Friday, August 7, 2015

Mo (The Most Wonderful Gift in the History of Birthdays)

In my years of working with seniors, I have seen many of them muster up the courage to repair broken relationships with long lost family and friends – those are spectacular, groundbreaking moments. But the quieter moments take my breath away too, like when I realize that they have been slowly and steadily deepening the relationships with these family and friends.

Every first Thursday of the month, our group puts down our pen and paper and get on the computers instead, to recall stories that we, and our friends in satellite groups, have written. Each senior scrolls up and down this blog and our satellite blogs, and takes turns reading a friend’s story out loud. Yesterday, Joe picked out this story from Mo’s from 2010, which got us to go onto Youtube to look at this unforgettable video that the story was referring to. Mo works and has to arrive late some days. He walked in almost right when the story ended, and we thought it was so funny.

But what made us gasp was when he pulled out a book from his tote. The cover has a black and white photo or a child and the words, “A Boy Named Skippy.” Skip is one of his many ;) nicknames. Turns out that his daughter Kathleen, the same daughter who was in the Youtube video that we had just happened to pop open, made him this book recently for his 80th birthday. It contains the stories that he had written in our group, so far ;) Mo had tears of joy in his eyes the whole time when he was showing it to us.

As the story of Mo and Kathleen continues to deepen, I feel like it’d be fun to do a lil’ throwback. Click here to read Mo’s story “Only Child” and my blog post in October 2009 about the Mo I was just getting to know. It’s been six years, but it feels like just yesterday when he told me, "I've never done this before. Writing or anything like that. Not even in school. This is my first time."