Freegans and Urban Foraging

Guys. I haven't written a blog post in forever, but right now, I need help.

Yes, you're going to say near the end of this article. Yes, you definitely do.

No. Not in that way. Wait, hear me out.

I know I sound crazy. But I'm not a loony dumpster-diver person either. Tonight, the whole time, I was looking at the fresh fruit I could see by the light of my cell phone and thinking, "I can't do this. It's one thing to pick up abandoned pear at the foot of a neighbor's tree, or happily swipe an extra boxed lunch at the end of a seminar. To get this fruit, I'd have to climb in the dumpster. That's way too much effort to, you know, consume something that someone else has judged as trash." That just sounds--feels--icky. You are what you eat, right?

I climbed in anyway.

This is all part of an experiment that's been tickling at the back of my skull for a while now, ever since I got involved with the FreeFoodCommune. You all may know that I head over to the park most Saturdays, put on an apron, and help Pam the Freegan distribute food that's been rescued from restaurants, farmer's markets, grocery stores and soup kitchens all across Atlanta. No one needs proof of poverty. The goal is not to feed the homeless (although it's certainly fun when we do)--it's to prevent food waste. With that goal, everyone can help.

I could give Pam the shout-out she deserves for the obscene amount of her time, soul, and gas money she pours into this project, but I've thanked her in other venues and right now I have a point to make. The point is that I've been spending the last year and a half benefiting from other people's food rescue efforts, and my modus operandi for joining the fray is predictably unadventurous. I tend to hang around late after the occasional party or gathering and offer to help clean up, sweeping the food from trays into tupperware before I take out the garbage. It's a great method for food rescue--immediate pre-garbage interception. I'd venture to say that this is how just about all of our food gets to the Commune--people have connections with stores or farmers or restaurants, and manage to collect the unwanted usables before they get dumped. But I heard Pam sigh once:

"I'm just one person, and I don't have the manpower (or the fridge space, or the truck) to save more than this. There's a grocery store right up the street, and their dumpster is a treasure chest, but we're already at the limit of what we can transport." Huh. All that food (and if you've been there, you know that there's a ton) and there's still that much food being thrown away right down the street? I...had no idea.

So I looked it up. Here's the page: http://robgreenfield.tv/dumpsterdiving/. According to this Rob guy, grocery store dumpsters are one of the most eco-friendly, practicable ways of stocking your larder around. Key points are these:

1) Grocery store dumpsters contain almost exclusively food. (Contrast this to mall dumpsters, where the potential for contamination is much higher, or restaurants, where the food is probably cooked, unpackaged, and messy.) 2) Food that's thrown away isn't necessarily bad. Lots of food gets tossed because it's at its arbitrarily-defined expiration date, because it has a bad spot, because it's not as pretty as the other food it's surrounded by, or because the store overstocked and they had to make room for the newer influx. 3) If you catch it quickly, the food is probably just as good as what you paid for in the store--and since so much food gets thrown out, the dumpsters are probably emptied regularly, leaving the food inside fairly fresh. This works better in winter than in summer, for obvious reasons, but you have the nose and the judgement to make each individual call.

*           *          *

My curiosity hasn't been piqued enough for me to go searching dumpsters with gusto. I glance at them when I pass, just in case, mainly for furniture rather than food--sometimes people move and leave loads of goodies behind. (I got a working sewing machine out of a dumpster once.)

This week, the scales finally tipped. I missed the Commune for the fifth week in a row, my local store's "discounted produce" section was empty, and my gymnastics club doesn't meet in summer, so my evenings feel strangely empty. I have five grocery stories in a 1.5 mile radius, one of which closes at 8PM, parking lot clear by 9. I investigated.

The first night, there were brown bananas and overripe strawberries at the top, but I left them because the flies were thick and action required more data points than one. Second day, same bananas, same strawberries. Cool, decision confirmed: I don't want stuff that's been composting in the heat for unknown numbers of days. Third day was supposed to be another investigatory run--but I found a bag of hard green pears, within arm's reach of the opening. My heart was in my chest, but I took it home, and washed all the pears thoroughly. I found the rotten one at the bottom of the bag, the reason why it'd been trashed; the others were still hard and green and perfect to withstand a good scrubbing. I nibbled one a day or so later. Still hard, really, but I found that it hadn't absorbed dumpster flavor, so I put its companions a little closer to the other fruit on my shelf and let them ripen.

