A Pause To Remember

ON Totalfeckineejit's blog was a suggestion we all pause at 12 noon on New Years Day and remember those we have lost in the past year, decade or 100 years.
This is a gesture of remembrance, but also a light to hope for the coming year. Check out the festival of light and be inspired.
My list of people who have gone before me are Bob Jackson, the boy who walked with me down the aisle and up onto the stage at our high school graduation. He died in a automobile accident shortly after that. Drinking and speeding were the cause of his death. He was a passenger in the automobile and the first person my own age - that I was close to - to die. Mortality is a difficult concept to face when you are 18 years old.
Of course I gratefully recall my grandparents, Rose and Peter and Ira and Anna, the essence of everything we are today and the values we hold dear. My uncles, Frank, Truman, Ray, Bud; my aunts, Mildred, Jo, Mary, Min, Dorothy, Mary Lou and Tina.
In the photo above, right next to the candle, are my parents George and Margaret. To be born into their loving arms was one of the luckiest things to happen to me. I will miss and love them forever.
I remember Orv and Ruth, and Grandma and Grandpa Matteson - Georgia and Ernie - born in another century, believing that all you had to do with a bathtub or toilet ordered from Sears Roebuck was put them in a room and they would do their job. Plumbing? What's plumbing?
I recall other friends from school and the community, gone too soon.
In their memories, and for our children and grandchildren, let us all endeavor to make the world better in our small part of it. You never know how far goodness will spread. To start you off on the right foot this year, check out this spot on the dial, Don't Almost Give. I have found myself - too often - putting aside a charitable request envelope "for later" and then never doing anything with it. This is the year I put my energy where my mouth is, and my extra currency, also. Won't you do the same? No money? Your time, then. You will never regret it - femminismo
edited at 6:30 p.m. - I forgot my Aunt Ellen, who taught me that people who are "different" can also love life as strongly as any "normal" person and love God even more fiercely.