Truth is, you get used to it. It takes a little time but living single and alone grows on you.
You chew your food better for lack of dinner conversation and sleep better alone without a chatty someone stealing the covers, cuddling, or wanting something more.
You save money not buying silly flowers or something special for no one special for no special reason and learn to be self-sufficient when sick, make your own soup, and get your own toilet paper.
You stop worrying about dying alone, just dying, and you gradually forget what it used to be like.
The sad but comforting truth is you get used to being single and alone.
It grows on you like an annihilation of might have beens and draws your heart, mind and soul closer to all the good things which actually are.

A three time cancer survivor at 78 with no family, she fears the odds won’t be in her favor this trip.
Lab work was completed two weeks ago and she’s so afraid, she’s gone without renewing her prescriptions for the fleeting good feeling of having saved $38.
She says it’s actually not so much the news but of not having someone there with her when she gets it. Just for an hour to help her through it and get her home safely afterward back to an empty apartment to ponder her options.
This.is.loneliness and a true story with dozens more just like it all over town today.
Especially this season, be a new friend to an old one if you can spare the time because someday you may be there yourself.
I know sad stories aren’t popular this time of year, but then sad stories aren’t popular any time of year. And because friendship always is, we got in the car.

Staying power is not my strong suit. Nor is small talk, dancing, drinking or tuxedos. I’m in bed by 7 most nights and already a couple hours tucked two sheets in when others are still out getting their three sheets on.
Parties were once calendared in pen at least twice weekly until one day several years back when I made the brutal self-discovery I’m not the man I used to be. And fortunately so.
I was the life of the party and also its casualty. I thrived on attention and often made myself the center of it often when I wasn’t. Insecurity compensates the ego in sometimes unimaginable ways.
I tried way too hard to be liked mostly because I didn’t like myself. Wearing lampshades would send me home in the wee hours with the false sense I was a treasured friend to many when in reality I was merely just a poorly behaved nuisance, likely tolerated and even more likely pitied.
Then one day several years ago very early in my 12 step program, another addict shared his own similar embarrassing epiphany and his story stopped me cold as addict stories often do.
After a long and deep cry over my countless embarrassing recollections of parties past, I began liking myself. Sitting on the sidelines became as satisfying as years in centerfield had seemed to be. Private conversations with a few in attendance became genuinely more preferable than grabbing microphones and lampshades to prove some personal point to myself that I was cool.
Growing up took much longer in life than I ever expected, but like so many times since, it took an honest addict at a meeting to be the messenger I didn’t know I desperately needed.
Tonight I’m dressing up and going to a party. I may dance, I’ll probably chat with a few people and I’ll be quite comfortable in my own skin. And no one there will ever know what it took to get to this point except that guy who saw me crying after his story at a recovery meeting years ago whose name I don’t remember but whose words I’ll never forget.

Peter wrote, “So if life means so much, why do you drive as you do?”
His unsolicited email went unanswered over the weekend as I pondered the author’s choice of ‘as’ over ‘like’ and prepared a grammarians rebuttal. But to be honest and fair, his email to me was honest and fair. I’d never met Peter before, but he was neither mean nor rude and there was no attack on my character thoughI knew this would happen some day. Promote your website on your rear window and at some point you’re gonna get feedback. This time it was about my driving habits, not my stories.
“You sped down Rainbow today and cut me off before your near sudden stop behind a white truck with no taillights.” Sadly, he was increasingly correct as I struggled to escape the culpability of his descriptions.
Every sentence erected another shameful memorial to my horrible driving until I was left sitting there reading Peter’s tirades like a chained prisoner without attorney deserving the chair.
Finally, I replied:
‘Dear Peter,
You caught me red handed. Yes, I was on Rainbow today and yes your description of my driving sounds remarkably accurate. While I am fighting the urge to explain, excuse and defend myself against your accusations, those days have been over for me for many years. So, I am sorry. Please accept my apology for cutting you off and endangering the entire Rainbow Blvd. contingent today. Putting my website #LifeMeansSoMuch.com on my rear window begs for greater accountability on my part and I didn’t live up to it today. I will endeavor to improve my driving from here on out.
Sincerely, Don Miller
P.S. The truck was blue not white.

