I may have found it. It was in front of my neighbor’s house with several flowerpots and old video cassettes including “The Tai Kwon Do Workout”. Peace of Mind, by Joshua Loth Liebman. It’s an old book with yellowing pages and a cloth cover that proclaims, “since publication in March, 1946, it’s popularity has steadily mounted until it is now America’s best-selling non-fiction book.” Like other things I hoard, I stashed it away somehwere for months and only this morning looked at it.
“As mature men and women we should regard our minds as a true democracy where all kinds of emotions and ideas should be given freedom of speech. If in political life we are willing to grant civil liberties to all sorts of parties and programs, should we not be equally willing to grant civil liberty to our innermost thoughts and drives, confident that the more dangerous of them will be outvoted by the decent and creative majority within our minds?”
“Our childhood is a blackmailer that makes us pay over and over again for some of the failures or mistakes that long ago have been outgrown…”
Sounds good to me. This guy says things so much better than even Zamboni sometimes. He says there should be a, “statute of limitations” on that old childhood stuff. Nice. The back cover tells us this guy’s an accomplished slashie, rabbi and professor and, “he is one of the leading radio preachers in America…millions have heard his sermons over NBC, ABC, and CBS..” Back then that about covered the airwaves.
Vintage book, and made in the US by Simon and Schuster. And best of all, a tiny slip of onion skin paper fell out of it. Someone long ago typed, with a real typewriter, these two lines and used them as a bookmark in their reading, or perhaps a reminder to themselves..? It read:
Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
(and below it:)
“The way to raise children right is to take it for granted they are going to do the right thing–and never let them think any different.”
This here medium can’t do justice to the beauty of the actual typing. Instead of that cloned dash you see here, its like two closed sleeping eyes, and one is just slightly higher than the other.
I always knew lapels and tie widths were better back then, didn’t realize that extended to dashes and outlooks too.
-j.w.
great zamboni 