She was dancing. My disabled grandmother was dancing. I stood in the living room doorway absolutely ________. I looked how her body bent beautifully, her arms greeting the sunlight that was ________ through the window. And her legs… Those legs that had ________ walked, aided with a walking stick as long as I could remember. Now she was wearing beautiful dancing shoes and her legs ________ her perfectly.

She turned around and saw me standing in the doorway. Her beautiful movement ended so ________ that it felt like being shaken awake from a beautiful dream. Grandma looked so much like a kid ________ with her hand in a cookie jar. Grandma sighed and gave me the whole story.

“________, my legs have been well all my life”, she said. She thought for a while and then continued. “We were talking about engagement when your grandfather had to go to war. I put all my energy and time into ________. I was invited to perform with the best and one day I realized

I was considered to be one of them. And then one day a letter from the ________ came. He lost his leg and asked me to forget about him.”

“What happened then?” I ________ her.

“I made my decision ________. I loved him so much that I was not going to lose him to depression. I told everyone I had been in a car ________ and that my leg would never completely heal again. My dancing days were over. I only danced at home when no one was around and never ________ my decision. I figured I could change a few years of fame to a lifetime of ________. And I was right. It was worth it.”

Tears filled my eyes. I was thinking about how much joy we can bring to each others’ lives. I know people who have chosen to ________ a lot and done it gladly to achieve something they considered worth it, just like my grandma.

My mother, who is short, fat and white-haired, looks just like many grand mothers. She seldom did _________ stuff as she comes from an old traditional family. That all _________ a few years ago. She began to _________ my older brother and me with bouts of what she described as "independence."

In early 2015, the year she turned 75, she _________ us she'd booked a seven-night trip to Turkey. Alone. She had never been. Of course, that was _________ , so there was no way my brother and I could allow that. Such a little old lady _________ the streets of Istanbul on her own, not speaking a word of Turkish, with no _________ of the laws and customs of the land—it was out of the question! She paid no attention to us. Off she went. When she returned, she told us it had been a wonderful _________ . As it turns out, she had barely spent any time alone after _________ a taxi driver to show her around Istanbul for a few days.

At 77, she did a __________ thing while on a Caribbean cruise with her younger sister. Upon __________ in Cuba, she flagged down a motorcycle rickshaw and had the driver "show her around the island" for several hours. My mom's 80th-birthday skiing is just the latest example of her wild newfound __________ .

My brother and I __________ : Had she become mad? But Mom's independence seems to be thoughtfully based on a（n） __________ that life is to be lived, and when there's relatively little of it left, it needs to be lived now. This philosophy __________ me of the line from The Shawshank Redemption: "Get busy living or get busy dying.”

“Dad, can you tell me how to get rich?”

My dad _________ down the evening paper, “_________ do you want to get rich, my son?”

“Because today Jimmy’s mom _________ up in their new BMW, and they were going to their beach house for the weekend. He _________ three of his friends, but Mike and I weren’t invited. They told us we weren’t invited because we were ‘_________ kids’.”

“They _________?” my father asked unbelievably.

“Yeah.” I replied in a _________ voice.

My dad _________ shook his head, _________ his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and went back to reading the paper. I stood waiting for a(n) ____________.

The year was 1956. I was nine years old. By some twists of fate, I ____________ the same public elementary school where the rich people sent their kids. I went to this school because my family lived on one ____________ of the street. Had I lived on the other side of the street, I would have gone to a ____________ school with kids from families more like mine. After grade six, the rich neighbors would send their kids to private schools, ____________ the poor kids and I would go on to the public intermediate and high school.

My dad finally put down the paper. I could ____________ he was thinking.

“Well, son,” he began slowly. “If you want to be rich, you have to learn to make money.”

“How do I make money? I asked.

“Well, use your ____________, Son,” he said, smiling. Despite my young age, I could tell what he ____________.

He was trying to say, “That’s all I’m going to tell you,” or “I don’t know the answer, so don’t ____________ me.

As expected, dad said, “Don’t count on me to give you an answer. ____________ for yourself, son. But keep it in mind that money is not an ____________, but a means to an end.”