Tonight, I looked down at 20 pounds of nectarines and faced a decision: Do I really know enough about this dumpster to be okay emptying it?

Well, I was going to shower anyway. I can always throw the fruit away again when I get home. I'm on a bike, so I can't take all the fruit anyway--so I'll just take the really nice-looking dumpster fruit, and see how it goes.

Did I really just say that? First sign of insanity--my words don't make sense.

I cleaned up a bit around the dumpster, so I fulfilled my responsibility as an upstanding diver of good breeding and proper etiquette. Most of the nectarines were hard and unripe again; I disposalled the ones that (as with the pears) had condemned their comrades to the bin. This is what's left:

I don't know if you can tell, but that's a freaking ton of nectarines. That bowl is so tall it barely fits on my second fridge shelf, and it's stacked double-high. This photo only accounts for the nectarines that didn't have any bad spots or blemishes; those got chopped up so the good parts could go into a fruit salad container. In front are the odds and ends that I picked up alongside the nectarine bags; behind is the webpage of Rob Greenfield's surprisingly accurate blog.

So, I know what you're thinking. This girl is eating straight out of the dumpster. She needs help.

Yes. Yes, I do. Can anyone take some nectarines?

Letter to a Graduating Senior

Three weeks and four days ago today, Duke's class of 2016 walked across the stage, and alumni were asked to send notes with advice that they'd have liked to have had as fresh graduates.

I thought long and hard about this prompt. My life so far hasn't gone as planned (yeah, I know, tell that to the fifty-somethings, give them a laugh)—and I've learned a few things I would have liked to know beforehand. So I wrote a letter. And then realized that the entry format was limited to 400 characters.

Oh really? Wisdom and experience in 400 characters? If we're going that route, how about a haiku?

Congratulations!
Now be wise, young padawan.
Things could get crazy.

That's 66 characters. I could write six haikus.

Eat veggies. Back up

your data. Start saving. Be

honest. Call your friends.

Duke 2016:

 I wish the world in your hands. 

You've got a good start!

Now you get to sleep.

It's pretty nice, right? One of

life's little pleasures.

Start your 401-

K. I'm not sure what it is, 

but it's important.

I'm not sure exactly what I sent in, but it wasn't as clever as all that. Regardless, what I really wanted to send in was this:

To you, the graduating senior:

 

I graduated Duke, class of 2012, so the four years I've spent away from college are probably the four years you've spent in it. This fall, I return to university to pursue a higher degree, so you can see that I'm still figuring a lot of things out.

While I didn't get it right on my first try, I hope you can take comfort from that: you're not tied forever to the first thing you do when you get out of college. Most of my friends—from fellow engineers to graphic designers and political science majors—have switched jobs in the past two years, some of them more than once. They tell me this is typical now—that the days of lifelong loyalty to a stable company are bygones. I guess I should have known that when I graduated, but I'm not sure where I would have learned it from. It's not something I saw in my parents or my friends' parents, and if there was a course on “preparing for America's changing corporate culture,” I didn't take it.

So—predictably—I've spent the last four years realizing that, despite my academic and non-academic successes, I have some very pertinent knowledge gaps. If being an adult means being wise and self-sufficient, I'm still not ready. On the other hand, when it comes to the arms race between me and Murphy's Law, Duke did give me a lot of good battle prep. (And friends. And basketball. Man, I love this place.)

I hope my war metaphors have nothing to do with your first experiences out of Duke. But, since I'm not the only one among my peers who's felt pretty overwhelmed with life post-graduation, I offer these tidbits of advice to you, graduating seniors. May they serve you well.

Point #1—The modus operandi that brought you to this point, that gave you success at Duke, may not include the same set of strategies that will serve you best in the next phase of your life.

• You may have enjoyed developing hard skills. Now you may have to learn about soft skills, economics or business in order to satisfy your boss and understand his agenda.
• Your teachers have been responsible for evaluating your work. Your first job may give you once-yearly reviews that leave you floundering for feedback and your progress mostly ignored unless you take matters into your own hands. 
• You may have focused intensely on your work. Now, focus on work-life boundaries, especially your health and your social life.
• Or, maybe you didn't focus on work, and that worked out for you. Maybe something different will be required this next time around.

