Highs and lows.....sorry if TL;DR
The highs: I love my neighborhood, and the people within. I maintain a website for the "Bunco Babes" here, a group of women who would get together monthly to socialize, play bunco...and drink. Since Karen passed, much of the organizing has dropped off. But the OG's of the babes invited me to a get-together; little did I know if was partially to thank me for the web site and congratulate my retirement. Pics below.
A low with a little bit of high: we have a local "Buy Nothing" FB group, for free things. I have refurbed and donated computers perhaps a dozen times now. Gave two laptops away this weekend, one to a gent who has been out of work for almost 4 years because he was in an accident where a Mack truck blew a red light and slammed into him. He is now in somewhat constant discomfort or pain, and can't do much physically; insurance fights every step of the way. He even gets PTSD driving long trips.... Yet still, he does a lot of nice small things for others, and we shared our stories about that. Oh, yes: we had one FB friend in common, a wonderful woman with whom I used to work. She passed away from cancer and pneumonia complications recently; it turns out this is her distant cousin, and he didn't even know of her passing.
The lower low: another laptop I gave to a woman who has an autistic son (two other kids too, one of whom has pretty high functioning autism). I volunteered to bring the laptop and a full docking station with monitor setup I had over. This amazing woman and her husband spend almost 24x7 watching her youngest, as he has non-verbal autism and also has a potentially deadly condition where his digestive tract will get blocked. Constant monitoring and care, advocating for him at hospital and doctor visits, etc. Hugs and tears resulted. They don't even have a place right now to set up the full monitor, so I told her I will come and help when they do find the space. You can see the strain, yet the strength all at once.
Humans are such amazing creatures. But the two situations above point out how much the system works against so many, though!