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.
2000: Maternity Nurses at Methodist, A steady hand during the scariest thing I’ve ever done
Dear Methodist Hospital Maternity Nurses,
Waking up in the middle of the night, in a post-surgery haze, wearing paper underwear with a large incision across your belly is a very strange experience. Multiple times, over a 48 your period it was your job to coax me past my confusion to try to begin to master the scariest, but most rewarding thing I ever done- caring for every need of my newborn babies. Yes babies… mine came in a pair.