News to feed your soul--a challenge for my fellow Coolerites

[Noodle]

As we approach the end of 2014, a year of great tumult and tragedy (like every other year of mankind's existence), yet, plausibly declared as one of the best years in history, I think we can all agree that this board has had its ups and downs as well. Still, even though I bleed Old Gold and Black, I love coming to this place. It's quirky little outpost where I have had my mind cracked open a little wider, honed my knives at times, and even discovered I was wrong from time to time.

Many of you know that I occasionally post about feel good stories from time to time, my so-called News to Feed Your Soul posts. At one time I even pondered creating a website devoted to such stories--intermittently with pondering about someday opening a restaurant, writing a novel, writing a screenplay, buying an old convertible, etc. You know, the kind of stuff everyone ponders at one time or another.

But since I have no plans to start such a website, I figured I would do the next best thing. As a way to ring out 2014 and usher in 2015, I challenge everyone to post their own News to Feed Your Soul story. Post about something that touches your soul, delivering it to the rest of us to enjoy. No rules or guidelines; just whatever gives you a nice warm feeling and optimism that there really are far, far more good people than the bad ones you see on the evening news.

I'll start with a modest one in this thread in a few minutes just to get things rolling.

 

[Noodle]

A bike is a special thing to a child


I loved website:

Close your eyes and think about every childhood holiday or birthday gift you received. What is the single distinct gift about which you remember the day, event, color, style, brand and what you did the moment after receiving your gift? For many, this positive lifelong memory will be the day you received your first new bike. Now, imagine the tears of joy and squeals of glee that children with a history of abuse and neglect would experience if they see a shiny two-wheeled surprise under the tree in 2014. Positive lifelong memories are in short supply for many of these kids. Help the Bike Lady create this magical experience.

Well done Ms. Koch, well done.

 

[hoot1]

NBC Nightly News will feed your soul...

...with each program as introduced by Brian Williams ending with an example of heretofore unknown Americans helping their fellow man with acts of compassion and kindness.

I think of our own Noodle who does the same here at the Cooler when I see this.

Might call this watching Noodle Nightly.

 

[TheOriginalHappyGoat]

Here's one about the little things...

Last month, a law student in Edmonton parked in a residential neighborhood and forgot to turn his lights off. One of the residents, instead of laughing at the misfortune of the student who was parking near his house with no right, wanted to help him jump his car after the battery died. Since he apparently had to leave, he ran an extension cord out to the fence, placed a battery charger out there with it, and left a note on the car telling the driver where to find the equipment and how to use it to recharge his battery.

For the record, it snowed that day and the high was 26 in Edmonton, so it would have been more than a small headache for that law student to have a dead battery.

goat

Nice move.

 

[GOIU]

This is mine two fold

One I and my kids are runners and if you've ever been to a cross country meet you know everyone is cheering for their school for the front runners...it's when you watch the kids cheer for everyone in the back no matter what without being asked or told.
in addition anytime I catch myself thinking "kids these days" I watch this.
This post was edited on 12/30 9:32 PM by GOIU

Link

 

[Noodle]

One more from me today...an update on Lauren Hill

As I hope all of you know by now, Lauren Hill is the young woman with terminal brain cancer who never let go of her dream to play college basketball. She pulled it off in November,with the help of her teammates and their opponent. Sold out Cintas Center (Xavier Univ.), live nationwide TV broadcast, etc.

Well, Lauren had another goal: raise $1,000,000 for supporting research for a cure for her type of brain cancer.

Tonight, Lauren scored once again. An anonymous donation of $116,000 put her way over the top in her quest to raise $1,000,000 in a little more than one month.

Bravo, Lauren. Bravo.



http://espn.go.com/womens-college-basketball/story/_/id/12100507/lauren-hill-charity-reaches-1-million-donations

 

[Noodle]

Love it!

Reminds me a little bit of the 17th hour at an Ironman triathlon when everyone, particularly the top finishers, to cheer on people trying to beat the midnight cutoff.

As for kids these days, the way they treat my son on a daily basis has me convinced that our future is indeed very bright.

 

[Noodle]

What a great story!

Just goes to show how such a simple act of kindness--one that costs nothing--can have such a big impact on another human being. Just as importantly, it sounds like it has inspired the recipient to pay it forward.

Cool story--thanks for sharing that one.

 

[Noodle]

Brian Williams is great, and other news outlets are doing similar things

One of my favorite TV shows is CBS Sunday Morning, and they do a lot of uplifting stories. I really wish they would bring back the "Everyone Has a Story" segment where a city and person is randomly picked using a dart and a map along with a phonebook, then they would go and talk to that person. Invariably, the person had a fascinating, usually uplifting story to tell.

 

[TheOriginalHappyGoat]

Tales from the "Maman" front - personal news to feed your soul.

