Bupkus!

As a young girl I often sought comfort in old television shows. I was a Nick-at-Night junky and would stay up hours into the night escaping reality into the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. My best friends, Lucy Ricardo, Genie, Robert Petrie and Maxwell Smart joined me every night as I laughed, cried and eventually slept the night away. All the predicaments, schemes, situations, and special moments that I viewed in those late hours have stuck with me, but there is one episode in particular that though I don't remember it that well, I have taken from it a sort of motto you might say. And though I don't always follow my motto I do wholeheartedly believe in it.
This particular episode was of The Dick Van Dyke Show. It begins with Robert Petrie eating breakfast. He hears a song on the radio called Bupkus. This song, he soon recognizes, is one he wrote years ago with a fellow writer. Rob is irked, to say the least, that his old writing companion is making money off of his work. The show goes on with Rob seeking him out and rectifying the situation. But the word Bupkus intrigued me.
Soon after I made a trip to the library and researched this word. I discovered that it is a Yiddish word meaning "nothing." As in, "all we got was bupkus!" I thought this word was pretty cool. I liked the fact that I knew what it meant and I began using it when ever I could. It became my word. I used it as my handle on my very first AOL account, I wrote it on my notebooks and binders. And I came up with my own quote using my word. "Bupkus is impossible," I would say. You see, I incorporated my word’s meaning into an idea from a favorite Disney song, Never Say Never from An American Tail. This song sings about the idea that by saying "never" you are giving up all hope and accepting that what ever that something is, is impossible.
Now even as a young bright eyed adolescent I knew that nothing should be deemed impossible. This world is huge, with endless people, ideas, and possibilities. There are endless problems and thus endless solutions. With so many minds and situations at work one could never say "impossible" without having some margin of error. I believed anything was possible. So I attached this word to myself and began stating to those questioning my special word that I can achieve anything and that “nothing is impossible.” And as the years have gone by, experiences have been had, and I've seen so many amazing things I have come to believe that if you truly and wholeheartedly believe you can do something, then you can. The only question is how. Because after all, if you say never then there is no room for maybe.