It was the first cold night of the season and from her trunk, she handed me a beautiful long blue wool pea coat. “Dad, do you think you could find a home for this?” She knew among the population we serve that I could.  I said “Yeah honey, I’m sure it will find a good home on its own. They always do.” She replied, “I know. I’ll be waiting to hear.”
Fast forward two days.
78 year old Lettie had taken the bus several miles up Boulder Highway and walked another half mile from the bus stop in 30mph winds to our office. I took her back for our appointment to help pay her utility bill since the week before, her purse had been stolen. Still shivering, I served her a hot cup of coffee as she described making the police report and in tears that dripped nearly frozen to her cheeks, she shared how she’d stowed another $35 saved in a zippered pocket for a special Christmas gift to herself she would now have to go without.
With her utility bill paid, I carried two bags of groceries from our pantry and asked her to follow me to the parking lot.
And just as it happened two days prior, I opened my trunk and handed her the Christmas gift she’d saved to buy herself. The blue wool pea coat fit like a glove, just like the matching pair of gloves I’d received from another psychic donor that morning to accompany yet another moment just like this.

Magic happens year ’round but it sparkles at Christmastime.

For 30 years I’ve collected greeting cards but I’m giving up the habit for how much it hurts. It’s been a favorite pastime shopping rows of card racks for hours at a time walking out with all the very best wishes for any occasion or holiday or simply “just because.” The funniest, the best written, the most beautiful and all the ones that made me wipe my eyes in the store over the years ended up in three crates, many now yellowed and none of which were ever sent. Turns out I couldn’t bring myself to part with them when someone’s occasion or holiday was approaching. Today a foot-high stack each got their final read and their last cry one by one before being buried in a 13 gallon can of memories whose optimal times had come and gone and were rolled to the street for their crimes of assorted missed opportunities. Everything Mom, every Wonderful Dad and all those bought and cherished to give in case I ever fell in love again, which at my age has turned out as unlikely as me sending out one in my selection to anyone who’d deserved it at just the right time or occasion.
So after a productive afternoon and a half box of tissue, it’s time to make myself dinner and climb into a melancholy dreamland of a regret and rest. From this day forward, if you ever get a card from me, trust it will be a good one and never too belated to matter anymore.

It’s late in the day and while I should be elsewhere he’s swimming around the hook of my last line cast and I’m here anxiously anticipating his next move. It’s my best line and lure but just when I thought he might take the bait and my tempting invitation all I heard was long silence followed by a click. And I sat there, phone in hand weeping for another addict off the hook still seeking dope and not enough interest in the alternative I offered that may not satisfy his craving but would save his soul.
In case you ever wanted to know, some days that’s exactly what my seven years of recovery feels like.

All he wanted was a photograph.
I took his picture, but not the one he wants most of all.

I always leave my door open when I’m on site at the senior center twice a week. I set up shop there to meet low income senior citizens and try to engage with them to show them the kinds of services I can offer free of charge. Ways to save on utility bills, plans for having food when the money runs out before the month does, budgeting help, how to escape from being prey to payday loan companies and so many other services that can make a meager fixed income go much further and last much longer.

This generation of senior citizens are a unique breed. They are the aging baby boomers and what I consider the last of the moral few. They grew up on the belief you should always work hard, scrimp and save, pay your bills and be willing to sacrifice if you can’t. They grew up without computers or an online education and today know very little about how to navigate most things younger people do from their phones in an instant.

And, sadly, they are a generation of lost people. There are no large scale wars that unite them as a group. Their children were born in the “me” generation of self-centeredness and permissiveness and who, for the most part, have found keeping generational ties is generally unimportant. As a result and more often than not, they abandon the older generation as if it is somehow the respectful thing to do. Today’s seniors are also a generation first to experience the insufficiency of social security income to buy the retirement they had hoped. What are so errantly called the Golden Years are truly as thin and flimsy as aluminum foil.

I work the saddest shift at the non-profit charity I chose to join five years ago today.

