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video credit: USA Today
Denise Wilson: Bus Drive Extraordinaire
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For Valentine Lovers Without A Valentine Line
I created this scroll for a post a couple years ago but thought there might be a few who just can’t come up with the right line for their valentine. Here are 50 from the past that you can pick and choose from. Please …don’t confine yourself to only one …wonder awaits!
I hope you enjoy 50 Shades of Love, and Happy Valentine’s Day with love to all.
50 Shades of Love from Paul Mark Sutherland
- Life is the flower for which love is the honey. —Victor Hugo
- Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. —Plato
- The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds. —Nicholas Sparks
- If you judge people, you have no time to love them. —Mother Teresa
- Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
—Zelda Fitzgerald - A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you. —Elbert Hubbard
- Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own. —Robert A. Heinlein
- You don’t love someone because of their looks or their clothes or their car. You love them because they sing a song only your heart can understand. —L.J. Smith
- For it was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart. It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul. —Judy Garland
- Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. —Lao Tzu
- Where there is love there is life. —Mahatma Ghandi
- Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality. —Emily Dickinson
- When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others… —John Lennon
- I love you, and it’s getting worse. —Joseph Morris
- I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees. —Pablo Neruda
- Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies. —Aristotle
- If you love someone, put their name in a circle not a heart, because a heart can be broken, but a circle goes on forever. —Brian Littrell
- If I had a flower for every time I thought of you…I could walk through my garden forever. —Alfred Tennyson
- Love is a game that two can play and both win. —Eva Gabor
- I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul.
—Victor Hugo - When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth. —Jess C. Scott
- Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new. —Ursula K. LeGuin
- There’s this place in me where your fingerprints still rest, your kisses still linger, and your whispers softly echo. It’s the place where a part of you will forever be a part of me. —Gretchen Kemp
- Come sleep with me, we won’t make love, love will make us. —Julio Cortázar
- Morning without you is a dwindled dawn. —Emily Dickinson
- Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.
—Maya Angelou - The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
—W. Somerset Maugham - Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone. —Mitch Albom
- Where there is great love, there are always miracles. —Willa Cather
- Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence. —David Byrne
- I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary. —Margaret Atwood
- I want morning and noon and nightfall with you. I want your tears, your smiles, your kisses…the smell of your hair, the taste of your skin, the touch of your breath on my face. I want to see you in the final hour of my life…to lie in your arms as I take my last breath. —Lisa Kleypas
- If I know what love is, it is because of you. —Hermann Hesse
- One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life. That word is love. —Sophocles
- Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth, ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that, it lights the whole sky. —Hafiz
- Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing. —Mother Teresa
- Who, being loved, is poor? —Oscar Wilde
- Love is always open arms. If you close your arms about love you will find that you are left holding only yourself. —Leo Buscaglia
- I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.
—Paulo Coelho - If you have love, you don’t need to have anything else, and if you don’t have it, it doesn’t matter much what else you have. —James Barrie
- Love is the strongest force the world possesses, and yet it is the humblest imaginable. —Mahatma Gandhi
- Love is a flower that grows in any soil, works its sweet miracles undaunted by autumn frost or winter snow, blooming fair and fragrant all the year, and blessing those who give and those who receive. —Louisa May Alcott
- The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough is love. —Henry Miller
- To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead.
—Bertrand Russell - The soul that can speak through the eyes can also kiss with a gaze.
—Gustavo Adolfo Becquer - How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach. —Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. —Oscar Wilde
- In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities. —Janos Arany
- I love you, not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you.
—Roy Croft - I will love you always. When this red hair is white, I will still love you. When the smooth softness of youth is replaced by the delicate softness of age, I will still want to touch your skin. When your face is full of the lines of every smile you have ever smiled, of every surprise I have seen flash through your eyes, when every tear you have ever cried has left its mark upon your face, I will treasure you all the more, because I was there to see it all. I will share your life with you …and I will love you until the last breath leaves your body or mine. —Laurell K. Hamilton
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Kristopher Hudson: Always Encourage Others
Extend Your Hand, Don’t Point It
ANCHORAGE — Kenyada Waters was driving through town when she noticed a man on the side of the road. He was holding up a cardboard sign that read, “Laid off 2 long. Anything helps.” Waters noticed all of the cars in front of her drove right past him.
