You say, you couldn’t make payroll yesterday because your clients have stretched out their payments. Or, you can’t sell products because your bank has frozen your credit line. Maybe, your Horoscope Sign was a 5? Because, because; we can always find excuses upon which to blame our troubles.

FACT: even though the stock market declined 83 points yesterday and the new Stimulus Plan will place future generations at risk, guess what didn’t happen, yesterday?

Brian Williams on the NBC Evening News didn’t broadcast any report by IMS (Immigration Services) about an alarming number of visa application cancellations. Foreigners are still lining up at the gates of our great, but temporarily troubled country, waiting patiently for their legal entry papers. Illegal aliens are still tragically dying in rickety old leaky boats on the high seas off the Florida coast. I’m sure, a few even came across our Southwestern border in the past few nights.

No matter how good or bad Friday the 13^th was for us, it was still a better day than for most foreigners.

Whatever daily calamities challenge small business owners like us, we have much more to be thankful for than when my father first set foot on US soil in 1919. Nicholas Demetrious Alagazakis (Nicholas D. Allen, the Americanized version) was a Greek Immigrant who found himself in a strange, foreign country in a time of war.

Not quite penniless, but with just the clothes on his back, and a working fluency of English; he was destined to make his family of four boys proud of his American Legacy.

Thanks to an established Greek Community in New York City, where he quickly made friends, he found employment and later became an insurance salesman for the Prudential Life Insurance Company.

At the end of WW1, he brought my English mother, Dolly Fortune, to this country where they became citizens. Hard work and good fortune empowered him to become a ship owner of the Prudential Steamship Company headquartered at Battery Place in New York City.

In WW2, he and his company prospered and he moved his growing family to Florida in the late 1940’s where he settled into a new business as owner of the Florida Yacht Basin on the Miami River.

When my brothers and I were growing up, a day never went by when Nicholas didn’t thank this great country for the opportunities it afforded he and his children. While TV and radio were daily distractions, we were constantly infused with his spirit of gratitude and reminded to fulfill our individual American goals and destinies. And, we have. My brother Homer became a ship owner; Winston, an architect; Milton, a software company executive; and me, a sales training consultant.

Our legacy was repeated millions of times in every corner of our great country. Through the Great Depression and the many peaks and valleys of historic economic trends; we have weathered harsh circumstances and still prospered individually and grown our nation.

That’s my story. That’s why I am eternally thankful to be an American. That’s why I still count Friday, the 13^th, as my Lucky Day. Every day I breathe our air is my blessing.

I’d like to hear your story.