This is about an enduring friendship.
Between 87 year old Dan Peterson and 7 year old Norah Wood.
And those random moments and chance encounters that we experience every day.
The possibilities.
Dan was deeply depressed.
His wife of five decades, Mary, had died six months before….and he was racked with anxiety and sadness.
And he felt very alone.
He was spending much of his time in his garden.
His wife’s favorite flower was the white rose.
"I'm sitting here staring out the back window of my house, just waiting it out to see how long I was going to live.
I hadn't shaved for a couple days and I hadn't had a haircut probably for three months and didn't give a you-know-what about anything except 'Well, what do I do tomorrow? Watch squirrels?'
Dan hadn’t eaten much for days, and he forced himself to go to the local Publix supermarket near his home in Augusta, Georgia.
It was Norah’s 4th birthday, and she wanted a special cupcake.
Her mom, Tara, told her that she would bake some for her, but Norah was adamant.
She told her mom that she ‘must’ go to the store for the cupcakes.
So off to the store they went.
As Tara retells it...
“She was sitting in one of those carts that look like a car or truck or whatever when an older gentleman walked by. We’d passed several other elderly customers but she seemed magnetically drawn to this man.
Her face lit up like the sun, she waved excitedly, and said ‘Hi old person! It’s my birfday today!’
He was furrow browed but his expression softened when he realized she was speaking to him.
“‘Well hello little lady! And how old are you today?’ he asked. They chatted for a few seconds and it was super adorable.”
They parted ways...but a few minutes later, Norah asked her mom “Can I take a picture with the old man for my birfday?”
“It was the cutest damn thing ever. I knew he couldn’t have gone very far so we backtracked until we found him.
‘Excuse me, sir? She’d like to know if you’d take a photo with her for her birthday?’ I asked.”He looked confused and then stunned and then delighted.”
‘A photo? With me?’” he asked.
‘Yes suh! For my birfday!’ Norah added.
“And so they posed together and then they hugged each other like they were long lost friends.”
Tara thanked Dan for his time, and Dan told her, 'No, thank YOU. This has been the best day I've had in a long time. You've made me so happy, Ms. Norah."
"I don't know — it was magical and profound, and it's this cosmic sweetness that happened, you know, right in front of the dairy section of the grocery store," Tara says.
A week later, a friend was looking at the pictures and recognized Dan.
Norah wouldn’t stop talking about Mr. Dan.
So Tara located his phone number and called him up to tell him that they had a framed picture for him, and see if he wanted to come over for a play date with Norah.
And before i go any further….how incredible is Tara...to foster and nurture this budding flower?
From NPR..
"Norah just ran right up to him like she's known him all of her life and she was climbing all over him like a monkey," Tara says.
"And of course every time I turned around, she'd come back over and hug me again," Dan says.
"I just promised I loved him," Norah says.
When it was time to leave, Norah and her mom passed the rose bush by Dan's door, "and it just blossomed a great big red rose," Dan says.
Norah leaned over to smell it.
"It was precious to me," Dan says. "The only thing I had to give back, so I got it and gave it to her."
With his pocket knife, he slowly carved each thorn from the stem and handed it to Norah.
And that sealed the deal.
“He said that he hadn’t had an uninterrupted night of sleep for the past several months,” said Tara. “Sadness and anxiety had made his mind wander at night, but since meeting Norah, he has slept soundly every single night. He said she healed him.”
"Norah got me out of the loop, gave me something to live for.
It's like the sun came out, you know?"
In the years since, they still see each other every week.
Birthdays, holidays, special days….at Christmas and New Years 2020...….Dan is still celebrating with his friend Norah.
They just celebrated three years together.
www.facebook.com/...
"Sweet Mr. Dan is going to be part of our family whether he likes it or not”, said Tara recently.
Dan will never be alone again.
I was in the company of three young children who had introduced me to this story, and as we were watching a video of it, one of them, a six year old girl, said confidently and assuredly that Dan’s departed wife Mary had arranged this.
So Dan wouldn’t be alone.
And i was going to tell her different?
When i researched and wrote this little bit of peppermint-like sweetness, the soundtrack in my head was playing this song over and again, so i’m going to go with it.
Please pardon me my whimsy.
“If you just take the time to notice people, you never know how you can positively impact a life.”