My open door policy, however, seems to make it a little easier for these needy yet ashamed old people to be willing to break the ice. Like rescue dogs beaten down from years of abuse, they often are afraid to make the first contact. Fortunately, I’m pretty good at that and regularly seek out and engage many solo seniors who have had nobody to talk with for years. Their lifetime friends are now six feet under or six hundred miles away and they don’t have money for milk much less travel in these Aluminum Years.

Again, I made the first move.

For three weeks, he’d passed by while I was in what they call the Library at the senior center. It’s not much of a library, really. It has a cache of donated old books and magazines piled neatly as if they were new editions. Nobody is fooled by the name of the room which doubles for bingo on Tuesday afternoons where winners receive rolls of toilet paper as prizes.

I never heard him coming down the hall and mostly only got a glimpse of his profile as he passed through the light streaming in the doorway so many times before. Each trip, he always turned his head and proceeded at a steady pace as if on a conveyor belt to nowhere.

It took some coaxing. I got up from the computer and stood by the door so a chance meeting might be a little easier for him if it was to happen at all. He was far down the corridor, head down and without direction. But he must have heard me or seen my friendly gesture somehow, for as I sat back down, he was right there at the door, seemingly in reciprocation.

“Hey there!,” I spoke loudly as most of the people around here are hard of hearing or not used to being selected for a conversation.

He looked up and through the doorway. As he approached I could see great depth in the crevasses of his face and his long, black feeble shadow met me long before he did.

“How’s it going on this beautiful day?”

He looked around as if perhaps I was addressing another, more important passerby. I introduced myself and my reason for being here and asked the same of him.

“I’m Al, and I just need a photograph.”

I invited him to sit awhile and tell me about this photograph he wanted.

At first, he wasn’t well spoken but when he did, his long grey beard moved in synchronicity with each syllable. Obviously anxious at the thought of talking with a complete stranger and worse, having a need to present to one, he chose his words carefully.

Al hadn’t seen his three kids in some time. It had been years for two, perhaps a decade more for the oldest. He knows he must have grandchildren by now and wonders if one of them might be an Albert or Alan or Allison…named in his memory as if he were already dead and gone. It’s not likely. After his wife died in ’84, the kids moved him to this senior living community in the desert where he’d “have a really fun time with all the people his age and their games and bingo” and the cache of lies he was told as he managed the last $700 of his savings as a deposit when he signed.

He was all of 81 now, and in addition to winning a roll of toilet paper now and then, he spends holidays, birthdays and anniversaries alone except when he can get a ride to the library or the cemetery where his wife was laid to rest 30 years earlier. To make best use of the ride and the welcomed time away, he goes grave to grave to pull weeds, straighten dirty plastic flowers and talks to all the horizontal people his age and older and forgotten. Except of course Sally, his wife, who only made it a half century before a drunk in a pickup truck ended their marriage and for some reason, the only real connection to the children and family.

Today, he was missing them and wondering about their well-being. He had their addresses on some scraps of paper he pulled from his wallet as I offered him a cold bottle of water. There were no phone numbers, just penciled addresses which had blurred illegible after so many years there next to what looked like high school pictures.

Al hadn’t had a picture taken of him since he could remember.

We talked of his history and my own in extended groups of topics from fishing to art to puppies. I came to discover he was quite a well-rounded man of experience who had evidently cared so much for his wife and children when he was a younger man that his kindness had been taken as weakness and his family had exhausted most of his time and assets before he was shipped out to the desert to wither and die with hundreds more just like him. As he became more comfortable, we even talked about death itself and speculated how each of us might eventually kick our respective buckets.

I didn’t share it with him but by the look of his frail, taut face and thin weathered body, he was sure to die of starvation if something wasn’t done soon. I told him we have a food pantry I bring every Thursday morning and suggested he be first in line with a couple very large bags. It was the first smile he had given me all morning.

I used that smile as an opportunity to fill him in on some things I thought we could do to help his situation and stretch his $718 monthly social security income and $15 in food stamps. That brought the second smile of the morning. I was on a roll and thought I might go for three by asking him to sit back against the wall as I used my IPhone to do for him what he’d come for.

