The lesson

Today's headlines started me thinking about the kind of Vampires whose stories are now impossible to ignore. The former self-proclaimed gods and golden boys (they never did get around to letting ladies into the club) of the investment banking, finance, mortgage and home building industries.The “I can't wait to get my tanned mug shot into another ‘celebrity profile’” type of CEO.The ones who just a few years ago couldn't take enough credit (or stock options) for making all the supposedly brilliant decisions that drove their company's stock prices and their compensation to unrealistic heights. The very same guys who are now finally willing and eager to give all of the credit (and the accompanying indictments) to their long suffering, slightly less outrageously compensated underlings.

But this being the second full day of my transplant, I decided to focus on a more uplifting subject.(I'll get back to the Vampires of Wall Street when my counts are higher.)So instead I spent most of today thinking about the message left on our voice mail the night before I checked into the hospital.The message from our gardening service was simple. "Hi, this is Juan, Lucio's boss. Please call us tonight."By the way, Vampires love their gardens--almost as much as they love blood.And before a lack of oxygen made me too tired to rake and low white count could turn a rose prick into a nasty infection-- I was quite a gardener. And only a little bit obsessive.

So a lot of gardeners came and went while I searched for one that could maintain the appearance of an exotic, hands-off, natural setting. All while cutting and clipping to create perfect symmetry.

And then my lovely wife, who'd grown tired of following me around with Band-Aids and Neosporin every time I ventured out with my clippers --found Lucio.The day I came home to find him hand weeding between the rocks of the ornamental stream I told Mary Beth it was safe to put away her Band- Aids. I was laying down my shears.

When I'm home Lucio and I talk. We share our diet cokes and discuss how each fern should be pruned and which flowers can be planted for color without destroying the green on green background. And just that morning, we talked about my cancer, the transplant and how I 'd be happy to pay extra for him to do an extra drop-by every week to make sure the garden was getting what it needed until I came home.

So while I waited for Juan to answer his phone, I began calculating the outrageous amount of money the drop-by would cost, now that they knew my situation.

But I was wrong. Juan wasn’t interested in sucking a few more dollars out of me; instead he was calling to wish me luck. To let me to know that he or Lucio would come by to check on the garden throughout the week. They’d also be sure to put in the flowers we talked about, so it looked pretty for the Ms.

And they wanted me to know that they wouldn’t be charging us for anything for the next several months.

I started to protest. And then Juan said, “We are friends, people take care of their friends.”

What a concept. Bernie Madoff and the rest of those Wall Street CEO’s should have had a gardener like Juan.
They might have learned something from him. I did.