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Making
things happen - with integrity. A Weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday, March 20, 2000 Volume II Number 12
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FOCUS - Not Everything's in the Day Timer
Renée Lancouague fell out of bed.
The night before, she and her then fiancé Mike danced the night away at a Los Angeles hotel ballroom. All the way home, they laughed and talked about their wedding – just two months away. The invitations. The wedding party. The tuxes. The dresses. The rehearsal dinner. The reception. The music. The dancing. Oh… the dancing. Footloose. Everybody cut footloose. It’s gunna be the best, they agreed.
Renée’s trained singing voice made her a favorite teacher at San Clemente High School in 1988. She ran the vocal music program.
Her students mimicked her bright smile
and high energy whenever they performed. The
program had
suffered until Renée joined the high school faculty.
Her years traveling with the Young Americans equipped her to motivate
her teenage kids to love music. They
discovered their own voices. They
reveled in the sounds they made. They
mastered harmonies. They moved in
synch.
They followed their pied piper through demanding rehearsals right up to the stage, and for the first time in years, packed the high school auditorium standing room only - parents and fellow-students and community leaders - just to hear them sing. Applause filled the room as they all took their bow.
Renée and her roommate shared a condominium. Mike said goodnight after the dance and went home. She reported in to her roommate then walked upstairs to get ready for a good night’s sleep. She was exhausted. It had been a good good day, she thought.
It would be her last self-propelled climb up those familiar stairs.
Twelve years later, the mystery remains. No one, including Renée, knows why or how in a sound sleep she fell to the floor at two in the morning. To this very day, there is no explanation. Her recollection is foggy – her head hit the floor with a crash, and the weight of her body pushed her head way forward. A snap at the base of her skull, at the top of her shoulders, signaled a crushing break. The fourth vertebrae and the spinal cord. Both broken.
Renée’s life was forever changed.
* * * * * * * * *
Robin Ostrander rarely is home alone. She and her two Lab pups are best friends. Smoky Bear and Pooh Bear and Robin like to cuddle.
Robin’s got some special needs, but most the time she’s independent and self-contained and dependable.
Last Friday morning, Dad ran a mandatory half-day errand down the hill in Knoxville. Mom and big sister Jennifer were at work – the exclusive Blackberry Inn tucked away in a scenic valley around the bend.
The Ostrander guesthouse just outside Tallassee sits on the same ridge as the main house, perched high on the mountaintop. Both front porches offer visitors a magnificent view of The Great Smoky Mountain National Park. The Blue Ridge Mountains stretch north to south as an unforgettable landscape. Guests come regularly from far away places for fresh, pine scented mountain air and magical vistas. Robin and her family call their property Pilgrim’s Rest.
No one knows when or how it started - a slow natural gas leak. Just four days before, a young family occupied the guesthouse. Looking for retreat, on the rocking chairs of the wrap around covered porch overlooking Happy Valley, they found it.
By ten thirty that fateful Friday morning just this past week, uninvited gas filled the rooms of the two-story house. No one was there to smell the fumes. It was a sunny, breezy pre-spring morning. The blue ridges came to life after winter snows. Light rains fell earlier in the week in anticipation of springtime. On this day, bright blossoms and grassy meadows brought brilliant colors back. Fluffy clouds floated by.
In the main house, Robin played on the carpet with her pups.
The most credible theory involves the refrigerator. When the thermostat determines that the refrigerator needs another cycle of condensed vapor to cool the enclosed box, it sends an electrical impulse through a wire that clicks the compressor on. That click created an untimely spark.
The explosion cracked like a flash of lightening followed by a sonic boom. It echoed over the ridges and through the valley.
The windows blew. Glass shards flew in all four directions. A hailstorm of broken boards and torn shingles dropped all around. A billow of smoke rose like a mushroom cloud above the house that once gave rest. Flames reached skyward, lapping up the wood siding, the beams and framing and stair rail, the carpet and the bedding and the draperies and the sofas and the overstuffed chairs and paintings on the walls and the antiques stored in the basement… all reduced to ashes in a matter of minutes. Consumed by a hot ball of raging fire.
From the isolated community of Happy Valley far below came an emergency call. There was an explosion and fire way up on the hill, someone reported. Another neighbor dialed 911. Fire units hit the sirens and pulled out on Foothill Parkway, up the grade to Tallassee.
