Owen was born just as Hurricane Katrina ________ the Gulf Coast. Days later, Owen became ________ill. Those weeks taught me something about the ________ of strangers.

All catastrophes (灾祸) are personal. Some in the Gulf Coast sought survival. Some sought to ________others. At the hospital, we watched our son Owen sleep. Despite the tubes dripping, he still slept his baby sleep. My wife asked for the pastor (牧师). I ________ the doctor. She prayed for him. I held the CAT scan up to the light and searched for answers. No one can know what you will feel in a time of need, but I learned that in this ________ time, the people our family depended upon most were people we had never ________.

We depended upon strangers who knew their ________ was to help others. We depended upon the nurses who _________after our son so well, who watched me hold him through the night. We depended upon the hostel that gave us a place to ________ near the hospital, upon the doctors and clerks and ambulance drivers. We depended upon a ________made to helping others.

This commitment is a web that ________ us together in hard times. By the time we took Owen home, the worse effects of Katrina were ________. I watched the images from the Gulf Coast, images of communities, lives and families whose fabric (基本结构) had been ________.

I thought of the web of strangers that had helped my family. I can only hope this web will be ________ enough, so that it will hold and care for many and we can all depend upon the kindness of strangers.

There he was, turning the corner of Hawley and Main Street like clockwork. His red hair seemed to catch the sunlight, giving his head a soft candle-flame glow. He_________my eye, and up went his arm in his usual wave. As usual, I_________back and gave him a warm smile. I didn't know his name, but he was very_________to everybody. No matter the weather, I saw him walking out there almost every day.

Having moved from a larger city, I wasn't used to waves from_________. Actually, wherever we were, people_________greet each other. We simply passed by each other, heads down, minding our own_________.

Perhaps that's why I_________these daily waves. It felt great to be_________and receive that message of "Hello!". On days when we didn't_________to pass each other, I missed him and__________if he was all right. The next day, I'd find myself driving with one eye on the__________. It was a happy reunion when I spotted him, and I'd wave first __________.

One night I was walking in the street, my thoughts__________to "The Waver, wondering if I could be__________enough to wave at people I didn't know.

Just at the point, I heard a car__________. I made eye contact with the person in the car, smiled and waved at her. The woman's face__________, and she waved back. I was a little__________. I reminded myself, "It's okay. It's actually kind of cool!" I waved to everyone I saw the rest of the way home.

Everyone at some point in their lives wonders if they've made any__________to the world. I can tell you that you don't have to__________the world thoroughly. It's enough to help sweeten it a little, even by a__________wave.

It was just the three of us — my parents and me. My dad is a truck driver and when I was little, he was gone for most of the time, _______ goods around the Midwest.

We lived in a small house in Colorado and we moved there on my third birthday. My first _______ is our neighbor Arlene handing me strawberries from her garden _______ a hole in the fence. She and her husband, Bill, lived next door. They spent a lot of time working in their garden and _______ got tired of listening to me chatter (唠叨). It was a wonderful _______.

One day, my parents asked Bill and Arlene whether they’d watch me while they were out on a date. This worked well for everyone, so it became a somewhat monthly _______. Arlene and Bill didn’t have kids and they had a _______ room in their house, which became “my” room.

When I was five, an idea hit me one day: “What if I adopted Bill and Arlene as my grandparents?” My parents said I could go over and ask them, so I knocked on their door and said, “Will you guys be my grandparents?” They started crying and enthusiastically _______. Soon after, they printed out an adoption certificate and it _______ on their wall from then on.

I was surprised that they took my offer so ________. They could have laughed it off. Thinking of that moment still brings ________ to my eyes. There is something truly ________ about a child offering up her love and adults being so ________ to accept it. Every child ________ enthusiastically responded love.

Over the years, Bill and Arlene supported me in all my dreams. They encouraged me to apply for college, ________ I didn’t have the money to go. And when I got admitted to Colorado State University, they ________ me with the fund. They told me they had been ________ money since the day I adopted them.

Arlene passed away in 2013, two days before our adoption ________. At the funeral, Bill gave me the ________ he once gifted to Arlene. I still wear it on my finger as a ________ of the kind of love I wish to put into the world.