How did you do it, Dad? How have you managed not to take a drink for almost 20 years? It took me almost 20 years to have the _______ to even ask my father this very personal question. When Dad first _______ drinking, the whole family was on pins and needles every time he got into a _______ that, in the past, would have started him _______ again. For a few years we were _______ to bring it up for fear that the drinking would begin again.

“I had this little poem that I would recite to myself at least four to five times a day,” was Dad’s _______ to my 18-year-old unasked question. “The words were a constant _______ to me that things were _______ so hard that I could not deal with them,” Dad said. Then he _______ the poem with me. The poem’s ________, yet profound words immediately became ________ of my daily routine as well.

About a month after this ________ with my father, I received a gift in the mail from a friend of mine. It was a book of daily sayings of wisdom with one ________ for each day of the year.

It has been my ________ that when you get something with days of the year on it, you naturally turn to the page that lists your own ________.

I ________ opened the book to November 10 to see ________ words of wisdom this book had in store for me. I was ________ when I looked at the page, and then tears of disbelief and appreciation ________ down my face. There, on my birthday, was the exact same poem that had ________ my father for all these years! It is called the Serenity (平静) Prayer.

God grant me

the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;

the courage to change the things I can;

and the wisdom to know the difference.

We first met Tom and Gee in the early days of our marriage. Someone had been returning our garbage cans to the garage, and Jim and I had ________ who. Then we spotted him: an elderly man living across the street.

I left some cookies outside the garage with a thank-you ________. When we got home, a letter had replaced the ________. It was from Tom and explained how he had returned cans for people he ________ knew. Back when he’d been fighting a war I wasn’t ________ to see, his wife, Gee, had lived alone. ________ had taken time to handle her garbage cans, and he never ________. Now he paid it forward by doing the same for us.

Then Tom died. We photocopied that ________ and attached it to one of our own for Gee. We told her how special Tom had been to us and how ________ we were to have known him. She wrote back and invited us over to __________ Christmas decorations. She told us that she and Tom __________ their decoration collection piece by piece and sent them to us as a gift. I realized how hard it must be for Gee to __________ with them, a piece of Tom.

These days, we’re planning a move. The boxes are all neatly packed in our __________, but we agree to wait until January. This Christmas, we’ll __________ our tree with Gee’s gift. I’ll talk to Tom, “Thank you for teaching us what it __________ to be a neighbor.”