Finding refuge in the living room of the main house Robin curled up on the couch quietly sobbing and hugging her puppies. In just a few short minutes, Karen, an angel of a neighbor rushed into the house and found Robin. She held her in her arms and gently gave her comfort.
Karen called Blackberry Inn. Mom and Jennifer were home in minutes.
Two hours later, unaware, Dad pulled up to the long gravel driveway. He surveyed the scene in stunned disbelief. Firefighters packed up their gear. Hoses. Pumps. Ladders. Hard hats. Diesel engines idled. By now, the flashing lights were turned off. Loud radios squelched over scratchy voices in the background.
Running up the drive were Mom, Jennifer and Robin. Smoky and Pooh followed close behind. “We’re all OK,” they cried.
And from a Blue Ridge at a place called Pilgrim’s Rest, a good family embraced and wept. A long and cherished group hug.
“We’re all OK.” And that’s all that really mattered.
* * * * * * * * *
I got my first date book during my college years. It was called a Seven Star Diary. I liked the smooth leather cover. It’s miniature ring binders held tiny pages in place and in order… loose leaf. I used a fine point pencil to get appointments and tasks inside the narrow lines.
Ever since, I’ve always carried a calendar. Today it’s a Palm Pilot. I synch it to the master calendar three or four times a day.
I jot down tasks. Schedule meetings. Try to prioritize. I like to anticipate events in my day. At night, I check it again just to be sure I know what’s happening tomorrow. In the morning I check it, and then decide what I’m going to wear.
It gives me, at least, the illusion of control. It helps me remember.
But occasionally something comes along that re-orders the whole day. There are no advance entries. The pre-scheduled stuff suddenly becomes entirely irrelevant.
These are events that are not in the calendar.
But they will certainly appear in the journal. Later. After some time to process.
* * * * * * * * *
When the paramedics arrived in the middle of that fateful night two months before her wedding, Renée knew she was in serious trouble. All feeling from just below her shoulders escaped like air from a flat tire.
This life-altering event was not scheduled. There was no mention of it in her master calendar.
Beautiful, vibrant, singing, dancing Renée had a new challenge. Her high school choir would never sing again under her leadership. Wedding plans vaporized. Her career froze in place. She is a quadriplegic. None of her four limbs is operational. The doctors said she would never sing again.
Maybe it’s those songs she sang and later directed about our great country. About self-reliance. About beating the odds. About climbing every mountain. About a spoon full of sugar. About an awesome God. About faith and hope and love.
Renée refused to check out. She went to prayer. And then she went to work.
Ten years later, the vibrancy is back. Renée Bondi sings from a wheel chair. Her eyes are bright. As bright as her smile. She still dances, but from a four-wheel battery powered electric machine. She calls it wheelchair choreography.
That fiancé whose life was also put on hold waited. Mike Bondi and Renée Lancouague wed just a couple years behind the originally scheduled date. The delay was entirely excusable.
Renée Bondi has worked audiences with the likes of Christopher Reeve, Dr. Lloyd Ogilvie and Dr. Robert Schuler. When she speaks and when she sings, she calls it her ministry. Ministry indeed.
And a couple years ago, God rewarded the Mike and Renée with a naturally born son, Dwight. With a giggle and a shrug, Renée likes to inform her audiences, “I didn’t feel a thing!”
* * * * * * * * *
You are a leader. You like to write things down.
Your calendar is your daily, weekly and monthly road map. You’ve made it this far, which means you likely extend your planning beyond thirty days. You’ve got your quarterly plan. Your bi-annual plan. Your yearly plan. And your five and ten year plans.
Don’t stop planning. Sharpen it up. Fill in the detail. There is magic in writing it down. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But you’ve been around long enough to know. You also need a journal.
What you plan is not always what you get.
The calendar is what you expect will happen. The journal records what happened. The two are not always the same.
When Robin saw that flash of light and heard the shocking boom, she was blindsided by a new reality. When Renée found herself on the floor in heap when her calendar said she’d be in a deep sleep in the middle of the night, she awoke to a brave new world.
Tonight, at the end of this Monday, look at that calendar again. Don’t look forward, look backward.
Pull out the journal and write down the comparison. The planned and the unplanned. The scheduled and the unscheduled. The mundane and the serendipitous. The routine and the surprise.
This Monday morning, be ready for both.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2000
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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