60 Minutes

My favorite subject in school was math. I enjoyed working with numbers and even received a “Math Scholarship” to UC Berkeley when I graduated High School. Unfortunately, I dropped out of college after only one year, but being good with numbers has served me well all my life, especially as a businessman who often had to do his own bookkeeping. Even today I still have a talent for remembering numbers. In fact, my head is full of useless information and tons of numbers, but since our society today requires driver’s license numbers, social security numbers, credit card numbers, and an endless string of passwords with numbers, it’s been helpful to have a good memory for numbers.

Lately, the number 60 keeps popping up in my life. I’ll tell you how in a moment, but first, did you know that in numerology, the number 60 represents family, home, and harmony? It even has special meaning in the Bible in that 60 was considered the threshold of when a person enters the last stage of their life. So why do I bring up the number 60? It’s not because there are 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour, although I sometimes wonder how that came to be? No, I bring it up for two reasons.

First, one of my best friends, a golfing buddy is turning 60 tomorrow. His wife bought him 60 ProV1 golf balls to celebrate, so of course, I had to follow suit. I bought him 60 Diet Dr. Peppers!  

Second, we celebrated the 60^th wedding anniversary yesterday of my wife’s parents. That doesn’t happen often! Tom and Jan are such great people. When I married their daughter, they took me into their home and treated me like a son. I always felt welcome around them and always appreciated their kindness. They might seem average to other people, but to me they are the quintessential happy American couple, good hard-working people with strong moral values. I have never seen either of them get angry or have a bad word to say about anybody. Unfortunately, Jan has been struggling with Alzheimer’s for the past two years and Tom, at age 79, has now taken on the role of full-time care giver. It is really hard on both of them, but they do their best which makes me appreciate their loving relationship all the more. And let me add, If the number 60 stands for family, home, and harmony, then it’s no wonder that Tom and Jan reached that milestone.  

And that got me thinking… If I only had 60 minutes left to live on this earth, I would want to reach out to the people in my life who meant the most to me, people who taught me about life, love, and family.   I would want to reach out to Tom and Jan.

The truth is maybe we are just average. But the way I see it – families

where parents get up every morning and go to work so they can get 

their kids through school and through life, and struggle to make it 

all work, and somehow manage to do it with a little dignity and a 

little humor – well, that’s not average. That’s extraordinary!   

~ Frankie Heck (from the TV Show "The Middle")