I want to lay all my cards out on the table and face up. I’m the grandfather of Ti Ti. I discovered my granddaughter a dozen years ago near Inle Lake, Myanmar. At that time, she was 9. This is a link to all the articles that I have written about her, and these are her articles about College Days.

Ti Ti turned 21 on June 2. I sent her a special gift for her birthday. Now, some who know me think I’m a doting old grandfather. Hey, I don’t think that 82 is old.

I also maintain that Ti Ti and I are clones of each other. This is one of our similarities. My dad was transferred to a corporate insurance company in Pittsburgh when I was Ti Ti’s age when we first met. My dad wasn’t able to go to college due to WWII. Therefore, he asked a real estate agent about which school system was the best in the Pittsburgh area. The answer was Mt. Lebanon. It was also the richest community in Western Pennsylvania and the 19^th-best school system in the country.

During my junior and senior high school years in Mt. Lebanon, I learned two things: I was dumb and poor. Granted, that mindset was incorrect, but it took me years to realize it. Nonetheless, those feelings remain etched into my psyche. My mind haunts me when I think about Ti Ti and her family. Myanmar is a developing country with a civil war raging, along with a recent devastating earthquake. I have helped my family financially.

An example is that I wanted Ti Ti to go to college in Myanmar. I helped the family send her to a college preparatory high school. Ti Ti felt like I did at Mt. Lebanon. She excelled at that high school and won the award for the best math student in the entire Shan State. Also, Ti Ti took an online class that I taught. In that online class, the midterm and final exams were posted for the entire class to read and provide feedback to their classmates. This is Ti Ti’s final.

Ti Ti enrolled at Gusto University in Yangon. However, during the latest military takeover in Myanmar, Ti Ti and some of her fellow students fled to Bangkok, Thailand. She is now taking Gusto’s online classes.

Before that, Ti Ti tried three times to obtain a student visa to live in my home and attend college, where I taught. However, a male member of the embassy staff of our US Embassy in Yangon didn’t like Ti Ti and refused her three separate applications for a student visa. I wrote to the acting ambassador of our embassy with all the data that Ti Ti had provided regarding the three interviews. My email to the acting ambassador wasn’t given to her. A female staff member never forwarded my email to the acting ambassador. Instead, the staff member provided her with only a limited amount of information from my email.

That dream of my granddaughter getting her college education in the States and living with me on the lake isn’t going to be realized. Ginger, my Irish Setter, would have been ecstatic with having Ti Ti as her playmate.

Ti Ti lives in Bangkok. She works part-time and takes classes online from Gusto. Ti Ti is brilliant and one of the best students I have ever taught in my three decades of teaching.

Over the years, I have provided one-liners to assist Ti Ti on her yellow brick road of life. Ti Ti has heard her doting grandfather talk about his mentor, Bobby Kennedy. She knows what I consider Bobby's most important one-liner, “Some men see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say, why not.”

My grandmother on my mother’s side had another one-liner that Ti Ti has heard many times. “I love me. I think I'm grand. When I go to heaven, I'll hold my hand.” Actually, it was a three-liner. It was my grandmother’s way of politely teaching her young grandchildren to behave themselves.

Another one-liner was my creation. “It is in giving that we get.” There is a negative sequel to that one-liner, which is, “The less we give, the less we get.” If either one-liner is questionable, one will need to rethink their mindset regarding reaching out to others to assist them on their journey down their yellow brick roads. Either one-liner is the essence of our being.

St. Francis of Assisi is credited with authorship of the Prayer of St. Francis.

This is Giotto’s painting of St. Francis of Assisi.

Regardless, whoever it was knew how to write. The prayer contains 15 virtues and a means to acquire them. If you wish to receive any of the virtues, you must start by giving what you wish to someone else first.

It seems, at first glance, to be a contradiction. I had read that prayer when I was in my teens, and I missed the message. In my twilight years, I finally grasped it. I came up with my one-liner and thought either I was an intellectual genius or someone had produced a more poetic one-liner than I had. It was then that I realized St. Francis influenced my one-liner.

This brings me back to Ti Ti. She emailed to suggest chatting again on WhatsApp and decided on a time and day. Chatting with Ti Ti provides me with precious and euphoric moments together. I thought I'd mention a new one-liner I created. However, before presenting my literary mindset, I googled it. Fortunately, it is totally my literary notion. This is my one-liner: “The world about which I dream often isn’t the world in which I live.” My creation takes Bobby’s one-liner, “Some men see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say, why not,” a step further.

My new one-liner addresses the issue when my dreams don’t come true. What am I going to do about unrealized hopes? It goes back to one of my favorite short one-liners: no pain, no gain. When my unrealized dreams are dashed, I have two choices. I can either quit or rethink how to use the pain to create a modified dream.

All of humanity has dreams about their lives, many of which won’t be accomplished. Suppose all my dreams or your dreams come true. If that became the new normal, life would not be a dream world. That new normal would result in apathy.

What makes us unique is that we have the opportunity to determine our destinies. It gives a reason for our being. My new one-liner provides us with the opportunity to address failed dreams. We all live in a world consisting of unrealized dreams. What we do with our dashed dreams provides each of us an opportunity to use our failed and hurtful times as a means to success. It is another Kierkegaardian either/or situation. Either we sit and bide our time, which will not get us anywhere. Or we can work around our failed dreams.

I failed to obtain my dream of Ti Ti coming to America for her education. It hurts me deeply. However, chatting with Ti Ti provides moments of sheer happiness. After we ended our chat, I received this video postscript to our time together on WhatsApp several moments later.