I hope it's obvious that I don't intend for you to throw away things that have worked for you in the past. If those are your habits, they're there for a reason! Your new environment may be different enough, however, that it'd be worth paying attention to your priorities, your assumptions, and your default reactions. Some of them may rescue you—and some may need to be tempered.

Sometimes it takes a while to figure out how your new place pulls you into and out of balance. So: keep your eyes open. Be observant. Be adaptable. Even a good change involves an adjustment.

Point #2—The people who surround you are incredibly important.

There's a story behind this one. The biggest differences between life in school and in industry—for me—in order of importance:

3. Scenery. (My first job was in Texas.)
2. Social life. (Turns out, it's much harder to squeeze in “making new friends” time in the wee hours before and after work. Unless you can make friends at work. That's probably the best thing.)
1. No longer being surrounded by people who cared about my success.

There was also having my own kitchen and bathroom and car and income and access to big-city festivals and extracurriculars. But #1 pretty much dominated all the rest.

I was hired for my dream job after graduation—I hadn't thought a bachelor's degree could qualify me to design computer hardware—and I came on during what was supposed to be the transition point between two projects. The team was kind and generally supportive, I was nervous and eager to please, so everything was good except for the minor distraction of getting the older (late) project out the door. In the meantime (as my teammates slaved and the schedule got delayed and delayed again) I “ramped up” more or less on my own—with one hour of training meetings a week, a mentor who was on maternity leave for my first three months and then transferred to a more urgent assignment, and a three-hundred page technical document that was not written for the novice (in fact, it had crossed-out sections with “update this please” in the margins). Sick of stagnation, both bored and overwhelmed, I asked my manager repeatedly how I could be more helpful. He told me to be patient. I tried. After six months, I owned a spreadsheet.

There are a ton of lessons I could pull out here about assertiveness, future-focused priorities, communication, and office politics. But the overarching theme I want to pull out of this is: the people around you matter. I'd spent six months trying to contribute to my team as diligently as I'd been instructed, and by so doing had arguably wasted half a year of my life. It wasn't their fault—turns out, my team hadn't had a new hire to train in about ten years. (They'd hired experienced professionals only. That explains the age demographic that I didn't think to pay attention to when I interviewed.) Regardless, I was very dependent on their examples and their input, so when I should have been making friends and pushing my way into influential pieces of the project, I stayed meekly unobtrusive in my office. Friends: being unobtrusive at work is not a virtue.

The reason is this: the people who surround you are your biggest asset. They're the ones who look out for you and tell you things you don't know to look for; their reactions to things become your basis for evaluating the environment. They're the ones who provide the culture that makes you complacent or inspired, and they're what makes you want to come to work even when it's hard—because a challenge makes a bond that's worth the overtime and stress. You need to connect at work almost more than you need to work. The former enlivens and empowers you. The latter gets you paid.

That's for coworkers—now, how about your boss? If you're so brilliantly effective that your boss never needs to check on you, you should still have regular contact to keep from falling through the cracks in his brain. If, like me, you're struggling, the longer you wait to ask for help, the deeper and more embarrassing is your quagmire. In my case, I think my boss felt trapped between a rock and a hard place. The team was behind, so my help could have been used, but on the other hand, everyone was too busy catching up to devote time to mentoring. Anyway, I was an untested chess piece and there were higher-ups breathing down my manager's neck. So the choice to leave me to my own devices was the convenient one, but also the myopic one; I think there were better compromises possible, and I'd have earned more respect if I'd insisted on what I needed to contribute.


Which brings me to

Point #3—the lifelong goals of balance and resilience.

We're living things, and we do fantastic things to maintain homeostasis. Balance is a life-long pursuit, full of continual epiphanies as we discover that “one change” that makes all the difference between living on the positive and negative edge of the threshold.

Trouble is, that one thing changes. So we look at someone else and see that they have what we need and we get jealous, not realizing that the thing that solves our problem doesn't necessarily solve all of theirs. (At some point, I finally got handed real work, and had two months of thrill before the stress levels skyrocketed. Then, just like my coworkers, overtime became my new battle. Until I quit my job, and some of them became jealous of me.)

