And you're listening to The Daily Grateful. My name is Michael Gross. I hope you're having a terrific day. I'm kind of having a good day, but what are we grateful for today?
Got any ideas? Let's see. Uh, tomorrow I have to pay $780 to get the air conditioning fixed in my 23-year-old pickup truck. New compressor.
How's that? I'm grateful because I'll have air conditioning. I haven't had air conditioning in a week and a half, and now I'll have air conditioning. So I'll be more productive, and I'll enjoy driving more, and life will be beautiful all the time, and I'll be happy to see those nice young men and their clean white coats, if you could say that.
Yeah, I can say that. I hope that that's going to be what happens. Anyway, what else is there to be grateful about today? Well, let me tell you.
I had a very nice conversation with my son, Zach, today. Very, very, very nice conversation, and we talked about the importance of doing good deeds. You see, Zach and I work together during the day. I'm helping him out, and we have a business, and it's going to be his business, and he's going to take it over here sooner rather than later, I hope.
But one of the things that we do every day is we find a good deed to do. That is our first priority, is to find a good deed to do. We have helped people that we have seen stranded on the side of the road many times. We've donated money to people holding out those cardboard signs.
Yes, don't get me started. We do it every time. We do it, and I know you're going to hear, well, they're buying her. No, I don't know what they're buying.
We gave a young lady $20, and she was so grateful to us, and she headed straight into the store to buy food. We watched her. So we do good deeds. Everything that we can do to do a good deed is our first priority, and we find that when we do that, it comes back to us in many forms.
It is just something that we really enjoy doing, and it makes us feel good. The other thing we do is we have wonderful discussions, and I tell him all these marvelous stories that I hope that he will tell his children when, you know, I'm no longer around and he has children. He doesn't have any yet. But I'm hoping that that is something that he will pass along.
He passes them along to his girlfriend right now. I tell him stories about my Aunt June. I could do an entire podcast on my Aunt June. I mean, not just one podcast.
I mean, a whole series of podcasts I could do on my Aunt June, and it would be good. I'm telling you. He keeps telling me I should do that. I'm so grateful to have known Aunt June my entire life until she passed away.
Oh, she passed away in the 90s, but in the young, I think she was only 61 or 62 years of age when she passed. But growing up with her in the 50s and 60s and 70s, there were some crazy things. I'm telling you, this woman did some crazy stuff, and I used to so enjoy having conversations with her. And I mean, of all the craziness that she has, and believe me, I just wish I could share, and I hesitate to, but I wish I could share crazy Aunt June stories, but I'm going to share one story from when I was very, very young.
You see, I have a cousin. I have a cousin named Dawn. I've known her my whole life. As a matter of fact, she's the same age as what my sister would be if my sister was still alive.
But what I didn't know when I was young is that I also had a cousin as well, who was a young boy who died as a baby of something that we now know of as SIDS, sudden infant death, whatever it is. And this is something that back in the 40s, when this all happened, nobody knew about SIDS. I'm just telling you, nobody knew about sudden infant death syndrome. And when my cousin died, I got to tell you, a lot of people, including my uncle, I think, I mean, I don't know this, but I think this, a lot of people blamed my Aunt June for it.
And it is something that she carried with her her whole life. The way I knew that I had a cousin who was a boy is one day I was looking at her sewing kit, and there was an envelope in there, and it had his name. I'm not going to tell his name out of respect, but there was an envelope. And I said, what's that?
And she opened it up, and in it was his hair, some of his hair in there. And I said, what is that? And she told me, and she told me the whole story. And it's the only time I've ever seen my Aunt June cry.
And it was one of these moments that stayed with me for a very, very, very long time. As a matter of fact, it's still with me. And when she passed on in the 90s, when she passed on, a week before she passed on, and believe me, again, lots of crazy Aunt June stories, but the week before she passed on, maybe a week and a half before she passed on, she was at my mother's house with my Uncle George, and she was out on the patio where the swimming pool is. She was out there sneaking cigarettes.
Uncle George thought she'd quit, but she was out there sneaking a cigarette. And I went out, and I sat down with her. And I had the most wonderful conversation with her. And we had had a lot of things that went on between us growing up and early adulthood.
We just had a lot of stuff between us. And it was almost, no, it wasn't almost. I'm going to tell you, it was exactly what it was. She sat there, and she settled all the accounts.
That's what I call this. We had the most wonderful conversation where we talked about all of the crazy things that I had interpreted that she had done that, in my mind, affected my life. And she gave me precise explanations for each one of them, and every damn one of them made sense to me. And when that conversation was over, I just took a deep breath, and she took a deep breath.
The difference between our deep breaths is she took a deep breath in inhaling a Winston. But I just took a deep breath. And I looked at her, and I smiled, and she looked at me, and she smiled. And that was our last conversation, because it wasn't long after that, that she sat on a chair in their home at night watching television.
She was a very comfortable chair, and it was not unusual for her to fall asleep in that chair. She fell asleep in that chair, and she never woke up. And the next day, we had to deal with all of that. And I got to go to her funeral, and I was able to share some things with people there personally about my Aunt June with that funeral.
And as crazy as she was, and I'm telling you, this woman was bat poop crazy at times. God, I loved her so much. But she was also one of the most tender, and caring, and loving people that I knew in my whole life. Hope you got it in June.
I'm grateful for my Aunt June. Truly am. She was pretty amazing. She was bat poop crazy at times.
God, I love her. But she had such a good heart. And she was so kind to me, when I needed to have someone be kind to me. Yeah, she was a pain in the ass a lot of times.
But her and I had a special relationship, and I'm very, very grateful for it. Have a terrific day. We'll talk again soon. We'll talk again soon.