Stopped me in my tracks.

I am reading a book called EMMIS by Cecil Wade. She is an old family friend (as in 78 yrs) and self published her first novel after having it get rejected by several publishers. She did, however , win $3,000 from the McNight foundation after having submitted it for their consideration.

What Cecil gave me as a kid growing up I cannot put a price on however. Cecil's the one who has always encouraged me, "Mary, the Fifth Avenue tree house kid" to write.

The setting for her novel is in a small pre- depression era farming community surrounding a rural town called EMMIS.

It is the following that stopped me. It rings so true:


“ I never thought and still don’t think there’s anything wrong with chasing the dollar. When I left Ontario I was already a rich man. I wanted to be richer. I made good money in lumber, I made more in building railroads, I made even more in lucky investments.

“I never cheated my men by underpaying or overworking them, so help me God. That’s the one thing I wanted you and Tom to know, that having money is having command, and the really great command is not using money to hurt somebody or to stab someone’s dreams like nobody’s dreams but your own matter.

“But all the benefits of having money are not as powerful as what you find is true about money, sadly true. Nothing can change this one very bad thing about the human circumstance: in a business or in a house, the person with the least good intentions or who is the least noble rules everything.

“It’s a kind of Hell when you live in the shadow of such a person’s nature. We can laugh, we can sing, we can look away, but the dark stain reaches us.

“Trying to move where the stain can’t reach us changes who we are, changes everything. “

EMMIS by Cecil Wade.