So balance involves a perpetual chase, and yet—there's a synergy to it. Some things remain important, and when we keep those as our anchor points, it's much easier to stay centered. Those good things form a foundation that's likely to give you the energy, health, confidence—whatever that next unnameable thing is you need—that lets you grab hold of the next thing that builds you up. When times get tough, your foundation erodes, or you're simply in an unfamiliar place and you feel weak and out of control—these are the times when it becomes really obvious what anchors were holding you together before and just how valuable they are.

The bad news is, being out of balance is also a spiral. The good news is, people have overcome tremendous odds before—I daresay, this includes you—and because of synergy, every anchor point you harness makes you more capable/increases the speed of your progress. One of my foundations is journaling—it helps me keep track of the others. Exercise, sleep, and diet are recurrent themes; I'm learning which ones work when.

My life works better when I make good decisions convenient. Also, when I'm doing hard things. (Purpose above comfort: my brief experiment with a life of pointless ease was terrible.) Health is a huge priority, but if I'm healthy enough in one area, I can use it to make up for lack in another. I look for friends who help me trust myself. Try to align my wants with my needs. Make decisions that my future self will thank me for. And when I'm teetering, surround myself with uplifting and inspiring friends and media and hold to the rules and schedules and things that keep me disciplined instead of distracted.

It's a starting point; it's what works for me. As you explore, may your skillfulness in personal things be prelude to the many outward accomplishments and contributions you bring into the world. You were not meant to live an unimportant life.

To you, the class of 2016!

--Jenna

In which Jara discovers a solution for the non-sequitur

Blogs aren't kings of non-sequiturs, are they? But I am. Thus: problem.

I have a fix--behold! The cheating magical link to the non-sequiturial thing!

I dug this up from the mine of old files on my computer and found this thing I had way too much fun writing. Hopefully--particularly if you've ever tried your hand at some sort of storyishness before--you have way too much fun reading. ;-)

Villains, FanFics, and the Fourth Wall

In Which Jara Provides a Nearly-Wordless Post

I want to start updating regularly.

I'm in the middle of grad school applications.

Non-essay writing isn't happening right now.

Here. Have a picture of a peacock feather.

I hope you have a nice day.

(I think I was inspired by this picture, originally:)

 

I like that quote.

Home is Where the Heart Is

When we were little, my sister used to save everything. With the extravagant and gullible affection of childhood, she would harvest toys, pictures, even little pieces of paper if they were sufficiently "cute" and colorful (meaning purpley), to go in a little treasure chest overflowing with what nobody else would have considered valuable.

I did not understand sentimental attachments. I had them, of course, but they didn't make sense to me. An object's sentimental aspect comes from its associated memories and feelings—things which are inherently inside your head and cannot be taken away from you. If lost, they are things forgotten, which a mere physical item can not bring back. So—if circumstance provides that you misplace the item, or find it no longer worth the space it takes up—what have you lost? Nothing important, so long as the important part is still inside of you. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.

And yet, in June, as I piled and boxed my stuff on my roommate's living room floor, an old stuffed horse and a blanket tumbled out of the trash bag that had housed them for three years, and a wave swept up and melted a side of my heart. These...feelings. Come from images I can no longer remember (oh God, my brain, empty fumes, I mean rooms, I mean how do you call the flipping mind thingies that hold memory stuff) but they somehow—how?—still are embedded in me. Strongly.

It's like... I used to remember all the important things. Now, my mind's out of fuel and out of space. It's no longer an empty bookshelf or even a full one, but a museum of the scars and events of my life, its very structure a memorial to the history that created it.

It's like... I'm no longer entirely inside of me. I've left little pieces of me all around, without a map to find them all, and the environment around me is the key that unlocks those associations and brings them back.

*     *     *

I remember taking a walk in the waste field behind my first apartment complex, climbing up on top of a pile of rocks, fenced in by a net of wire to form a containing wall. A weed had burst out of the caged rocks, and, given that it grew with no soil to speak of, I admired its verve.

“When you transplant a plant,” Steve said from beside me, also regarding it, “it’s the tiny little roots you need to be careful of. You want to keep them intact as much as possible.”

That surprised me. My train of thought switched tracks. “Not the taproot?”

He shook his head. “The taproot is important as an anchor, but that's not where the plant gets most of its water and nutrients from. The smaller, more fibrous ones have the greater surface area.”

As a recent transplant myself, and one who'd paid a lot of attention to her anchor points, a lot of inexplicable things abruptly made sense.

