Bread on the Water

For some reason, I was thinking about NECCO wafers recently. For you youngsters out there, NECCO wafers were rolls of flavored compressed sugar candies wrapped in wax paper sleeves. They were sold all over the United States as far as I know, but I haven't seen them for maybe thirty years and am pretty sure they've gone the way of the dodo. So probably has NECCO itself, the New England Confectionary Company.

Thinking about NECCO wafers made me remember a story my father told me about his own grandfather, Maximilien Lefebvre, who came from Montreal to Boston to visit dad's family in about 1918. One day while there he took my father, then about five years old, for a walk and bought him a roll of NECCO wafers.

It was a tiny act of kindness, but my father still recalled it sixty or more years later. Grandfather Max continued to live in my father's heart for all that time, and even continues today since I know the story and have just passed it along to you.

In my own childhood, I remember fondly my uncle Raymond, who took time from a Florida vacation to throw a baseball around with me when I was five. And I was terrible, he had to chase my bad throws over and over again. He's nearly forty years in the grave, but the friendliness he showed to a little boy lives on.

As I'm sure astute readers already have figured out, my point is that acts of charity, of kindness are remembered, and hopefully, are paid forward. May we all do so.

No politics today. No jokes.