"I just want to leave a few bouquets behind to be remembered by." Erroll Flynn in The Desperate Hours (1942.)

   When the great, swashbuckling, Erroll Flynn (above) spoke those lines, the world was at war. With thousands of young soldiers dying every day, many must have wondered, in their last moments, how they might be remembered, if at all.

   In the moments we have on this earth, are we creating bouquets or thorns? Most of us create a little of both.

   I remember my daughter teaching me a lesson about this. I was feeling angry one day because a neighborhood teen had squealed his tires by our house. I thought of the little children who might be playing nearby. "Don't shout at him, Dad" she warned. "This may be the only time you talk to him. Do you want him to always think of you as 'the angry man?'"

   She was right, of course, and her words have come back to me often as I've considered, in a given exchange, whether to use the tough tools I learned in the courtroom or the kinder tools I learned in church. I wish I could say that the church-learned tools always won out.

   When and how do we create "bouquets' for others? Is today a day when you and I might fashion something that would brighten the life of someone around us?

-Erie Chapman