On the Father's Day before my father entered a nursing home, I gave him an Elmo doll. Like the colored pencils and sketchbook I bought him a year earlier, this was a desperate attempt to bring some joy to my increasingly bedridden father. Years ago, my father suffered a stroke which left him in bed for the rest of his life.

At the sight of Elmo, my three elder sisters shook their heads, certain that our father who was anything but childish would not like it. Sure enough, my father, 76, broke into that unpleasant smile that barely concealed his dislike.

“What on earth is this?” shouted my sisters, bursting into laughter.

“Daddy knows why I give him this,” I said, thinking that they had no idea what Elmo meant to my father. To my disappointment, my father shrugged. How could he not remember? Years earlier, I had been in the kitchen and heard something rare from the living room: laughter. I ran downstairs and saw that Elmo was on the PBS cooking show “The Frugal Gourmet”. “I don’t know what it is about him that gets to me,” my father choked out between laughter and tears. “He's just so funny!”

As my father lay in the nursing home, I would visit him in the evenings. We watched old movies with the lights off. Even though he never asked for it, I brought Elmo from home and put him where my father could see him. Before leaving, I would take Elmo from the dresser and place him in my father’s immobile arm. A slight smile would appear on his face. It never looked softer.

My parents divorced when I was 5, making my mother a single parent. We had little money, but my mum gave me a lot of love. Each night, she sat me on her lap and spoke the words that would change my life," Kemmons, you are certain to be a great man and you can do anything in life if you work hard enough to get it."

At fourteen, I was hit by a car and the doctors said I would never walk again. Every day, my mother spoke to me in her gentle, loving voice, telling me that no matter what those doctors said. I could walk again if I wanted to badly enough. She drove that message so deep into my heart that I finally believed her. A year later, I returned to school— walking on my own!

When the Great Depression(大萧条)occurred, my mum lost her job. Then I left school to support the family. At that moment, was determined never to be poor again.

My real change occurred on a vacation I took with my wife and five kids in 1951.I was angry that the second-class hotel charged an extra $ 2 for each child. That was too expensive for the average American family. I decided to open a motel(汽车旅馆)for families that would never charge extra for children. 'There were plenty of doubters at that time.

Not surprisingly .mother was one of my strongest supporters. We experienced a lot of challenges. But with my mother's words deeply rooted in my soul. I never doubted we would succeed

Fifteen years later, we had the largest hotel system in the world—Holiday Inn. In 1979 my company had 1,759 inns in more than fifty countries with an income of $ 1 billion a year.

You may not have started out life in the best situation. But if you can find a task in life worth working for and believe in yourself, nothing can stop you.

One evening last summer, when I asked my 17-year-old son, Ray, for help with dinner, his response surprised me, “What’s a colander（漏勺）?” he asked.

I could only blame myself. Nobody’s hands went in the sauce except my own. But that night, as I explained with a touch of panic that a colander is the thing with holes in it, I wondered what else I hadn’t prepared Ray for. I felt confident that I’d raised a self-reliant boy, as we all try to do. But could he boil water? Sew on a button? Wash his clothes without turning them pink? No, no and no. Suddenly it hit me: He’d be leaving the house in a year to attend college. No way was I going to set a spoiled prince into the world.

As parents, while we focus on our child’s confidence and character, we perhaps don’t always consider that we are also raising someone’s future roommate, boyfriend, husband, or father. I wanted to know that I’d raised a boy who would never ask the woman in his life, “What’s for dinner?” So I came up with a plan: I would offer Ray a private home economics course. I was delighted to find that he didn’t say no.

For two hours, three days a week, Ray was all mine. One day, as his tomato sauce reduced on the stove, he washed and seasoned a chicken for toasting. Then he rolled out the piecrust（馅饼皮）and filled it with apples, all while listening to my explanation on the importance of preheating an oven.

Three of my four grandparents were tailors, so Ray was genetically programmed to quickly master the basics, like mending a split seam or refastening a button. One day we covered Advanced Laundry, in which I taught him never to mix a red sweatshirt with white shirts or put sweaters in the dryer. I knew that he would rather have been shooting hoops in the driveway than learning to mend socks with his mother -- he tried to beg off sewing lessons, even though I insisted that one day, someone would find the sight of him fixing his own shirt very attractive -- but it couldn’t be denied that he was learning, and more than just housekeeping. “I appreciate more what you do as a mom,” he told me one day.

Ray now understands the finer points of cooking, and more important, he realizes there’s nothing masculine（男子气的）about being helpless. Not only can he make his own dinner, he can make it for his family, too. That’s what I call a man.