Something in her told her to stop and hear his story.
The man introduced himself as Richard and explained his situation. He told her how he’s been a tree-trimmer for nearly 20 years but found himself down on his luck after getting laid off.
Richard said his cellphone was cut off because he ran out of money. Standing on the side of the road with a cardboard sign was his last resort. He told Waters that people would drive by him and yell out, “Get a job you stupid, lazy bum!” Richard told Waters that he had submitted over 20 job applications but since his phone was turned off, he wasn’t able to hear back.
Waters says his story inspired her to help. She decided to pay for two months’ worth of cellphone service for him. “This man cried in AT&T!” Waters said.
As soon as his phone powered back on, there was a job opportunity waiting for him in his text message log.
“It might be you one day!” Waters wrote on a GoFundMe page she has set up for Richard.
“Extend your hand don’t point it!”
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This story originally appeared in USA Today:
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Thanks for Helping Me to Smell the Flowers
Looking back at some old notebooks from my younger days, I came across an entry that simply stated, “She said, ‘Smell my flower,’ to me today.” With those three words, I instantly found myself back in 6th grade and recalled the exact moment that seemed important enough to commemorate in my diary.
In 6th grade, I lived in Lexington, Kentucky with my mother and step-father. We had moved there from New Jersey when I was near the end of 5th grade. Under the guise that we were “taking a vacation” to visit our friends in Kentucky, our mother had checked my younger and sister out in the middle of a school day. After a week in Kentucky, we were told my mother and father were getting a divorce – and that we would never return to our school, our friends, our home, or our pets.
By 6th grade, a few months had gone by since…
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Final Salute For An Invisible Neighbor
Andrew Moore lived alone and died alone. He was raised in an orphanage, never married and outlived his friends. For his last 40 years, the World War II veteran slept on a couch in a rent-controlled efficiency apartment in the nation’s capital.
The 89-year-old pensioner died in December with no will, no instructions and no next of kin. He lay in a cold room at the D.C. medical examiner’s office, where the unclaimed dead are usually destined for a nameless pauper’s grave.
Instead, on Friday, Moore was given a hero’s sendoff at Arlington National Cemetery. A uniformed honor guard escorted Moore’s flag-covered remains. In place of a silent goodbye, a bugler played taps and three volleys of rifle fire marked his passing.
How was a lonely man diverted from the oblivion of a potter’s field for the glory of his country’s most hallowed resting place? It was the work of a family Moore may not have known he had: the residents of State House, a post-WWII apartment building at the edge of Washington’s Embassy Row.
His neighbors in that vertical village didn’t know much about the affable old-timer who smoked on the front steps. But they knew this: He deserved a dignified goodbye.
Most residents of the eight-story, 308-unit State House probably never heard Andy Moore’s name. He was just one of the building’s fixtures, the friendly Redskins fanatic — always wearing the burgundy-and-gold cap — in Apartment 307. He would bring the staff members Hershey’s Kisses from his outings to CVS or cookies from the McDonald’s on 17th Street in Northwest Washington, where he would play pickup chess.
“I offered to replace his AC unit once, and he said not to bother,” said building engineer Damian Greenleaf, who took a half-day off from work to attend Moore’s funeral at Arlington. “He said, ‘Don’t bother, I prefer the breeze.’”
It was Bill Sheppard and Nick Addams who spearheaded the effort to make Moore’s funeral something more than minimal. The two single retirees count themselves among the State House’s “sociables,” those residents who make a point to chat in the lobby, to pierce the urban anonymity of a busy city dwelling.
©Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post
Nick Addams and and Bill Sheppard attend the memorial service they arranged for their neighbor, World War II vet Andrew Moore, 89, at Arlington National Cemetery.
Moore was a sociable, too. That’s how they pieced together bits of his history: a stint in the Navy, dispatched to the Philippines; a few years in the Coast Guard. He had worked at a federal warehouse and then for an insurance company, maybe as a janitor. For a man who loved to gab and could delay the mail carrier with a half-hour of football talk, he didn’t share much about himself.
“We knew a little, but there were big gaps in it,” Sheppard said.
He had no family, about that he was clear. He told more than one person that his mother was a Native American who dropped him off at a Catholic orphanage in Omaha.
“I always assumed it was Boys Town,” said Sheppard, 65, who retired young from a career with an international airport vendor.“ He was quite proud of it. He said the priests and the nuns taught him discipline.”
Boys Town confirmed that an Andrew Moore with the same birthday lived at the famous facility in 1942 when he was 16, but not for long. “We don’t know much, because he was only with us a month and then he ran away,” said spokeswoman Kara Neuverth.
Moore was in his 70s when Sheppard moved to the building 15 years ago. Moore had a knack for putting strangers at ease, and the two struck up a smokers’ friendship outside the front door. Soon Sheppard was helping his upstairs neighbor make sense of the cable box. They watched a few games together, even though Sheppard is no football fan.
“It was impossible not to like him,” Sheppard said.
Moore’s health faded in recent years, as did his memory. He began to call Nick Addams “Calvin” for unknown reasons.
“I just answered to it,” Addams said with a laugh.
‘We should do something’
After a fall in 2014, Moore spent time in a rehabilitation hospital. Officials there had a court-appointed guardian assigned to him and wanted to move him to a nursing home. But Moore insisted on returning to State House.
“Mr. Moore was a very strong-willed character, and he was having none of it,” said attorney Charles Fitzpatrick, who served as Moore’s guardian. “I was dubious, but I really admired the fact that he was able to do what he wanted to do.”
Moore came back with a walker, always asserting he would soon be done with it. He never walked unaided again, but he did live another eight months on his own.
“This was his home,” Addams said.
When an ambulance pulled up in December, Sheppard immediately thought of Moore. Sure enough, a desk clerk told him Moore had been taken to MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. A few days later, a manager told Sheppard he had died of heart failure.
Sheppard and Addams were in the lobby, lamenting the loss of their neighbor. That could have been it. He wasn’t exactly a friend. They didn’t know much about him. It was city living; people come and go.
But they kept thinking of two things: the Navy and the Coast Guard.
“I’m a veteran, too,” said Addams, who served in the Army during the Korean War. “I thought we should do something.”
Addams is also a D.C. tour guide, a retirement gig that has made him very familiar with the rites and rituals of Arlington National Cemetery. He knew that although it was hard to qualify for an Arlington grave, any veteran with someone pushing for him could have his ashes inurned there, with full military honors.
It was an instant plan. Sheppard was the writer, drafting the appeal for funds they would hang on every doorknob in the building. Addams was the paper pusher, digging up Moore’s service record from the Pentagon, navigating the bureaucracies.
“The medical examiner’s office was extremely helpful,” Addams said. When a person there “heard that he was a veteran, she said they could arrange for him to be buried at Quantico. But we were committed to Arlington. There is no place like Arlington.”
Under D.C. law, unclaimed or indigent deceased are cremated at public expense and buried with multiple sets of ashes in a single casket. Veterans, when they are identified, are sent to Quantico National Cemetery. But after a 30-day waiting period, anyone willing to shoulder the expense of burial can arrange to have the body sent to a funeral home.
“It doesn’t happen in a lot of our cases, but we do see the community come together like this, church members, neighbors,” said Jennifer Love, a forensic anthropologist at the agency. “We call it releasing to the ‘next of friend.’ ”
Finally, bearing a letter from the medical examiner’s office explaining how he came to have custody of Moore’s remains, Addams went to Arlington. At first, officials were reluctant to recognize him as the crucial PADD (Person Authorized to Direct Disposition). “I had to ask for a supervisor,” Addams said. “Usually they are talking to a brother or a close friend. I was just the guy down the hall.”
