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Five good things · Three minutes
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KINDNESS • NPR Stories
A stranger caught her at the airport. I got you.The flight was canceled. A stranger two seats over decided otherwise.
About 30 years ago, six months into her Peace Corps service in El Salvador, Kate Rogan got a phone call from the country director. "His exact words were, 'Kate, I'm so sorry. Your dear mother has died,'" she said. The next hours were a blur of packing and airports, El Salvador to Miami to Boston. After she boarded her final flight, the pilot announced that Logan International Airport had closed for a snowstorm. Passengers began unbuckling and gathering their bags. Rogan started to sob. "I said loudly, 'No, no, no, no, you don't understand. I need to go to Boston. My mom just died.'" A hand landed on her shoulder. It belonged to another passenger, who said, "Come with me. I got you." The woman got her a hotel, knocked on her door the next morning, and stayed with her until she reached her sister at baggage claim in Boston. Rogan never got her name.
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KINDNESS • Upworthy
For 17 years, her mom mailed photos to her birth motherOne deal at the adoption. A friend's mailbox. Seventeen years of updates.
Alicia Mae Holloway learned at nearly 18 that her adoptive mother, Evelyn, had spent 17 years quietly writing to the woman who gave her up. The dancer and television personality shared the story on TikTok, describing a deal Evelyn made at the adoption. Every six months, Evelyn would send a photo and a written update on how Holloway was doing. Because Holloway was born from an affair her birth mother kept hidden from a family she called racist, the letters could not arrive at the house. Evelyn mailed them to a friend instead. "I get chills when I think about how she was watching me grow up and I had no idea," Holloway told Today. "She knew I was a dancer and that I was doing beauty pageants and that I was a good kid." The two mothers finally met and held one long embrace, both crying. Holloway asked her family health history, then said thank you. Read the full story → | |||
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KINDNESS • Sunny Skyz
18 prank pizzas became dinner for the ER staffSomeone ordered 18 pizzas and vanished. The ER ate well.
Someone in Cheyenne, Wyoming placed a prank order for 18 pizzas last Friday, sticking L'Osteria Mondello with roughly $300 in food nobody came to collect. The restaurant doesn't ask customers to pay in advance. "We trust people," owner Dave Agovic told Cowboy State Daily. "Cheyenne is a small place, and Cheyenne is the place with wonderful people." The kitchen was already swamped, more than 40 pizzas going at once, with waits pushing two hours. Staff got the 18 out in about 40 minutes anyway. Then they waited for a pickup that never happened. When Agovic called the number on the order, whoever answered had no idea what he meant. Rather than bin the food, the team decided to send it to the emergency room at Cheyenne Regional Medical Center. That left one problem: someone had to drive it. Ryan Lemley, 18, a former employee, happened to walk in, and loaded up every box. "He was my hero that day," Agovic said. Read the full story → | |||
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MOTIVATIONAL • Upworthy
He reunites families for a living. DNA found his own sister.He spent years reuniting other families. Then his own DNA pinged.
Blair Clark and his wife, Leah, have spent more than four years reuniting families through their YouTube show, The Leah and Blair Slog, tracking down leads and analyzing old photos for adoptees and Amerasian Filipinos searching for missing parents. This time the search found him. After Blair took a MyHeritage DNA test, the site flagged a 22.7% match with Fiona, a 66-year-old woman in San Antonio, Texas. When Blair was 20, his mother, Isabel, had told him she placed a child for adoption at 19, one of roughly 200,000 U.K. mothers pressured to do so after World War II. Isabel died in 1999. Fiona, raised in Scotland and Bermuda, had signed up for the site a decade earlier and waited. "After 66 years, I have hoped that someone would come find me," she said. The four siblings now plan to meet in Thailand in late 2026. As Blair put it, they can at least grow old together. Read the full story → | |||
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DELIGHT • Upworthy
At 77, she camps alone and 538,000 people watchShe went looking for women her age outdoors. Found none. So she filmed herself.
Wendy Eden is 77 years old, camps alone across Vancouver Island with a dog named Milo, and has drawn 538,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel in about five years. The former nurse paddles, hikes, and bakes cinnamon rolls on camera in British Columbia's backcountry. Her most-watched video, a summer tent camp at Lake Horne Regional Park, has passed 1.3 million views. There is no survivalist drama. She brings ingredients from home, including a container of parmesan she sprinkles over reheated egg noodles. Eden started filming in 2020 after searching for older women doing this and finding mostly men doing Bear Grylls impressions. Her husband, Bob, told her to make a channel. She doesn't wear a watch. Before a 2,000-kilometer solo drive to the Yukon, she told viewers her plan: "I'm going to go as far as I feel I can and still have fun." Then she went.
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With love, The Editor
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