Many years ago, my dad was facing a serious heart condition. He was unable to do a steady job. He suddenly fell ill and had to be admitted to the hospital.

He wanted to do something to keep himself busy, so he decided to volunteer at the local children’s hospital. My dad loved kids. It was a perfect job for him. He ended up working with the seriously ill children. He would talk, play, and do arts with them.

One of his kids was a girl with a rare disease that paralyzed (使瘫痪) her from the neck down. She couldn’t do anything, and she was very depressed. My dad decided to try to help her. He started visiting her in her room, bringing paints, brushes and paper. He stood the paper up, put the paintbrush in his mouth and began to paint. He didn’t use his hands at all. All the while he would tell her, “See, you can do anything you set your mind to.” At the end of the day, she began to paint using her mouth, and she and my dad became friends. Soon after, the little girl was sent home because the doctors felt there was nothing else they could do for her. My dad also left the children’s hospital for a little while because he became ill. Some time later after my dad had recovered and returned to work, in came the little girl who had been paralyzed and only this time she was walking. She ran straight over to my dad and hugged him really tight. She gave him a picture she had done using her hands. At the bottom it read: “Thank you for helping me walk.”

My dad would cry every time he told us this story and so would we. He would say sometimes love is more powerful than doctors, and my dad — who died just a few months after the little girl gave him the picture — loved every single child in that hospital.

I was just in France to visit my grandmother who is very dear to me. I don’t get to cross the Atlantic very often, and she’s now 96 years old, so every time I visit her, the two of us are very aware that it might be the last time we see each other.

Last year, I did a series of short video interviews about her life. I asked her what it was like growing up with her father in the 1910s, and living alone with two young children. I asked her about her greatest memories, and her favorite books, foods, etc. I learned a lot of amazing new things about her I had never known before. These were very intimate conversations, which made me know her better.

This year, I did not really have questions and I only had a great desire to make her know how much I loved her. I cooked for her and read her stories. I gave her a foot massage (按摩), which was her first ever! Before leaving, I was looking for a way to leave something meaningful behind besides the memory of our time together. Therefore, I wrote her five different love notes, and hid them in different places where I knew she would eventually find them.

I left really joyously knowing that these cards would surely cheer her up after I left. She called me as I was travelling back to Paris to catch my plane back to the US and said, “I found your cards! By the time I discovered the last one, I was laughing out loud! Thank you so much, my sweetheart!” I smiled to myself, knowing she still had two more to go! It was Sunday, so my guess was that she had not checked her mailbox and had not yet driven her car!

Laurie Horam never thought of himself as musical. At home, his dad never listened to music, while one of his boarding school teachers labelled him tone deaf. But last month he started to busk. And while he accompanies on harmonica (口琴) his guitar - playing friend Alan Eaton, people clap, dance and throw coins into Alan’s guitar case for the local food bank. Horam caught himself thinking: “How, at the age of 80, do I come to be playing music to people on the streets of Brad-ford?”

The question preoccupied him, because, some years ago at a family gathering, Gavin, one of his children, said, “You know what, Dad? It can’t be coincidental. We must have got our natural abilities and interest from you.” He has three sons, two daughters and a stepson from two marriages; between them, they cover a range of instruments and genres from techno to rock. Horam was floored. “There can’t be music in me, because I can’t play!”, he said.

Eight years ago, Horam, a retired civil servant, was driving back from a trip to the Yorkshire coast with his eldest son, Gavin, who was visiting from Canada. Cavin wanted to stop at a music shop. He walked out and said, “Here you are. I bought this for you, Dad. It’s a harmonica. I’ll try to show you how to play a bit.”

They went to a local pub. Gavin played guitar and Laurie sat in the corner with his harmonica, trying to make a sound that no one would hear. After six months, he was invited into the group. Unable to read music, he discovered a talent for improvisation (即兴表演), responding to a note within a millisecond without batting an eyelid. “I don’t play by ear. I play by heart.” Actually, Horam says, “My harmonica plays me - how I feel, what I am, what I’ve been.”

Music has enriched life with friendship and made Horam feel “part of something much bigger” than himself. “At a time when the scope of life might be shrinking, mine is expanding,” he says. “Maybe we never know completely who we are or what we can do.”