You know how I tell you that little things can happen in your life that you put away and later can have an interesting effect on your psyche and your development and your mental health and just feeling cool. Yeah, we're going to talk about that. Well, hello. Welcome to the Daily Grateful.
It's Wednesday. Do we do anything special on Wednesdays? No, Thursdays, we talk about podcast. Today, we talk about being grateful.
Oh, wait, I'm grateful. All right. I may have told you, you know, a day or so ago that I'm writing a series of books, small books, under a hundred page books. So very, very small to the points all about Florida gardening.
It's my latest project all about Florida gardening. The first one is going to be about lawn care. And I've been gathering up and doing my research and all of this good type of stuff in order to do that. And it got me thinking.
I may have talked a little bit about this, but it got me thinking about in nine. I figured out when this happened, 1990, this happened. 1990, the former Mrs. Croson, I owned an organic pesticide company.
We made Fleabowder and we sold it via mail order. That's the only way we sold it. Well, we would wholesale it, but we would sell to people via mail order. And that worked out well.
It worked out well. I remember Diane and I packaging this stuff up at our house in Tarpen Springs and then off to a warehouse and, you know, just going on and on and on from there. Well, then somewhere in 1990, sold a can of this stuff to a lady in Clearwater and she put in the check, you know, she mailed a check in to get it. Remember those days?
And she said, is there any way you could hand deliver this? And I said, yeah, why not? You know, why not? So we go over to her house.
She lived by a cemetery. I remember that and we met her and my goodness gracious was she a ball of fire and I could not remember her last name, but I thought it was Vandermeer. That's what I thought. And it turns out that her dad had written a book about organic gardening.
And I said, really? And actually, they self published these books. She self published a book on asthma. She gave me a copy of that because my son had asthma.
He outgrew it, but he had asthma. So she gave me a book that she and self publishing. In 1990 and in the 80s was a lot different than it is today. I mean, just a lot, lot different.
I could go into a whole dissertation about that, but really enjoyed talking with her. And as it turns out, her dad lived like a block away from me. I said, Oh, I would have him on my radio show because I had a big, a big ass radio show about gardening that was heard all over the country. And I said, you know, she said, so she gave me his address and she says, go knock on his door and tell him I sent you.
So I did. I went over and knocked on his door. And I said, you know, like to do this. Maybe have you on as a guest.
He gives me a copy of the book and he goes, there's no way I'm coming on as a guest. Why? Because I'm too shy and I cuss a lot. And I said, what?
He goes, I cuss a lot and I can't stop cussing. And you know, somebody's going to call and ask a question. I'm going to get pissed off. I said, OK, thank you very much.
Have a nice day. Bye bye. Well, then I took the book home and I looked it over. I sat on the sofa and I kind of perused through it and seemed interesting.
It was about 200 pages as I recall. And it seemed interesting. And then I had a stack of books. Now, in those days, publishers were sending me books like you would not believe.
And I would look at them. By the way, they were sending these to me in the vein hopes that I would have their author on as a guest. And I didn't like having authors on as a guest. I don't know why I done it.
And I just didn't throw me. I mean, a book really had to really had to thrill me. And you know, this book, you know, the natural gardening book, that kind of thrilled me and the fact that the guy would, you know, come right to my house and sit in the studio with me, that was kind of nice. But anyway, but that wasn't going to happen.
So I take the book, toss it in the pile of other books. And ever so often, because I had so many books, because I just kept coming, I would load these books up and I would take them up and donate them to a thrift shop. And his book got donated to a thrift shop. Probably shouldn't have done that, but I did.
And so let's fast forward now to now. And I said to myself, I said, self, you're going to write these books. It would be really cool if you had this book to look it over. So I Google Vandermeer and I didn't know his first name.
I did all kinds of stuff. Finally, I went on the Facebook and talked to, you know, you knew you grew up in an old clear water and I put a note out there. And, you know, what did it say? I think I have it right here.
I said, there was a man in clear water who wrote a book about organic gardening. His last name was Vandermeer. He had a daughter who also wrote books. Does anyone remember his first name?
I'm trying to find his book. Well, a million people popped in giving me a Vandermeer guy that was too young to be him because this guy was really old when I met him. So, but another guy by the name of John popped in with a Amazon link to the book. And he says, whoa, I said, this is fantastic.
Thank you. He says, you're welcome. And he says he had a daughter. And by the way, the guy's name was not Vandermeer.
It was Leo Van Meer. Leo Van Meer. And he had a daughter, the daughter I met was Mary Van Meer. And like I say, she published books and everything.
And I remember back then, this was like a little bit pre-internet. It was like AOL time of the year and everybody was on AOL. And I remember he's saying, you know, there's like 17 million people on AOL or something like that. Just the fact that I can get in front of them to sell my books is making me very excited.
And I said, yeah, and she just really seemed to know her crap. She really didn't. I made a middle-to-note to stay in touch with her, but I never did because I was busy, you know, and so her name was Mary Van Meer. Well, as it turns out, she passed away several years ago, about six or seven years ago.
She passed away. And John wrote about her. Mary Van Meer was his daughter. I worked with her on her campground book publishing company.
And later when she ran national centers for health and medical information, she was a wonderful, beautiful person, a great friend and employer. She passed away a number of years ago. She is missed. And then there was a link to her obituary.
So all of this stuff kind of came back to me. And I'm really excited about it because now I'm going to get the book and I'm going to use it for research for the series of books that I'm writing. And now because organics are so popular now, I want to see what he wrote. And he wrote this book in 1984.
So that's exciting. I'm not going to get it until the 16th of the month, but you know, something? When you plant little seeds, things happen. And I planted a little seed and I found these people again, even though they're both long on.
I found them again. And more importantly, I will have the book, which will not wind up in my pile of books to donate. And I will use it for research. I'm very grateful.
Ever think about somebody that you knew way back then and wondered what they're doing now or wondered what, you know, they were involved with that you might want to be involved with now? My answer to you is go for it. This is the Daily Grateful I'm Michael Gross. We will see you tomorrow.