Earlier Sunday evening, I got a reminder of a post by a good friend of mine where he talked about his two weeks of being “Morning Mayor” of the small radio station we worked for in southern Ohio. His tenure started the day after I was pulled into the station manager’s office and told that I was going to be replaced in two weeks by someone from a larger market who he had hired the day before.

To be honest, I was rightly pissed at the decision, especially since I had worked through one of the worst winters the town had experienced to that point. I went off to lick my wounds while my friend, Alex, got the chance to play personality radio for a fortnight.

His post described his experience as being one of the best in his life (you’re welcome, Alex) – one which he never really forgot. Reading his post, I recalled the period and my mourning the loss of a job I really wanted for three years prior to getting it.

I then read some of the comments made in addition to the post, including an entry made by me where I recall accepting the “demotion”, as it allowed me to do what I really wanted to do which was to create creative commercials for the station’s clients.

I had taken a lemon and made it into lemonade. Something I have done repeatedly in the span of my lifetime. It’s being able to roll with the punches, to adapt, which makes someone genuinely… let’s just say, interesting.

There is an entire litany of little setbacks I had suffered on the way from there to here; too many setbacks and comebacks to enumerate in a short period of time.

Two which came to mind were the events leading up to owning a house in an obscure little corner of the DFW Metromess and the more recent setback I had earlier this year.

The better half and I were living in a rental home in an older part of Allen Texas a few years back. I had just come off an injury which took me out of work for nearly two months when I got a call from a real-estate agent who blithely told me that she was coming over to look at the house so she could list it for sale. She prefaced her announcement by asking me if I had gotten the note from the landlord telling me that I needed to be out of the house by the end of the month. Never mind the detail of sending us a registered letter or even bothering to call me… I needed to be out by the end of the month with about sixteen day’s notice.

We made it out, landing on a property owned by my wife’s boss, arriving by the skin of our teeth. For the next few months, we hustled to find a permanent place to live, finally settling on a really nice place in a somewhat decent neighborhood. Truth be known, I knew enough about Real Estate law to be able to have the agent who called me on that beautiful October day to sweat out keeping her license – and I could have stuck it to the landlord for not fixing various shortcomings which desperately needed to be repaired.

But I didn’t.

I was the nice guy who put it behind me and went ahead to better things.

The rectal cancer had the possibility of being an even bigger setback. Before the good news that it was operable and that it had not spread, I determined to make the best out of the situation by rolling out my sense of humor, grinning and bearing what could have been a onerous load.

The gist of this little essay is that today’s encounter with a six-year-old post from my friend gave me some insight about what really matters in this life. Life can sometimes hand out some pretty tough lumps. It’s how one handles those lumps which defines what type of person one is.

Be Seeing You!