but he was big.
"They're free," he said cheerfully when I had finished. "I'm the Balloon Man."
The word "free" always makes my hand jerk forward automatically, and I found myself clutching a fractious yellow plastic globe filled with helium and air. The Balloon Man found no answer at the house next door, and he tied a blue balloon to the doorknob.
I learned from the paper the following day why the balloons were free. The Balloon Man had been arrested for selling balloons without a licence. It took two police cars to haul the criminal and the evidence to jail.
During the next two days, my wife named the balloon Charlie and tamed, scolded, cheek-rubbed, and saved him from unspeakable disasters in the kitchen. When he finally expired, she buried the wrinkled remains in a tearful ceremony. I commemorated the event in an article for a local paper: "It Was a Gas While It Lasted".
About a year later, I ran into the Balloon Man near the town centre. Now fully licensed and legal as a street trader, he was inflating balloons halfway from a helium tank, then bringing them into full bloom with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. A flock of balloons was tethered with lengths of coloured yarn to a tree, where they jostled like children at a bus stop.
We were discussing the psychological effects of balloons on people - how, like stars and church steeples, they direct the eye and the spirit upwards - when an old woman known only as the Shopping Cart Lady approached timidly. She slept in doorways at night, and by day she plodded the streets wearily with her head down, pushing all her worldly possessions in the shopping trolley.
She looked up at the tall Balloon Man with wide, wondering childlike eyes.
"There's something I always wanted to know," she said shyly. "When you carry all those balloons at once, what keeps you from just floating up into the sky with them?"
The Balloon Man cupped a hand to her ear and whispered secretively, "I wear special magic shoes." He lifted one of his size 14s and pointed to it. "They keep me firmly attached to the ground."
"Oh," she nodded wisely. "I see."
"They're lovely balloons," she added.
"Would you like one?" the Balloon Man asked.
"Oh, I couldn't afford it," she said.
"Which colour would you prefer?" he persisted.
She carefully selected an independent-looking blue one. The Balloon Man separated it from the flock and ceremoniously tied it to the handle of the shopping trolley.
Without the Balloon Man's special magic shoes to keep her firmly attached to the ground, the old woman stepped lightly as a teenager down the street, her head raised high to watch the balloon dancing above her. She seemed to be imitating the balloon's efforts to reach as near to Heaven as possible, while being buffeted one way and another by the winds of this world.
I know it sounds makey-up, but it happened just like that, and I wrote down the dialogue word for word before I left the Balloon Man.
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