A few observations:

Resurrecting these memories reminded me of just how often people really do deliver for each other with no expectation that their effort be rewarded.  It gave me hope and the incentive to try to do the same.

I’m not a bucket list person.  Most people don’t have that luxury.  It is a privilege to enjoy the rewarding cycle of being curious, trying something new, failing a bit and succeeding.  I still want to try hard things and to finish what I’ve started.  Between about six-teen and fifty-five years old the “hard things” and the “had to” was a way of life.  Now it is a choice.  It never want to stop taking risks and trying.

I love the breaking of a glass at the celebratory end of a Jewish wedding… representative of life’s fragility and the reminder to us all to commit to pick up life’s pieces and try to create good. So, I conclude on a sobering story because life is messy and our world is a mess.  Creating the chance to say thank you is my way of picking up a few pieces of broken glass.

Finally, when did we stop putting a space between sentences?  There are some things I’m just incapable of evolving.

1970: Dear Joe Austin, My Accidental Manny
1970 Laura Max Rose 1970 Laura Max Rose

1970: Dear Joe Austin, My Accidental Manny

Dear Joe,

Sometime around 1970, direct from your deployment with the US Army in Vietnam, you appeared at our front door on Columbine Street in Denver, Colorado with a somewhat suspect recommendation from a family friend. Grateful for your service to our country (and what must have been an amazing first impression), my parents enthusiastically welcomed you into our home as a basement apartment tenant with a twist.

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