Best of Blog challenge of 2009 says write about this on the 20th: New person. She came into your life and turned it upside down. He went out of his way to provide incredible customer service. Who is your unsung hero of 2009?
I could list all the ways in which my children became my unsung heroes – but maybe they are “sung” since they as well as everyone else should know how incredible they are. There’s the employee at California Adventure who was exceptional and I wrote to Disney about him – he now has the commendation in his personnel file. But my unsung hero of the year is all of us. Me too. In the last few weeks, I’ve gotten some new insights on life from Twitter, of all places, and I’m finding quite a few of us – just folks out there – who are meeting life with courage, doing the best they can, and leaving a trail of kindness behind for those of us lucky enough to find it.
Perhaps this resonates because this year, as have the last two, is ending with some chaos, sadness, and difficulty. We can get so mired in it all that we forget such is the way of the world, everywhere, for everyone. I’ll give two specific examples. One is daxtonsnini.
I noticed this twitter name on Adam Lambert’s twitter and thought, Daxton? Is there actually another Daxton out there? One of my granddaughters is named Daxton and my daughter made up the name. So I asked daxtonsnini, tell me about your name. Her grandson is named Daxton and he can’t say her name, Nita, so he calls her Nini. In this innocuous exchange, and several more messages of 140 characters or less, I realized that daxtonsnini has encountered more than her fair share of sadness in life but she moves forward with courage. Just by these small exchanges, in which she’s shown true kindness, I’ve been reminded that we all face the same challenges.
Then there’s BeKatherine, someone who started following me on Twitter. Her tweets make me realize this is a person I would like to know, so one day I told her how much I enjoy them. She read my blog and responded to my short story Sunset in such a way that I realized all over again that we all need to learn from each other, be reminded by each other, how we fit into the fabric of life. How we all face the same challenges with parents, how we are not so different after all.
Daxtonsnini is in Oklahoma, BeKatherine is in Ohio. BeKatherine sounds like me – just younger, prettier, and a 3rd grade teacher instead of 7th grade. Besides the raising the puppy part, you could pretty much put her bio under my name.
So that’s nice. This Twitter thing is forming connections in spite of, or maybe because of, the 140 character limit. It’s reminding me that we all share the same problems, likes, dislikes, loves, dreams, and that we don’t live our problems alone. It doesn’t even matter if no one else knows the details of whatever my particular travail is at the moment – I know that we’re in it together anyhow.
So all of us, daxtonsnini, BeKatherine, me, my children and husband, and everyone else who I’ve encountered and haven’t encountered, we can all share the unsung hero appellation.
I feel blessed to know you in person… and love how Adam made it into this blog post.
He was in one of my #Best09 blog posts, too. LOL
i could not agree more with what you say about making connections via twitter. i’ve had a twitter account for a good long while, but never did anything until 12/1 when i started this blog challenge. through the challenge and through twitter, i feel i have finally found my just right people.
a brownie camera and you’re the family historian, too???? oh, we are such kindred spirits.