Binding: Digital
Label: Amazon
Manufacturer: Amazon
Number Of Pages: 10
Publication Date: 2006-08-25
Publisher: Amazon
Release Date: 2006-08-25
Studio: Amazon

This is a true story. My father wanted you to hear it, and so I wrote it for you, and for him, of course. Did you ever see the movie, Pay it Forward? It promotes a truly inspiring message: when someone does you a favor, no need to pay it back—pay it forward and do a favor for someone else. This story, my father's story, has an element of that in it. Perhaps it is more than an element. I don't know. You can decide. 100% of my royalties for this story will be donated to Casa de Ampara, a children's charity in my town.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Reality Gives Birth to the Surreal and Gives Meaning to Life
Comment: Crafted from real-world experiences, Kathe Gogolewski engagingly weaves a story of ever-lasting love and compassion through the odd circumstances between herself and her father.

Life, death, conscious, unconsciousness and the materialistic take on all new meanings for anyone fortunate enough to read "The Golden Coin."

For those of us who have suffered the varying stages of grief, and experienced what seemed to be elements of the paranormal through our dreams- this book will touch your heart and ultimately bring you feelings of peace, joy and a deeper understanding of the meaning of life.

I love Amazon Shorts, as they offer a reader with scant time to spare an opportunity to fulfill desires for satisfying prose. Kathe Gogolewski spins a wonderful, compelling tale in only eight pages- brilliantly done!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A Father's Gift
Comment:
We all have vivid dreams, and often we relate them to family and friends. They usually listen and say things like, "Wow! That was some dream alright." Seldom does this dream become a life changing experience for the listener. In "The Gold Coin" it does.

The author starts the narrative by describing a dream her father related to her when she visited him in the hospital. He dreamed that he was transported to a beautiful wild garden where he discovered that he was holding gold coins. He started giving them out to people who found that once they had a gold coin all their needs disappeared. These people passed them on to others who also gave them away.

As time passed, the author's memory of her father's dream faded, until fifteen years later when she suddenly remembered the dream in vivid detail. This began her journey toward self discovery. However, it was only after her father's death and through a series of events that she came to understand what the dream truly meant and to appreciate it as the gift it was, her father's gold coin to her.

This is a story of a daughter's love for her father, but most importantly, it is one woman's discovery of what really matters in life.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Amen...Amen...Amen...
Comment: As the title suggests..I don't know whether to review or testify... this story and the telling of it touched my heart so deeply. The Message Kathe Gogolewski shares with us from her own deeply moving experience brings goose bumps...brings tears...brings a deep satisying JOY. Kathe orchestrates these reactions superbly, introducing us to her father, herself, and a dream he has shortly after surviving very serious heart surgery. She begins with her initial reaction...a clever "dream interpretation" meeting a somewhat bored reaction from the dreamer, her dad.

From that first well crafted word portrait, she proceeds to the next: Crisis over...life resumes. Some changes perhaps, but small ones...nothing as earth-moving as the dream itself would suggest. With the return to normalcy, the dream begins to fade from her life.

The picture changes again and once more her dad faces a life-threatening situation. Again the family gathers...again the emotions are stirred...only this time her father dies, his wife, children and grandchildren gathered round.

Now we follow her into grief... a grief in which previously held values prove inadequate to hold and explain, much less comfort the bereaved daughter of this kindly yet otherwise...so we might THINK...unremarkable man. Thus far, Ms. Gogolewski has described stages almost all of us have experienced at one time or another...stages made recognizable, even empathetic, by her vivid word portraits.

So far a great story...and one I enjoyed because I followed along with the loved ones of my own life so easily...so comfortably. But as good as it is thus far...it is nothing...NOTHING... to what Kathe shares with us next.

It begins with the kind of reunion any of us might have with the memory of a recently departed loved one...the finding of the three coins, which the bereaved daughter readily identifies with her dad's dream of long ago. Definitely beyond coincidence, yet nothing remarkable... sufficently unremarkable so that the coins remain forgotten in a pocket as the jeans go into the wash, then the dryer.

Yet it is here that the hand of the loving father reaches out from beyond the grave to comfort his beloved daughter and fill her with a message of Love and Truth that will no doubt sustain Kathe and any of us privileged to share this story for the rest of our lives. For Kathe it has the added bonus of telling her, not by faith but by KNOWLEDGE, that her dad is still there...still a part of her...not visible but real...discernable and loving as much as ever...and maybe even more so.

For all of us is the joy of the dream's significance...realized at last down to its most subtle nuance,combining the familiar spiritual imperative that one cannot truly possess something until one has let it go...a verity the true realization of which can be a joyful experience in itself... with an additional plus that instructs that by not merely letting go, but in giving to others, what the person retains is so much more than he or she had to begin with. For now two are enriched instead of one, the same "gold coin" enriching the giver...the receiver...then the ones to whom the receiver then gives, and so on down the line, resulting in a potentially limitless number of persons enriched by that one gold coin. For in the giving of it the giver receives true riches, a certain knowledge his needs will be fulfilled.

To this Eternal Truth so much more eloquently expressed in the simple yet majestic prose of the author than my fumbling efforts here have done, I am compelled to add my own Testimony. Hungry...homeless...separated from those I loved most in the world with no hope of reunion some fifteen years ago, I was rescued out of the blue by two saintly people who wanted nothing in return. I had been a proud man, confident in my not inconsiderable talents, my confidence only bloated by the siren song of worldly esteem. Then, in a devastating 24 hours, it was all swept away, and with it all that I had amassed in my pride and ambition, leaving me starving, apathetic and lying in a gutter where those good people found me.

As they slowly got me talking, thinking and eventually even laughing again, a previously inconceivable transformation occurred. As I was reunited with my beloved wife and children, I was united with entirely new values, values occuring to me not through preaching, but through the example of my rescuers. Within a couple years, I took my reunited family to a remote part of the world, to teach my skills to others who wanted desperately to learn them, rather than use them, as I'd previously intended, as a means to self-enrichment. And in sharing and passing these skills on, I discovered a joy the like of which I had never known...as pride and pretension vanished, there grew in their place a closeness with me my wife and children had not previously experienced and the satisfaction experienced by all underpaid but devoted teachers. When disability ended my practice of my profession some ten years later, I returned to America possessed of friends and a familial closeness previously undreamed of by me, and I now greet each new day on a small disability pension happier and more confident than ever that I have all the riches I could ever aspire to.

So it was that Kathe's eloquent, emotional rendering of the Heaven-sent experience with her dad and his dream those many years ago and after his death caused the tears and the goosebumps I mentioned at the outset. Kathe Gogolewski's story is Truth itself...a divinely inspired Truth she shares with us so vividly...inviting us all to begin, or continue, with whatever time may remain to us, to pass on to others whatever spiritual and material wealth we may possess, and in so doing to be spiritually, emotionally and yes, even materially enriched...as enriched as you will ever need to be. Five Stars

John W. Cassell

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A touching story!
Comment: A very touching and emotional story about a moment of connection between a father and a daughter. The definition of the connection as a gift to be passed on is what makes the story truly inspirational. A very nice lift in your day!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: An uplifting message for the heart...
Comment: A very well told and touching story... with a lot of truth to it! A solid "moral" with a very peaceful and freeing message to the heart. This is not just a must-read, but a must-have and read again and again. Pass it on to others! You can feel the sincerity of the author through throughout the story. :)

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