At Your Service by Maggie Inge

“I’m sorry for your loss.” Few phrases in our language are spoken with more sincerity than this one; yet it is also the phrase most likely to have a hollow ring for its listener. It is difficult because both the speaker and the listener have been forced into a confrontation with mortality. These are moments in which few of us are comfortable.

It is when we are challenged, that we most often rise to the occasion and supersede our own expectations. Rarely are challenges more direct than when they come from nature, as we have seen in this last week. There are those among us who have not fully emerged from snowbound status, some still without power. We don’t have to look much further than our neighbors to find examples of people overcoming hardship.

How did we get to this place? It was the question of the moment. They looked around, into the eyes of those they had been working with toward the same goal. Now the goal seemed more elusive than ever and they did not know where they had gone wrong. They had failed. It is a place that we have all stood at some point in our lives.

Every two years we experience an event eight years, or two “Olympiads,” in the making. The Olympics were so important to the ancient Greeks that they measured time in terms of the reoccurrence of the athletic competitions; they called a period of four years an Olympiad. The games are given great importance in our times as well, although the reasons are different.

Toyota’s woes in the land of automobile safety led me to take a look back at the Ford Pinto. Ironically, the Pinto’s unique capacity to burst into flames at the slightest bump to the rear was the game changer that catapulted Toyota to the top of the heap in the 1970s. It seems that those who do not remember history really are condemned to repeat it.