Meanwhile, Sheppard’s solicitations were paying off. Envelopes began to slide under Addams’s door: $5, $20, a few $50s, one check for $250. In all, State House residents gave about $2,000 to honor a man some had never said more than hello to. The pair sent each donor a thank-you note and, when plans were complete, information about the funeral.
They spent about $1,500 on the cremation, a cremation certificate, the death certificate. They will give the leftover money to a veterans group.
They decided not to buy a special urn. Moore wouldn’t have cared about that, they said.
So Friday, with a cool wind whipping across Arlington’s hills, the Stars and Stripes draped the cardboard box containing Moore’s ashes. A Coast Guard honor guard folded the flag with grave precision before handing it to Sheppard. After the ceremony, Addams was given a felt bag containing the 21 shells fired in Moore’s honor.
And as his neighbors — make that his family — looked on, a man who spent his life alone took his place for eternity amid a host of heroes.
This story originally appeared in the Washington Post
It was written by Steve Hendrix
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Giving Without Cost
Here are six ways we can give ourselves away daily without cost.
Beautiful words that are often attributed to Francis of Assisi, however the actual author is unknown. They first appeared in print over one hundred years ago as part of a prayer titled Peace Prayer. Our world is still in dire need of each.
Please contribute today. Thank you.
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Mr. Joe
Random Acts of Kindness Week
14 Less Traditional Ways To Give Love On Valentine’s Day …or Any Day
Choose one …or a bunch!
- Deliver candy, balloons, or cards to a local disability day care facility.
- Give food to a local food pantry — call first to find out what their pressing needs are.
- Go to a busy building that doesn’t have automatic doors and be the doorman/woman for 30 minutes. Smile at everyone and wish each a good day. If anyone asks why you’re doing what you’re doing, tell them, with a big smile, because it’s Valentine’s Day.
- Deliver one or two dozen heart shaped cookies to an elderly couple or individual living in your neighborhood. Make sure you introduce yourself and get their names if you haven’t already. Also, make sure you leave a couple of really big smiles, and a compliment or two.
- Spend 30 minutes visiting someone in a nursing home facility who doesn’t receive regular visitors. Ask the staff, they’ll let you know whom to visit. Don’t go at dinner/supper time.
- Create or buy six Valentine cards and deliver them to a local nursing home. Write some fun, funny, or sentimental things inside. Leave them unsealed and unaddressed. Take them to the administration office or nurse station and ask if they would select six individuals and deliver them. They can add the person’s name and seal the envelope. (they’ll need to look inside envelopes from strangers — even nice strangers)
- Deliver one or two dozen heart shaped cookies to the staff at a local DMV or post office. (or, make four dozen and combine numbers 4 and 7)
- Tell someone that you love them — someone that you love very much, but you haven’t actually told them in quite some time.
- Volunteer at a free meal site for a couple of hours. Usually, they can always use additional help.
- Donate some of your valued and useful clothes to a local clothing distribution center that serves struggling individuals and families. Current season clothing is always best.
- Smile and say hello to every person you make eye contact with for the entire day. Hold the eye contact for at least three seconds.
- Help two people who appear to be struggling to accomplish a task (sweep, shovel, load a vehicle, etc., if you looking for the opportunity to help, you’ll find it).
- Refrain from saying ANYTHING negative about ANY individual for the entire day — including YOURSELF.
- Call an elderly relative or individual who has had a positive impact in your earlier life. Choose someone you haven’t talked with for some time, let them know that you were thinking of them, and are grateful for the influence they had in your life.
Note: If you partake in one or more of these love-filled gifts, they’ll be one additional love recipient …you!
Happy Valentine’s Day to all.
GYA today 