The Basket Lady

In the Good Humor Town, Basket Lady enjoyed a hearty bowl of blueberries and Cheerios for breakfast; nothing unusual about that except while breaking down the box to put into the recycling bin, I noticed a postcard on the inside of the box.

In the good ole days, a box of anything had a prize at the bottom-like a box of Cracker Jacks. “Oh,” what fun it was trying to get the prize out of the bottom of the box without dropping the cracker jacks on the ground.

Back to the Cheerios, the directions were easy to follow, cut out the postcard on the box of Cheerios, write a few words of encouragement, add postage and drop it in the mail. The USO will deliver it to a military family. Cheerios is on a campaign to send cheer to military families around the globe. How wonderful!

It took all of three minutes to write a note of thankfulness plus the cost of a stamp to let military families serving abroad know how much their sacrifice is appreciated. For those of you with access to a computer, I urge you to visit Cheerios.com to learn more about how you can send a note of cheer to a military family.

By some strange coincidence, Basket Lady unexpectedly found a tiny blue book on a shelf hidden behind a stack of magazines while digging around looking for a Red Sox magazine at the What Not Shop.

The tiny book, On Kindness, would have been very easy to overlook but it surely caught my eye. It was written by the Very Rev. J. Guibert, and without another thought, I grabbed up the book, paid for it and forgot all about a Red Sox magazine.

An example of what kindness does and is can be found on page 10, "to impart, then, moral strength to thy fellow man, be kind to him. Hundreds of times each one of us has felt the happy effects of the kindness of others. Their kind looks have cheered us in hours of gloom: their kind words have fallen on our ears like music from heaven, and gently lulled our pain."

Friends, kindness not only counts but it adds up.

We miss you every day, Dot Sanchas! Until then, smile and live in the present.