A grandmother was born in a small West Texas farming town on August 26, 1929, two months and three days before Black Tuesday, the Stock Market crash that started the Great Depression. As the youngest daughter of sharecroppers, who earned their living by picking cotton, she knew the meaning of barely getting by. Times were tough and she learned to never waste anything.
Her Uncle Jess was a compassionate man who always treated her with kindness. Each time she would visit him, she always left with the same feeling: I am special. After all, she was the only person who was allowed to drink from his special pink drinking glass. One day, she took the pink glass out to the water cooler, a special room that stored and cooled the water generated from the windmill. Out in the water cooler, she dropped the glass. Looking down at the hundreds of glass fragments, she began to cry. She had been entrusted with this special glass and now it was broken.
Her crying was interrupted when she heard Uncle Jess call out, "Ruby Nell, I was thinking. I'm tired of that silly old pink glass. Would you please break it for me?" She ran back to him calling out, with the enthusiasm that only a six-year-old can summon, "I did it, Uncle Jess! I did it!"
The way we choose to respond when others make mistakes can cause them to feel ashamed or can allow them to remember our kindness and share our stories with future generations. We choose our legacy that gets passed down to others.
I expect to pass through this life but once. Therefore, if there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do for another human being, let me do it now, for I shall not pass this way again.
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