At a gathering, we were all telling stories of our most embarrassing moments. It came around to Frank.

Frank began to tell us of his childhood. "I____________in San Pedro. My Dad was a fisherman, and he loved the sea. He had his own boat, but it was____________making a living on the sea. He worked hard and would stay out until he caught enough to_____________the family."

He looked at us and said, "I __________you could have met my Dad. He was a big man, and he was strong from pulling the nets and fighting the seas for the___________. When you got close to him, he____________like the ocean. He would wear his old coat and his overalls. No matter how much my mother___________them, they would still smell of the sea and of fish."

Frank's voice dropped a bit. "When the weather was bad he would _____________me to school. He had this old truck that was older than he was. As he would drive toward the school, I would shrink down into the seat hoping to___________. He would_________ right in front of the school gate, and it seemed like everybody would be__________around and watching. Then he would__________over and give me a big kiss on the cheek and tell me to be a good boy. It was so__________for me. I was twelve years old, and my Dad would lean over and kiss me goodbye!"

He__________and then went on, "I remember the day when I said 'No' "

It was the first time I had ever talked to him that________, and he had this surprised look on his face. I said, "Dad, I'm too_________for a goodbye kiss."

My Dad looked at me for the longest time, and his eyes started to tear up. I had never seen him_________.

He turned and looked out the windshield(挡风玻璃). "You're right," he said. "You are a big boy....a man. I won't kiss you anymore. "

Frank got a sad look on his face, and the tears began to__________in his eyes, as he spoke. "It wasn't long after that when my Dad went to sea and never came back." Tears were running down Frank's cheeks. He spoke again. "Guys, you don't know what I would__________to have my Dad give me just one more kiss on the cheek....to feel his rough old face...to smell the ocean on him...to feel his arm around my neck. I wish I had been a man then. If I had been a__________, I would never have told my Dad I was too old for a goodbye kiss."

To me, kindness is a chosen lifestyle. In my classroom, I tell my_________that every day they are offered a choice. They can’t choose what happens to them, but they can choose how they_________to it. Kindness is a _________ . And it is a lifestyle. It isn’t something that we just choose once in a while---it is a(n) _________to live our lives.

My father was hospitalized with leukemia(白血病) when I was in college. He didn’t choose the cancer. _________, he chose how to react to it. To this day, seventeen years later, the nurses _________write my mother letters. The _________? It was because of my father’s kindness to others even when he was _________against the disease. He made kindness a lifestyle. And I want to be _________ him. Every day as a teacher, I try and teach my students the kindness lifestyle. Just recently, I turned 40 and a friend gave me 40 individual dollar bills. She challenged me to do something __________with the money. I gladly accepted the challenge. I gave 40 of my students one dollar each and challenged them to make a(n)__________. What happened? My Twitter and Instagram were __________ with pictures of kids making the world a better place. One girl bought a dollar store stuffed animal（毛绒玩具）. It was __________that kids should have made a difference when they were given the __________ .

Living the kindness lifestyle __________ every day, every opportunity. As a high school teacher, I see __________ everywhere. In the hallways, in the lunchroom, in the locker room, __________ words and gossip fill the air. So I started a positive gossip __________is called “third party compliments(赞美)”. The idea is that you talk about people behind their backs, but do it in a__________way. In that way, the gossip that gets back to students makes their day instead of getting them down.

Our kindness lifestyle leaves a footprint on others, and let us be the movers and kindness-makers who __________ a better, more beautiful world.

During one particularly bad storm in 1838, a ship got into trouble as it passed the Farne Islands.

Despite one of the boilers in the ship having sprung a leak earlier in the journey, the ______   had decided to continue. In ______ conditions this may have been OK, but as the weather became worse, events turned disastrous as both boilers ______ , and the ship crashed against a big rock and broke in two.

At around 4: 30 a. m. , 22-year-old Grace Darling living in that lighthouse ______ the wreckage (失事) and told her father ______ , William Darling, the lighthouse keeper. Father and daughter looked for ______ of life through a telescope, but due to poor light, it wasn’t until around 7 a. m. that Grace spotted movement.

Realizing there was still life on board, and ______   that it was probably too stormy for the lifeboat from the nearby port of Seahouses to make it, Grace and William got in their 20ft boat and rowed out to ______ , despite Grace’s mother’s protests to stay put, not knowing if they themselves would ______ .

On arrival at the rock, they found nine survivors— more than they ______ and too many for one passage to safety. While her father jumped onto the rock to help the ______ , Grace was tasked with steadying the boat on her own.

William and Grace took the first boatload of survivors to the ______ , where Grace then remained with her mother, to ______ them, while her father rowed back to ______   the rest of the survivors. Finally, all the survivors were ______ .

Discover Britain February 2023.