Vignettes

Spanning more than 70 years, covering 48 US States and 63 of the world's nations, Vignettes captures the essence of life and the people in it from the observations of a man who trained to become a teacher and who ended up in international business for the majority of his 40-year career. The insights and reflections in this work, both the cathartic and the mundane are woven together through travel, through an enduring love affair with literature, through the belief that value can be found in offering safe clean drinking water to the world; through an equally enduring love affair with the youth of this world, and lastly, the belief that baseball is the greatest game ever invented.

We meet orphans in Nepal and Ethiopia and China; school children in China, in Cambodia, in Thailand, in India, in Nepal and in Ethiopia; Chinese businessmen who still suffer from the aftereffects of Maoism. We meet leaders - women leaders who consistently bring along those less fortunate than they - doing so without complaint or need for self-congratulation.

We experience the loss of a young mother and the effect that loss had on the lives of three young boys. We discover the simple joy of meeting others unlike ourselves and then joining with them in pursuits never imagined before meeting them.

Vignettes is truly like that shoe box of photos and memories you discovered as a child in your favorite aunt's closet or in your grandmother's attic.