When you’re seventeen, you don’t think about your best friend’s dad dying. When you’re seventeen, you don’t think about attending the funeral of your first boss. You don’t wonder whether the guy who owns the mountain where you ride horses is gonna die of cancer. When you’re seventeen, all you’re concerned with is boys, hair, and if you’ve got enough gas to run to Wendy’s. You worry about how you look in your swimsuit, and who is going to prom with whom. When you’re seventeen, you’re self involved with your own problems…and too young to realize they’re not problems at all, because they have zero bearing on the rest of your life. But when you’re forty-one, you smile through tears as your best friend delivers her father’s eulogy. You remember the times spent with him as he patiently taught the two of you how to drive in their subdivision. The silver van with the emergency brake lever in the console. You think about how many times he drove you to Walmart because there was nothing else to do…sometimes twice in one day! You recall him helping move furniture and building bookshelves and baking cheesecakes. You realize how much he loved his daughter and how he impacted your life, too. When you’re forty-one, you dress in black on a dreary Saturday and drive to a nearby church to pay…
Purina Mills has been around for over a century. In that time they put on the most informative sales meetings (for companies & feed customers alike) I have ever attended. A few stick out in my mind. One was where they showed a tag for a 12% horse feed. It sounded pretty good from a nutritional percentage standpoint. When you got down to the ingredients they were actually motor oil, cardboard, and a whole host of deadly components that carry protein, fat, and fiber ratios. Purina sets itself apart from competitors by constantly researching. Their private farm is home to over 3000 animals situated on 1200 acres. Once upon a time, I was attending a training meeting hosted by Purina. This presentation began by telling a story that *I benignly thought* had nothing to do with feeding horses. Seems that there was this woman that was cooking her Christmas ham. Her husband was in the kitchen, underfoot and watching. He noticed she cut a good two inches off each end of the ham. “Why’d you do that for?” he wanted to know. “Do what?” “Cut the perfectly good ends off.” The wife reportedly scrunched her brow. “Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t know. My momma always did it when she fixed the ham.” The ham was pushed into the oven to bake in pork peace. Later, as it was transferred to the table, the woman…