#storytime #storytimethread

It’s long, I know, but you’re going to want to stick with it till the end.

A thread:

My dad had a friend in college named Mike Crow. Good guy. Vietnam vet. Always been nice to me. He’s had a lot of success in life. He was an amateur boxer in his youth, with eyes on the Olympic before he enlisted. He was a practicing lawyer for a long time, and a business owner.

His wife Marti, who also went to college with my dad and his friends, represented the 41st district in the Kansas House as a Democrat for 14 years. https://ballotpedia.org/Marti_Crow 

Mike has held teaching positions, he’s dabbled in real estate, he’s made money in the stock market. He’s a genuine jack-of-all-trades, and not really the master-of-none type either.

He’s also been a victim of his own success. My dad said that for a while, the money he was making went to his head. He lost a part of himself, forgot where he came from. That old story. He wasn’t, for a while anyway, a very good person.

My dad didn’t see him much in those days. No one did. All the old college buddies just avoided Mike. The group of friends had a rotation of get-togethers every year. My dad hosted the Super Bowl party every year. Mike stopped showing up to them.

And no invitations arrived for the Christmas party that year, which had always been held at the Crow residence.

Mike had been living to lives. One with those that genuinely cared about him, including his wife and two daughters, and all his friends. The other with people that were only around him because of his money.

He gave up the former for the latter. But, perhaps inevitably, he ended up losing both.

His downfall started with rumors. Half-truths some of them, others flat out lies. There were too many to keep track of, much less find the source. Rumors of infidelity, illegal activities, unethical business practices, things that could get him disbarred.

Mike tried to fight them, even threatening a lawsuit once against some local bussiness news blog or something. But you can’t fight that kind of thing, not really. Not after the fact.

As Mike would say now, the only way to fight rumors like that is to fight them before they happen, “by living your life in a way that is so open it becomes impenetrable.”

“It is an unfortunate fact that your success can sometimes breed, in others who have less success, jealousy, anger, bitterness, and contempt.”

Regardless of who started the rumors - Mike believes it was a concerted effort by a group of people he had once considered friends - they took on a life of their own.

“It may have started with them, sure. But they only planted the seeds. Others watered them, gave them fertilizer

and sunlight. Some began to add their own seeds. And as all this came down on top of me, I realized with horror that while the seeds that were growing weren’t my seeds, and weren’t out there by me, nevertheless, I was to blame.

For it was I who bought the land! It was I who build the farmhouse! And it was I that tilled the soil, giving these seeds of lies a place to find purchase, to be nurtured, to grow.

It was my life, my public life of greed and indulgence and decadence that allowed these rumors - false as they may be - to be believed! My fault!

And let me tell you right now, if the intent in the hearts of these men was to knock me from the top branch and watch me fall, screaming, all the way to the ground, than congratulations! You succeeded. You succeeded in doing exactly that. I fell. And I hit the bottom hard.”

Nothing was ever proven exactly. Mike denies almost everything that people said about him, but admits that it doesn’t mean he was really innocent, just not guilty if those things specifically. In actuality, it didn’t matter.

Mike lost his job at the law firm he had started, the one with his name on it. Two of his companies went bankrupt. He came very close to a divorce.

Here’s the thing about Mike though- he has never been one for self-pity. It’s like he can’t help but be an optimist, can’t avoid seeing opportunity in defeat. He’s the kind of guy who hits rock bottom and says “well now all I can do is go up.”

Mike saw the worst moment of his life, when everything he had built was in ruins, and he saw it as a chance to rebuild it all stronger, better.

First thing he did was make changes in his life specifically to rebuild his marriage. Mostly, he listened. He took her words to heart, made changes and stuck with them. Today they remain married, and have been since 1982.

But the biggest changes in Mike’s life came when he began to seek out ways to find balance in his life, both externally and internally. He took up yoga, which morphed into a heavy devotion to meditation. Meditation led him to an interest in eastern culture, which led to him

studying martial arts. And after awhile, Mike’s old drive for success began to come back. But he was in a better place by then, more capable of using that drive and his talent for something good.