Winner of the Blog2inspire Contest :
POPCORN BOY by: Londa S. Hayden
As a mom of three very active boys, I spent a lot of time going door to door helping them sell Boyscout popcorn. My two oldest sons always did just enough to win the one prize they really wanted. When it came to my youngest special needs son, he really took everything to heart. Even though he looked at all the prizes very carefully, he really didn’t understand the concept of what all he would have to do to get just the one thing he really wanted. Instead, he just sold as much as he could with great commitment and excitment. One day after school he was very excited about going to sell popcorn, but I had other things that had to be done and told him he would have to wait. I left my husband in charge. He was mowing the lawn when I left to run errands and my son was helping him. When I got home, the entire culdesac was out looking for Jonathan. My husband finally found him going door to door selling popcorn all on his own. Yes, it was a scary moment. After the reprimands were over, we looked over his sales sheet and saw he had sold over $1200.00 in popcorn all by himself. The garage floor was filled with boxes of popcorn to deliver. He not only won the prize he wanted, but sold more than anyone else and got a special patch to show for it. Just goes to show, when you set your mind to do something – you can accomplish anything. My son didn’t know to set limits. He didn’t even think about just doing enough to get what he wanted and look what he accomplished. He far exceeded anything his brothers or the other members of his troop did that year.
1st Runner Up: Mom Is a Real Life Wonder Woman by: Geraldine Durant
Mom is a real life Wonder Woman! Her cape is well hidden and those bullet stopping bracelets only come out occasionally but she has many super powers! She can completes a day’s work before breakfast, repair a car, bandage a knee, and mend a teenager’s broken heart.
It amazes me when mom was in her 40’s she was raising 3 children, taking care of a very sick husband, looking after 2 elderly boarders, managing a farm with over 200 animals often by herself, and did a day’s work that would exhaust any 3 men combined.
Now lest it seem like I am portraying the woman as a saint let me just correct that notion for you right now. I’ve seen her angry a few times. Five years ago at the Yonge Bloor subway station in rush hour I was pushed from behind by a man who just came barrelling out of nowhere, knocked me to the floor, hurried onto a subway train, and didn’t even stop to help me up.
I can only hope that his desperate hurry was due to a dire medical emergency because he caused one. I ended up with a torn rotator cuff, months of physiotherapy, and a year of pain. Well when my mother found out she said she wanted to “hunt the guy down and wring his neck”, and there was real fire in her eyes! Then my sister reminded me how mom used to take an axe and chop the heads off chickens on the farm. Oh that guy is lucky he made a clean getaway! Like most moms the instinct to protect her kids is very strong.
There is an item in mom’s kitchen that has a place of honour in our family. It is a single large yellow mixing bowl the kind that’s early Corningware and very breakable. Mom got it when she was first married in 1954 and she always told us as kids, “If that yellow bowl ever breaks I am giving up baking forever!” No crown jewels, no expensive piece of the finest china has ever been washed and dried as carefully as my sister and I washed that yellow mixing bowl. The yellow bowl is still around and Mom is still baking.
She has faced the death of a daughter and a husband and her faith in God remains strong as a rock. There are 6 words that I have heard her say so many times that to me defines who she is. She says these 6 words to friends, family, in prayer to God, and to strangers. Those 6 words are what can I do for you?
Mom is a woman who lives her faith. Someday she will be in heaven and the world will be a much lesser place. When she was asked `”What’s the first thing she would do when she’s in heaven was, my nephew piped up with, “Oh she’s going to clean it.” But I think she’s going to be kneeling at the feet of God and saying, “What can I do for you?”
2nd Runner up: Random Acts of Kindness by: Joyce Lansky
Many years ago, I was helping my daughter sell Girl Scout cookies outside the Kroger store when a slender, well dressed man approached us with a task. He paid for six boxes of cookies but only took three. He asked the girls to find three people who looked like they were having a bad day and tell them, “Someone wants you to have these cookies.”
The girls spent the next several hours observing every Kroger shopper. Thirty minutes after giving a box to one woman, she returned with money to pay for someone else’s cookies and a story about how awful her day had been before meeting the scouts who lifted her spirits.
This pattern of buying and giving away cookies continued throughout the weekend and has become a practice of the troop. Now that these girls are grown-ups, they still remember the man in the suit and continue to perform random acts of kindness when possible.
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