*     *     *

What makes a home a home? It's many things, but one of the most elusive pieces comes from the thousand associations you build up in a place over hours and years of simply being there. You can't describe it, any more than you can consciously tell your life story in minute detail from beginning to end. Nor can you even remember exactly what it looks or sounds or smells like. But when you're there with it again in the flesh, each detail is a key—a key to a set of stories, habits, memories with an overlapping spectrum of emotions—that opens the door to a past life, a past self.

This is what I've lost, by starting over, in a new place, with no former associations. But—it's never truly lost. For better or for worse, my history is the same; I just need to find new ways to strengthen my connections to whichever parts I want to keep connected to.

(I wonder if this is the secret to happiness in old age. Tie all your flashbacks to your happy memories. Make lots of happy memories to tie back to.)

*     *     *

Sometimes, when I used to bike home from work, I used to count it up as "making memories." The scenery didn't change enough from day to day for there to be any one ride for me to remember, but over time, I imagined that I'd beat out a path in my mind strong enough that I'd look back on it vividly and feel some sort of connection to it.

I biked that road the day before the day before I left Austin. And it did, it held something—something more than just the feeling of the moment. There was an echo there from times before... The time when I'd seen deer crossing the road late at night. The times of relief, using my legs after a long day at work. The daily view of the lake and its heron, and a few, glorious maple trees in the height of autumn. The construction pillars along the side of the road and the pop music spilling all down the hill after the Top Golf there had finally been completed.

I held the echoes carefully next to the dry and real moment I was experiencing and tried to feel all of them at once. (It's important, I guess, to feel the weight of what you've experienced and the value of what you're leaving behind when you tell a place good-bye.) And then I made it larger. I tried to bring in the feeling of the wildflowers, the endless sunny air; the goofiness and techiness and food and fun. The sweat in the summer and in the dojo; the midnight light pollution from the highway. The times I'd walked outside and skipped over to the park; the times I'd gone to Wind Ensemble practice. The first people I became friends with and the last people I became friends with. The different places we played board games and the different seasons we went kayaking. The smell of the juniper, the call of grackles. The parkour gym. The church.

And the other pieces... Getting tired from being too busy, getting busy because things were missing and needed to be made up for. Times I tried to help people who never got better. Times I hurt people I liked. The times when I was irresponsible. The times I cried because I was irresponsible. The times I tried to become better and the times I failed over and over again anyway. Times I felt out of control. Times people leaned on me anyway.

The times when I was admired. The times where I wondered if anyone who liked or admired me really knew anything substantive about me. The times I talked too much. The times where someone saw beyond what I was saying.

The times I let someone hurt me. The times I needed help from someone I barely knew or couldn't pay back. The times where I connected with somebody. The times where I had to give up...

*     *     *

I held all those overlapping moments carefully, folding the corners back from their edges and examining them piece by piece and then all together. I waited, more patiently than I often do, for all those experiences to percolate. And, tangled and woven together, I found myself holding a nest of grungy and golden threads.

They were all so clear. Beads of glowing, shining moments, so small, so precious. Completely overwhelmed by gray and grunge.

No doubts: I want to go back home.

This should have been “home.”

A bright future. But another failure.

*     *     *

It's a strange feeling—coming back to a place that you know you knew, a place you already know you love, with barely a memory of why. Everyone I recognize I'm happy to see, as though my memory hands me the “overall positive experience” banner without any indicator of how strong a history was used to make the assessment. And yet, at the same time, there's a feeling of strangeness that jars with the strong-and-immediate attachment. There's a new shopping center in my town. A classmate makes jokes about a vice I never knew him for. People have moved. Some have married. Stuff has changed. It's eerie, because I still already love them anyway. But that's ok. There are reasons for all these feelings.

*     *     *

I stand at the edge of the backyard, thumbs in pockets, regarding the trees skeptically. The leaves are golden. A downy woodpecker pecks up a pine tree. For all the times I told people I missed the trees here, the immediate rush of affection is entirely memorized. I stare at them for a few minutes, challenging them to inspire me.

The woodpecker flits to another tree. A squirrel takes a few hops through crunchy leaves. It's nice, but it's hardly magical. I frown up at the woods appraisingly, then go to the shed and grab a hoe.

The garden bed has gone completely to seed, so I can get a good workout from hacking the weeds up by the roots. After half an hour or forty-five minutes of this, I lean on it and stare up at the trees again.

