Messages of Life: Share Your Pumpkin Seeds

The other day I was walking my dog when this kid rode his bike past me. He looked very familiar he stopped and said do I know you? And I was like I don’t know and then he asked me if I was Samantha and I said no. He rode his bike away before I could get his name.  He looked like a boy in my second grade class. He had the same brown eyes, dark skin, and big smile. I don’t remember the kid’s name in my second grade but that day made me think about him. How he open my eyes to the world around me. Yes in second grade in Lincolnshire. If I had to pick a time of when I became interested in helping others and where my passion for volunteering came from I would say it came from him. He always would make me laugh. When he came in my class it was the end of September and my mom and I use to always bake pumpkin seeds and I would bring them to school. I would share them with him every day because he never had a snack. He would play with me on the playground since I had no friends in my class. My second grade teacher even told me (later) that I actually helped him to read and he learned/ listened to me more than he did to her. I remember my class always having fights between the girls but when I was with him I didn’t get sucked into the petty drama. During reading time he uses to try to do my hair (a custom that all the girls did when our teacher read to us).  He had to leave at the end of October and I remember that when it was his last day my teacher gave him a bag of pumpkin seeds. He said “I want to give these to Dori because she was nice and always let me have hers”. It’s the little things like those words that make you smile and feel good about yourself.  In the world we live in today as a teen it can be hard to just sit down and smile while sharing pumpkin seeds.  I feel he taught me to appreciate the little things because before I knew it he was gone and off to a new school. As a second grader I guess you can say “he changed my life beyond all means”. Whenever I feel that everything is going wrong I always remember him and smile knowing that we have to appreciate the little things that I have like pumpkin seeds. 

Death is the end of a person’s body but it is a beginning of another journey for that person’s sole, beliefs, traditions, and memories.  Even though a person is dead the life they left behind will continue on forever. Traditions from grandmothers get passed down through the generations. Memories and stories go through every family that makes us remember that special love one even when they are dead. Even famous individuals in the world leave their mark.  Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. great believes and dreams have inspired others to do great things and make this world better even after King and Gandhi were dead. Thus these dreams were part of one person but continued on to another as a new journey.  Jews and others who died in the holocaust can be viewed the same way.  They are dead physically but their story of struggle and of ignorance of the world still are told today.  We might not know each of their names but their messages influence us to do better in this world.  We grieve for a love one and many times in this process we want to make sure that they are never forgotten. We do this by taking a part of this person and applying it to our lives in that very moment, day, week or year.  This part of their soul is taken on a new journey with a new person but still hold true what they believed in. So death is just a process everything in nature goes through. We end the physical life of a plant, animal, or person. But what that soul can carry on is the message of beauty, loyalty, or peace.