Kindergarten. The school bus dropped me off and I walked into an empty house.
Nobody home. Just a lunch bag on the counter with a note. "Go to Grandpa's."
He lived down the street. I ran the whole way.
Grandpa was the kind of man who would throw his cat in the pool, then dive in and swim after it to the other side. Sometimes he took me out for lunch to Mimi's Cafe. Just the two of us.
He was an airplane mechanic for many years. In airports, restaurants or wherever he was sitting, he would write notes to people on napkins and mail them. He used napkins, scrap paper, the back of an envelope, or whatever paper was available, because he wanted to write things in the moment he thought of them.
Years later we moved back to Arizona to be close to him because he wasn't doing well. Sunday afternoons after church, I often sat with him and listened.
He told me about trying to wire electricity to his house from the power pole because he had none. About his first car, a used Model T Ford.
Then he told me he would rather have a beat-up car that looked slow but was fast than a sleek car that looked fast but was slow.
He passed that winter, during my last year of high school.
I understood the car more with every year. Looks tell you very little. What it can do tells you the rest.
He never owned much. He wrote napkin notes and swam after his cat and took his grandson to lunch. The beat-up car that was fast.
This week, sit down with someone a generation or two ahead of you and just listen.
The good thing is, the people who shaped you keep teaching long after they're gone.
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Tell me your good thing this week. I read every one.