He obliged, licked his fingers and briefly ran them through the few hairs on his head, straightening his beard in what was obviously his own idiosyncratic method for many, many years. I chuckled as he did his little routine and told him my beard would never be as long as his but surely as grey. And the instant he laughed, I snapped the picture and showed him how great he looked in it.

I’d have easily guessed he had not seen himself in a mirror for what might have been years the way he held my phone and gazed at his own image. His last picture was at the DMV four years prior. He had aged quickly in four years. Very quickly.

“Wow, you look a lot different from your ID picture, Al.”

“I kinda guessed I might. A lot has changed in four years.”

Al shared he had been diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer 3 years prior and at the last visit to his doctor, was told he probably wouldn’t make it to Thanksgiving.

Al wanted a final picture of himself that could be displayed on his own grave wherever he might be buried like so many horizontal friends before him. It wasn’t likely that his family would make the trip to see dad and grampa before he passed but if so, he wanted them to see the man he’d become just in case someday they became curious about what happened to old Al.

He said he could never figure out what he’d done wrong for them to drop contact him again and hoped this picture of April 7th, 2015 might be different enough from how they knew him years before and that even from the grave, he might get a second chance to show them how much he had thought about them over the years and hoped they’d made lots of babies, perhaps one named Al.

I printed the picture and presented it to him for the fourth smile of the morning. I don’t think he had had mustered four smiles in a morning for as many years.

With our work done…or perhaps just begun…he got up and shook my hand and thanked me for having stood in the doorway an hour ago.

And as he left through the sunlight of that same doorway, I extended an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner at my house with my own three kids.

The fifth smile.
I took another picture.

God willing, 4:21pm today I’ll turn 59.

My beloved roommate shares my birthday, entering his seventh year on four legs and our traditional Thanksbirthday weekend celebration is at a holiday peak.

Across town Thursday, hundreds of selfless Thanksgiving workers will be sweating the stuffing that matters as St. Thomas More Catholic Community carries out the final turkey leg of our 20 year tradition together delivering full Thanksgiving meals to 1,000 shut-in and uninvited senior citizens having neither family, food, nor somewhere better to be. Other partner non-profits will be ministering within more desolate parts of town and elsewhere making sure no one goes hungry.  Indeed, all across America, prompted by the abundances in their ovens and on their tables, kitchen cooks everywhere are finding themselves suddenly inspired to extend spontaneous invitations to complete strangers and forgotten others, sending them home afterwards both with leftovers and a homespun experience many never had and some never will again.

Every breath we take is a moment growing older.

I hyperventilated once and lost count but still calculate 59 years more alive today than ever before. This past year, some lost that gift and those of us who remain will spend some part of the day and much of the ensuing season swimming in teardrops and memories that will decorate our faces, Christmas trees and into the New Year.  Older now, I know living is much less a celebration of another year or holiday and more the simple thankfulness to still be very much alive, even if only to write this short story for your Thanksgiving Day.

Writing stories for and about people is my passion. Today’s marks the 247^th  on my website and a baker’s dozen more brewing in my head for followers to catch a laugh, a cry or a deeper thought in the coming new year.  Like many of you, I will also be thinking about my own parents and many others who today are enjoying breathless feasts in a faraway place at a table which will soon hold a place setting bearing my name. An all-you-can-eat fat-free buffet! Yet while I’m still alive, I write stories to breathe a little life into a dying world and about  those around us who are selfless servants across the nation.

Stories sparked by inspiration are my gifts to those who need reminding that someone cares and that the season for making memories is now in high gear.  For Butch and me it’s neither because it’s our birthday nor because it’s Thanksgiving around the corner.  It’s because we’re not yet corpses of turkeys after the meal, and that’s pretty remarkable considering the life I once lived.

So as servants all over and the many heeding quiet summons as early morning cooks in country kitchens everywhere, my wish is that we all extend invitations to the uninvited, and write an unforgettable chapter in the lonely life of someone who needs a good friend and a hot meal.