The Greatest Miracle in the World by Og Mandino

Author:Og Mandino
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Spirituality, Self Help, Inspirational
ISBN: 9780307420640
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 1977-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

I surprised him with a gift on his seventy-ninth birthday.

The shock that I had remembered the exact date, November thirteen, from one of our very first conversations together almost did the old boy in.

I detest shopping but I had spent two torturous Saturdays searching for something unique and relevant to buy Simon. I finally found it in Marshall Field’s at Woodfield … an Italian cast-glass geranium plant. It stood nearly two feet tall with coloring and leafing so natural that unless one touched it there was no way to know that it hadn’t been grown and pampered in the fussiest of greenhouses.

Simon owned a window box, the only one hanging outside any apartment window on the entire blighted block. He said he had built and hung it soon after he had moved in, and each year he would haul it in and carefully paint it with fresh green paint. Also, each spring, he would plant countless seedling geranium plants, his favorite flower, in that box, and they would always struggle their way skywards, then turn ugly shades of yellow and lavender and finally wither and die. Last year, he told me, he tried to change his luck by waiting until early summer and buying plants already full-grown and in bloom. Two weeks later they were brown and dead. Still he never gave up. He already had a new strain picked out in a seed catalog that he looked forward to trying next spring.

The old man insisted he had never lost a geranium in either his Damascus or his Sachsenhausen gardens. Once he went into a long description of how he would dig his favorite plants before frost came, hang them in his basements to dry, and then replant them in the spring … one of his earliest successes at helping living things to start new lives, he chuckled. Some of his geraniums had been more than twenty years old. But not in Chicago. Simon blamed it on the pollution.

“How can anything survive in this rain of death from above and from the gasoline monsters on the street? Look outside, Mister Og. It is a full moon, tonight. Can you see it? No! We are engulfed in our own refuse. We bathe in it. We breathe it. We eat it. Even the water that I pour on my plants contains chemicals that would kill a cockroach. Today, only the plants and birds die. Tomorrow, who knows? Still I have faith that eventually I shall grow a geranium and that the human race will awake in time to prevent their world from becoming a giant junk pile.”

“It’s going to take an army of ragpickers to accomplish that, Simon.”

“In order for this planet to survive, each human must eventually become his own ragpicker. He must not depend on his neighbor for salvation. Believe me, Mister Og, this will come to pass.”

They had gift-wrapped the glass plant for me at Field’s with one of their most extravagant papers, and when he opened the door I placed the large gold box in his hands and just said, “Happy birthday, old friend.

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