Epilogue
There are many ways I thought to sum up our time together. I hope “The Case of the Missing Cutlery” and the Buoyancy Course that followed will be an ever-ready resource to help you on the journey toward your real ambition. There is one more piece of advice I want you to take with you: persist.
Do not take no for an answer. The person you are holds a recipe for success, and no matter what stands in front of you, leap over it, go around it, or, well, just knock it over. Success belongs to the persistent. Coupled with hard, hard work, persistence is the great equalizer. In trying to find an appropriate sentiment to leave you with, I was chatting with my mom, and an hour later I got the following e-mail from her (yes, eighty-three years old and e-mailing):
The setting: Deer Park Avenue Elementary School auditorium, Long Island, New York. The players: a third grade class getting ready to perform a play, HMS Pinafore, a Gilbert and Sullivan classic. We see on stage Kevin Allen, age seven, playing the captain of the Pinafore, his voice singing the stanza “I am the captain of the Pinafore and a right good captain too.” On cue and in response, a group of young ladies skip forth singing, “So say his sisters and his cousins and his aunts . . .” They headed straight for Kevin to dance around him, but alas, the ladies are overzealous and bounce into Kevin, sending him and his three-cornered hat flying flat to the stage floor. Oblivious to the audience before him, he simply got to his feet, retrieved his hat, stood in the middle of the now circling ladies dusting off his hat and the seat of his trousers and continued as if nothing had happened, showing at an early age that even if you knock Kevin over, be ready ’cause he is getting up again!
May the force be with you.