I don't know how long the link will be active, but this news story is about one of my cousins. A year or two before he died, David told my mom that there were only two men who had ever shown any constructive interest in his life. So my mom asked who they were, and he said one of them was my dad. Pressing further, my mom asked what my dad had ever done to merit the complement. "Once when I was little, I was trying to build something, and he showed me how to hold a hammer the right way."

I was told this story yesterday, and I can't stop thinking about it. Out of thirty-five or forty years of living, a guy remembers five minutes of "how to pound a nail" as a meaningful memory of feeling valued.

Kind of makes me reconsider all the moments I interact with everybody else. I get so lost in the past or the future; a past done and gone and a future which may never come, that I forget life is happening right now in this very moment—that life is happening only in this moment. And—my God—how the most brief, most simple of things can forever mean something to another soul.

Think about it. I know I will.