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.

1972: Dear Carder, Milligan, Heath, Eyler and Gamba Families, How to be a Real Neighbor
1972 Laura Max Rose 1972 Laura Max Rose

1972: Dear Carder, Milligan, Heath, Eyler and Gamba Families, How to be a Real Neighbor

Dear Columbine Street Neighborhood Families,

I have no idea how many times I rang your respective doorbells.

Occasionally, I rang to be helpful. More often I sprung into your day looking for something to do or eat. Thankfully, I have no memory of reaching out in a crisis. My Mom wished I hadn’t stopped by to announce she had “been spayed” after some kind of abdominal surgery. (I suspect she explained her hospital stay by using our family dog as reference).

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