As my 52nd birthday winds down, I am thinking about all that was good about today….. sifting through Facebook birthday greetings, enjoying the birthday serenade of none other than the Carthage Choir, welcoming two more new members into the Holy Communion Senior Choir (who also serenaded me), watching Jane Eaglen sing the Immolation Scene from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung just for the heck of it, and meeting a personable and talented high school student who hopes to attend Carthage a year from now. And that doesn’t count the two wonderful students to whom I gave voice lessons today or the delicious iced sugar cookie at Einstein’s which was my little birthday indulgence of the day or the anticipated pleasure of reading myself to sleep with the latest issue of Opera News, once Kathy and I have played our nightly game of Boggle on her iPad. In other words, to quote my favorite t-shirt, Life Is Good.
But amidst all of the things which are making me happy today, I am feeling sad about the recent death of one of my all-time favorite Morning Show guests: best-selling author Jeffrey Zaslow, who was killed in a car accident last Friday. In the media frenzy that has sprung up over the death of Whitney Houston, hardly anyone seems to be talking about or even noticing the death of the man who co-wrote the blockbuster best-seller The Last Lecture with Randy Pausch. But I find myself thinking a lot about this really gifted writer and warm-hearted human being, who made me wish that he and I could somehow be friends. In fact, in a strange sort of way, I almost feel like we actually were friends, even after the first of our four Morning Show phone interviews. (We spoke twice about The Last Lecture, and twice more about his next bestseller, The Girls from Ames.) I was sad the moment I heard the shocking news of his death on WGN radio Saturday afternoon…. but I became so much sadder when I listened to our conversations and realized that I would never have the pleasure of speaking with him again. That door has shut forever.
I’m guessing that a lot of you know the story of The Last Lecture, and of Randy Pausch’s desire to leave behind him his thoughts on what matters most in life before his own life would be cut short by pancreatic cancer. When Jeffrey Zaslow and I spoke the second time- shortly after Pausch’s death- I asked him if he had a favorite lesson among the many life lessons that Pausch had shared with the world in their collaboration. The lesson he chose to tell me about was of the day when Pausch went to a store to buy something, and ended up having some credit card trouble at the check out line – which resulted in him being overcharged by 16 dollars. There was no question about the error, and all he had to do to rectify the error was go to the customer service counter. He figured it would take 15 minutes at the most.
He didn’t do it.
Randy Pausch decided that 15 minutes of time was worth more to him than 16 dollars . . . and Jeffrey Zaslow loved this lesson because he believed that more of us needed to cherish the gift of time. I suppose one could take that notion a bit too far, but I think the central lesson is hard to argue with- Don’t devote precious time to something that the world insists is important unless it really is important to you. Time is a gift that cannot be replaced . . . and if Zaslow’s death teaches us anything, it’s that none of us can possibly know how much time each of us has. So treat it as the splendid, irreplacable gift that it is. . .beginning today.