Who Are You?

Actor Kirk Douglas recalls a conversation he had with a hitchhiker he picked up one day …

I picked up a sailor who was on weekend leave. He jumped into the car, took one look at me and exclaimed, “Hey! Do you know who you are?”

Now that is a very good question we should never stop asking ourselves — especially at gatherings such as this.

Several years ago, the Christmas catalog of a California publishing house featured a “made-to-order” children’s gift item: A “Me-Book.” All the “Me-Books” contained the same full-page color illustrations and some prose also was the same. Other than that, each book was highly personalized. The idea was that the buyer would send the publisher personal information about the child to whom the book was to be given: name, age, birthday, address, names of brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, friends, pets, etc. Thus, when the data was keyed into the publisher’s computer, out came a book in which the child receiving the…