The second-hand car that I bought just three months ago wouldn’t start the other day. The factory battery that came along with it showed that it had worked long enough to “face death”. My kind-hearted neighbor gave it a try, but the battery wouldn’t hold the charge. After giving another try, I headed to the local car store to buy a new one. Fixing it was more difficult than we thought, so I took it to a local repairman who finally got the new battery in and the car started running once again.

Driving it this morning, though, I noticed that the time on the screen had suddenly gone back to nine years, resetting to the date of the first time when it was started. While my son smartly found out how to program it back to today, I thought about how I had wished I could turn back time and make up for some of the errors I had made and the missteps I had taken in my own life during my boyhood time.

How many of us wish that we could go back to a certain time and change things? Like most middle-aged fathers, I have ever wished that. Yet, when I look back on my life today, I think that I won’t change anything. Every choice I have made, every step I have taken, and every road I have taken has led me to where I am now. Many of my choices have brought me pain in the past, but they have also guided me in the present. I won’t want to change things as they will change me. All that I have learned comes from the roads I have taken.

When you look at your own life, you can remember your past sadness, bout don’t regret the roads you took. Instead, celebrate the path you are on. Keep your feet moving forward.

The story is little known, but the anthologist Allie Esiri stumbled across it while researching her new book.“It's extraordinary that it may have been Shakespeare's words that jolted he guard's humanity," she said.

After the Holocaust(大屠杀) Eva was reunited with her boyfriend, Jan. They married, moved to the US and both taught chemistry at Illinois University, Yet none of that might have happened had she not been cast in A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1944. Eva never got to appear in the show as she was driven to the Theresienstadt ghetto Czechoslovakia, where 33,000 died. But it was there that she met the love of her life.

Now 95, Jan still remembers falling in love with the girl he saw helping elderly people with their luggage as they arrived. He read poetry with her and Eva would recite the lines she never got to perform. “Shakespeare was a very important part of her life. I loved hearing her recite it,”he said.

Months later Eva was saying those lines again in the Polish winter. By then, she had lost her father at Auschwitz. She and her mother were assessed by Dr. Josef Mengele and had been sent to the Kurzbach labor camp. It was there that a guard she knew as Suchy heard her lines as Titania.“He seemed to be listening to my recitations,” Eva wrote in her memoir.

The mere act of him talking to her was forbidden but Eva also noted that he spoke to her with the polite form of“you” in German. Mr. Rocek said that Suchy had no ulterior motive.“He never tried in the slightest to touch her or anything,” he said. The guard kept a watchful eye over Eva and her mother, particularly when the inmates were marched toward the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. Knowing this was a path to death, Suchy approached Eva's mother Anna early one morning and told them to escape. Eva, Anna and three others fled into the woods.

Esiri, who includes the story in her book Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year, says:“You wouldn't think those conversations in concentration camps had any human moments.”Michael Dobson, professor of Shakespeare studies at Birmingham University, said: “It's what culture's for. To provide channels of communication between people even in the hardest circumstances.”Eva and Jan were married from 1947 until her death in 2015, aged 87. He said:“We saw A Midsummer Night's Dream whenever we had a chance.”

Many healthy women in their late 70s tie up their walking shoelaces (鞋带) or hiking boots to stay active. But not Suzelle Poole. Six days week, the willowy (苗条的) 78-year-old Dallas ballet instructor laces up her dance shoes and teaches classical ballet, as she’s done for decades.

Madame Poole, as her students call her, also regularly performs ballet throughout the Dallas area as a guest artist with local dance companies. And she dances at the assisted-living centers along with her students. “People in care centers can relate to me because I’m about the same age.” Poole said, “I hope to get them interested in exercise. Plus, I enjoy showing them that it is never too late to do something you love.”

Ballet has always seemed as natural to her as breathing, she said, beginning with the first day when she took lessons at age 7 in London, where she was born. “I loved it from the start,” she said. “and when my parents took me to watch the well-known Margot Fonteyn in a ballet, I just knew it was something wanted to be a part of forever.”

Because 30 is the average age for most dancers to retire, Poole said, she thought she would be lucky to continue performing into her late 20s. Nobody was more surprised than she was when she continued to dance into her 40s, 50s and beyond. “I didn’t set out to be dancing ballet in my 70s,” she said, “but I’m certainly happy that it turned out that way. I have strong feet, strong knees and very strong back.” she added.