Life's Lemons

Another fruit blog. This time it's lemons.

Lemons have kind of a negative connotation, although personally I like them. Lemons are synonymous with junk cars and other defective items. As the saying goes: When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. In other words, make the best of a bad situation.

I was thinking about this last Saturday night while watching America's Most Wanted on T.V. For those of you who have been living without electricity the past eighteen years, America's Most Wanted is a crime fighting reality television show hosted by John Walsh. It debuted in February 1988 on FOX, and has been a mega hit ever since. But the real story is how it came into being.

John Walsh was an ordinary guy visiting a mall in South Florida with his six-year-old son Adam. Adam was snatched by an evil that went beyond the bitterest of lemons, and this crime changed John Walsh forever. He launched America's Most Wanted, and working with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, has brought a lot of predators up from the depths, sparing many parents the anguish that he and his wife Reve have lived through.

This is a tough show, full of tough cops and tough bad guys, violence and car chases, and heartbreaking victimization. And John Walsh presents as a tough guy, rarely referring to his own collision with violent crime. On his show, he doesn't smile much. He has that look of homicide detectives, of a face chisled out of rock. But they say the eyes are windows to the soul, and if you look into his eyes, it's clear this is a good man. A man who has lived through the worst of hell; and with the lemons life handed him, he has made some quality lemonade.

It's with this as my inspiration that I write this blog. Life has hit me with some serious lemons. None has approached the bitterness of those thrown at John Walsh. My lemons have been mostly about health issues and poor working conditions, and so that's what my blog will be about. I know there are many of you out there with those same issues, and I know that talking to or reading the words of somebody who's lived through the same can help. The blog of Wandering Scribe comes to mind.

I've learned a lot from life's lemons, and still have much to learn, and I hope, something to teach.