I may be crude and occasionally offensive in my posts, but that’s to be funny and that’s who I am.  I find that I do things for people that I actually get made fun of.  Someone calls me in the middle of the night and needs me, I will be there.  If I have $10 to my name there’s  a good chance I’ll spend it on a friend.

Unfortunately, sometimes I don’t feel the gratitude from the work I put into people.  I don’t do these things for gratitude but a sincere “Thank you” or just some show of appreciation makes a difference to me.

Before this week, I had only felt pure gratitude two different times.  The first was when I was in high school.  As I have mentioned before, I’ve been a writer since the age of 14 and one day, I was at a boyfriends house and saw a mommy mouse had been killed by the dog but a newborn had survived.

I took this baby in and I fed it with an eye dropper, looked up how a mother would bathe and make it go potty and the proper temperature the mouse needed to survive.

I blame myself for what happened.  I accidentally grabbed the wrong formula and the mouse died.  I grieved for this mouse for months and actually still do years later.

Because of my writing, a reader who was a fan of mine saw the story and felt my pain.  He knew the high school I went to, since I’m not shy about anything and he found me one day with a gift.  The gift was a brown box that slid in to reveal a tiny gold mouse.  That box, with the mouse inside sits in my car to this day.

The second time I felt gratitude shown to me was when I was on a cruise and because I had a little too much fun, I went wandering around looking for something to help cure my aching head.

Seeing a man at an information booth, I rushed over and asked where I could get something to help me out. He pointed me in the direction of a Cold Stone Creamery, now famous nationwide, but unfamiliar to me back then. (more…)