For background, although most of you are somewhat familiar with my situation, a short version for those who are not: my father's death was followed shortly by my mother's fall and stroke. I moved back to the Fort to take care of her, and a big part of that has been helping her brain work better. We started with simple talking and memory games and so forth. We moved on to doing the LA Times (because it's syndicated in the J-G) crossword together. Now, she can do MTW pretty much on her own, but we still do the weekend puzzles at least together. Hell, on Friday and Saturday, sometimes it's I that need her help to finish. Anyway, another one of our traditions is to watch Jeopardy together each night. We try to answer more quickly than the contestants, and each other (although, and she knows this, if it's a topic I know well, I hold my tongue to let her guess first). After doing this for many months, I've noticed a marked improvement in her cognitive function.

The lesson here is, if you have an elderly relative in your charge, don't discount the value of simply spending time with them talking and thinking together. It works wonders.

Anyway, we missed much of Jeopardy last night because the UMD-MSU game went into double OT, and we didn't want to miss it, but we joined up with Alex late in Double Jeopardy. The Final Jeopardy category was "Royalty." She looked at me and said, "You got this." She knows I love history and I know my royals.

Well, the final clue was, and I don't remember the exact words, but the main crux of the question was, "He was the last English king to die in battle."

Now, obviously, I knew the answer right away, and doubly - as a scholar of history and as a scholar of literature. But I looked at her first, and without even taking a breath or second-guessing herself, she looked back at me and said, in the best melding of nonchalantness and dismissiveness you could come up with, "Well, Richard III."

When the episode ended, we talked about it (all three contestants got it right, by the way), and she couldn't explain how she knew it. Was it because she remembered some bit of high school history class? Was it because we had discussed Shakespeare months earlier when we were watching Olivier portray Hamlet together? Was it because we had held long discussions about the distinguished career of Sir Ian McKellen after a LOTR marathon, and I had off-handedly mentioned the time he portrayed Richard in a post-modern monstrosity-slash-instant-classic? Her only explanation was, "He was the first one to come to mind."

She didn't know why or how. I didn't know. But what I did know was that somehow, out of somewhere, she grabbed that little bit of knowledge, and immediately knew that it was right. Her neurons fired together in an impeccable way, which they most surely would not have done only a few short months ago.

So yeah, that fed my soul. I didn't need to see it on HuffPost or BuzzFeed or whatever. When that clue came up, and my mom instantly knew without hesitation that the last King of England to die in battle was Richard III, it showed me quite clearly that, at her age, after going through what she's gone through, the sky is still the limit. That makes me feel good. It really does.

goat

EDIT: Forgot the link. Can't mention Sir Ian playing Richard without linking Sir Ian playing Richard.




This post was edited on 12/31 4:53 AM by TheOriginalHappyGoat

A horse! A horse!

 

[TheOriginalHappyGoat]

Sometimes I wonder...

...is the reason kids can be so awesome the fact that they were raised right? Or is it the fact that they are so young that they haven't yet learned how to be jerks yet?

 

[kingmanite]

I just saw this on fox. A man 103 years old got a hole in one. He and his wife have won the lottery in Pa twice and the Fla lottery once. They have also won a new car in a raffle. They plan to dance the new year in this evening. What a lucky couple.

 

[CO. Hoosier]

There's a million of them . . . . . .

Here's three;

The Little League World Series. Hearing and reading about the kids from Chicago being US champs warmed my heart. The victory parade with he stop at the Cell will make a lasting impression on the kids who are confronted with daily gunfire in Chicago. Mo'ne Davis personal story is icing on the cake. Googled and reread the stories about the LLWS again a day or so ago when Mo'ne was named AP's sportswoman of the year. Learned that she is an honor student. We need many many more like her.

An Oldie but a Goodie. One of my all time favorites came from a book I read about a cross county auto trip on US Highway 50; basically a collection of stories of the people and places the author met and saw along the way. He wrote about a small town diner somewhere in the middle of Kansas where he stopped at for breakfast. The back story of the diner is terrific. It seems that the diner had been there for decades and a group of famers and good 'ol boys met there every morning for coffee and chit chat. They were served by the same waitress for years and years. The owner of the diner died. The heirs were not interested in keeping it going. What to do. The guys could not or would not go to another place, besides the long-time waitress would have been out of a job. Turns out the guys took up a collection, bought the diner from the estate, and gave it to the waitress. Everybody was happy.

Ride a Tandem bicycle. This is mostly personal. Nobody can ride a tandem very far and not be in a good mood. My stoker and I have thousands of miles together on the bike and the feel-good stories seem endless. A couple of favorites. Everybody smiles when they see you. We've ridden in rural Mississippi and met and talked with people who have never seen a tandem and whose life is as far from a bike culture as you can imagine. We've ridden through some pretty rough neighborhoods in different cities and the smiles come from people who would challenge you with their gaze if you were in their 'hood in a car. The best story is the incredible feel good moment and sense of accomplishment we have as a couple when we finish a particularly strenuous ride; chief among those was Highway 1 along the Big Sur coast.