Ben Lomond, CA

Funny, I was just looking at old photos of my house in Ben Lomond and the Jeep Wrangler I used to own when I came across this video of a 90 year old Ben Lomond resident who lost 700k in investments with Madoff. The following video is of him working at the Ben Lomond Market, what I used to call “the super”, for $10 an hour.

This is truly an inspiration, to not waste time blaming others but instead making the best of it.

90 year old goes back to work

The last time the Super made the news was shocking. Micheal McClish was convicted of murdering a young woman, Aisha Veil, and her unborn child. He was also accused of rape and sodomy of her with a deadly weapon. It rocked the community though I was no longer living in the area when this came to light. He was finally convicted in May 2008 though I am unable to find the Santa Cruz Sentinel article to refer to.

I recall Micheal being a little too smug, either with his good looks or his guilty conscious, but I didn’t have any bad run-ins with him. If I did still live there, I don’t know that I would support the Super any longer. There is a part of me that knows the owners and other store managers knew something about Micheal’s abusive behavior (a string of other victims came forward dating back more than 10 years) and did nothing to stop it. Then again, I don’t know that we have a system in place that would support him in getting help BEFORE getting caught.

Like James Clement. Though I don’t know if he ever was caught molesting young girls. May never know.

In any case, you never really know someone or what lurks behind their facade. But that doesn’t mean anything because the only person any of us need to be concerned with is “KNOW THYSELF”. If we all did this, there would be a lot less theatrical and tragic stories like these to report and instead, maybe we would be hear more stories like this one. Of people transcending petty competition (ie ego) to honor the sacredness of life. And death.

This is the story of what the human spirit is capable of. I admit, it’s a whole lot easier, for me, to call these folks my human family than some other characters in the news lately. But in truth, we are going to see, hear, experience a lot more of our “shadow self” because it’s time to shed light where there has been none. The whole seperation between heroes and villans will get murky but we’ve had plenty of movies “The Dark Knight” for example, giving us all the clues.

I diverge, read:

http://highschool.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=914609
Peace out People.