When I was a boy growing up I could not once ever remember either my Mom or my Nana wasting food. Anything we didn’t eat at one meal was saved, stored, and ________ as leftovers later on. I can ________ my Nana making a huge pot of brown beans with a large cake of cornbread. We would all eat until we were ________ but there was always about half of the beans ________. A few days later Nana would take those beans out of the ________, boil noodles, add parsley and ________ them all together into her delicious Pasta Fasule. And I also remember when I ________ my Mom fry bacon for us in the mornings she would always take the oil and ________ pour it into a container. Then she later would use it to ________ so many other dishes. I was an adult before I realized that green beans didn’t ________ taste like bacon.

I learned their ________ well and after I grew up I tried to never ________ food myself. I always planned the week’s meals ahead of time and only bought what was on my ________ list so nothing went to waste. Every meal went into a tummy and any leftovers were later eaten by either myself, my boys, or my dogs. To me throwing food in the trash was just ________. All the work it took to grow it, harvest it, and prepare it needed to be ________ not wasted.

There Is No Ping without A Pong

In February 2020, my husband, Bob, and I were offered an outdoor pingpong table, but I was not good at pingpong at all. “ What are we going to do with that?” Bob asked me. He clearly thought we were about to get something we did not _______ .

“The two of us will play. ” I replied. Bob looked doubtful.

The pingpong table arrived _______ before the COVID-19 quarantines (隔离) began. We were both working at home. Every day at a little after 5, if it wasn’t rainy, we played pingpong for about 45 minutes, driving away the anxiety or _______ of another day in lockdown.

I lost every game. It didn’t _______ me at first. Bob was enjoying the chance to _______ . But there were days when I hated losing. Once I threw my paddle across the yard in anger. Then one day Bob suggested I play with a handicap (让步赛) of 12 points. That _______ a lot — I sometimes won! The effort of trying to win was _______ . Even when I lost a point, I enjoyed making Bob work harder for it.

Pingpong helped my husband and me _______ the worst of the lockdowns. The gift of the pingpong table gave us a way to have fun in a _______ time. It takes two willing partners to play table tennis. Similarly, it takes two people who would like to ________happiness with each other to make a marriage. Simply put, when it comes to table tennis — or any other relationship — there is no ping without a pong.

We were a group of people who took a bus to work every day. One of the _____ was a small old man who took the bus to the health centre every morning. He always _____ behind the driver. No one ever paid much _____ to him.

But one July morning he said good morning to the driver and smiled at others. The driver nodded. The rest of us were _____ as usual.

The next day, the old man got on the bus and said in a loud voice, “A very good _____ to you all!” Some of us looked up, _____, and said, “Good morning.” From then on he said good morning to us every day and we began to _____ to each other.

One morning he had some flowers in his hand. The driver turned around _____ and asked, “Are these for me, Charlie?” We never got to know if his name was really “Charlie”, _____ he waved the flowers and said yes. People laughed. Every morning after that Charlie always ______ a flower.

Until one morning Charlie wasn’t ______ at his usual stop. And he wasn’t there the next day and the day after that. What might have happened to him? When we came nearer to the health centre, a woman ______ the driver to wait a moment. We all held our ______ when she went to the door.

She said she knew who we were talking about. The elderly gentleman was sick. We ______ him back on Monday.

The next Monday when Charlie got on the bus, all of us who he had brought happiness to in that summer sat with a ______ in our hands.