NRU - happy things...sweet things only

I love Lake Merritt -- not running around it, but walking, yes, and hanging out ... glad to hear that its waters are becoming more habitable!

NPR spent a week digging through their best StoryCorps recordings to celebrate its 10th birthday.  They were all really good ... there are a few I might have picked that they left out.  It was especially nice for them to go back and find these folks to give updates.  This story is bittersweet, with an emphasis on the sweet -- if we could bottle this attitude, we might be able to heal humanity's ailments.  Give it a listen.

Admittedly bittersweet, I loved this collection of stories of people commemorating survival with the Sandy water line.  This one is particularly lovely, and it tell us something about perspective as well:

"Megan Levis, a teacher, and Mark Levis, a marine engineer, had been in their house only six months. They were newly married. They were maybe 100 yards from the Shark River Inlet in Belmar, N.J.

When the water blasted in, they were evacuated by rescuers riding a bulldozer. With a marker, Mr. Levis designated the waterline on the dining room bar. “Whenever we have a fight, we look at the line and we think, well, we’ve been through that,” he said."

I think I am better at ferreting out bittersweet than sweet.  There is much to love about this piece ... the humility of the man, the vulnerability of the woman, the standing ovation from the high school kids, that this "saving" was done in community.  Sometimes we all just need someone.  And, as luck would have it, someone came by just when this woman needed someone.  Also love that he is still worried about her and that helping her gave him perspective on his own life.  May we all embrace abundance.

I think Mr. Odone's daughter best encapsulates why this story of death is a sweet tale of love.  May they, all three, now rest in peace together:  

“If you had ever walked into the room and seen how Lorenzo responded to the way my father and Michaela embraced him in life, wrapped him in love, you would see he was a living being who knew he was loved. That’s what they gave him, but it was very difficult.”

Sweetness seems to be coming to me in waves of bitter reality and dogged persistence.  So it is with this review of a documentary about a man's struggle with mobility, or the loss of it.  I am hoping some of this persistence and perspective can rub off on me.

An oral history project on African American males in Oakland ... priceless.

Female inmates in Vermont using writing to heal ... bittersweet release.

I thought it would take a long time to collect enough stories for this post ... but I was wrong.

Maybe it is the lens you bring to the reading, or just putting into your mind to look for sweetness.  I don't know.

The last entry for this round is about a man who loves street sweeping machines... he fell in love with them when he was four or five, and it turned into a loving obsession.