Life can sometimes seem like an uphill climb, can’t it?

Comedian Red Buttons once did a routine in which he told of a bare dinner table. He was a teen and his family was poor. Around the table stood his family dressed in overcoats because they couldn’t afford heat. There was his mother dividing the half-loaf of stale bread among a dozen kids, who swept up and ate the crumbs.

“Then,” adds Red Buttons, “then came the Depression!”

Buttons was exaggerating, of course. But it does seem sometimes that, when times are bad, problems just keep coming.

Former President Richard M. Nixon wrote a book titled Six Crises. One day when he was autographing Six Crises at a bookstore, he asked the buyer to whom he should autograph his book. The man smiled and said, “You just met your seventh crisis; my n…