There are more birds; the woodpecker is gone, but there are two tufted titmice making squawking calls much bigger than they are. A small flock of sparrows or wrens flies overhead, and a cardinal chirps out of a nearby bush. The squirrels in the leaves keep changing their minds about whether they should run up a nearby tree or not—they take a three foot dash, pause, then go about their ground-sniffing business as though nothing whatever's the matter. For some reason, I find this amusing.

I set the hoe aside and meander onto the trail that goes farther back into the woods. I find scars on some bark, collect sweet-gum leaves, startle a doe when I try to mimic a tree-climbing squirrel. She doesn't go very far, though, and lifts her white tail daintily in my direction as she goes back to browsing.

I think I'm an undernourished person, trying to compensate for long-term starvation in a single sitting. It's like a thunderous rainstorm after a drought; even good things don't enter immediately. Absorption needs soft rain on soft soil, and time to percolate.

Woods, I address them, though not audibly, I think I'd better acknowledge that I don't know you like I used to. So, I'll stop pretending like I do, and we'll get to know each other again in the usual way.

It'll probably go faster; we've got a good foundation. Regardless, I'm looking forward to it. Last time was fun.

I'm re-knitting myself into this place. It's the intangible aspect of coming home.

After a long break...

I didn't forget you. I think about you all the time: words bubble out of me and splurt onto a page...but for several years now they've been better kept in other places.

For one thing, stories involve people. Real people. People who probably shouldn't have their interactions with me sub-anonymously sprayed out in a forum where technically, everybody could see. For another thing, sometimes I think the writing is for you, but it's not. It starts out pretty, then jumbles and snarls, and a few hours later I thank my computer for the therapy session and stuff the pages into a folder on my computer and then go to bed.

Sooner or later, I want the words to go farther. And hopefully, be packaged more neatly than the garbled stuff that comes out of my mouth when I normally feel the urge to share my thoughts and feelings.

No promises on chronological order. No promises on consistent theme. Someday, the blog can be predictable. For now, it's mostly for me.

Service

On my way home from NC a few weeks ago, while I was standing at my gate, looking back at the escalator longingly and making homesick posts on facebook, there was a couple nearby me getting their suitcases in order and preparing to board. The man was in a wheelchair, and the woman was handing him luggage to put in his lap because she couldn’t push both the suitcases and him. While I was watching absently, this other old man from all the way down the row got up, came over, and asked the lady if she could use some help. And she smiled in relief and said yes.

My first impulse was to mentally kick myself. That should have been me! I’m younger, I was right here; why didn’t I help? But then a warming thought sprouted in my heart: “Isn’t it nice that when you were distracted, someone else stepped up and did it? That you don’t have to always be the one to help?” Oh gosh, yes. Yes, it is. The world would be in dire straits if we all depended on one person to get all the problems fixed. There are too many people and problems in the world, I don’t have enough time, and then there are things like having the right skills or prior personal connection or being in the right place at the right time—the whole idea is ludicrous. On a more sober note, helping other people is something everyone needs--as much as I love it, it’s incredibly good for /everybody/ to get the opportunity to practice seeing other people’s needs, extending themselves for them, and feeling happy when somebody else is happy. That fulfills a part of our humanity. That's the way we were made.

Moving on, the end of my story: I got to have my private moment when I needed it, and still someone was helped. It was a wonderful moment that that man will never realize happened. And I wanted to mention it because this weekend, realizing that what I wanted for my birthday wasn't to have something so much as to be something, I drove down to Bluff Springs to help Austin Disaster Relief and Mormon Helping Hands with the cleanup from the flood a few weeks ago--in time to see tired volunteers coming back after having worked all day ripping up tile and cutting down rotting drywall and insulation. I didn't get to do very much myself, but it was a heartening thing to see how many people willingly came from all over for this, many who'd only heard about the event by word of mouth or because it was mentioned at their churches. People who did really physically demanding stuff, and people who did mundane, non-ego-validating stuff. Like honeybees together, wonderful things happen: not because the task isn't monumental, but because when people care more about their community than their own convenience they can chip away at those things that are ugly and hard and with imperceptible work make grand improvements. You know who you are, even if I don't, and you're the reason the world is a beautiful place. =) 

Thanks to all those who serve. You give me the ability to do good and the strength that I follow.