At its best

I hear people say they love ice cream, or balloons, or comic books and so many other things that it might seem as if the word, "love," is over used and meaningless.

Except that it isn't meaningless and when it is used correctly, it means more than any one word, or a dictionary worth of words could ever say.

Everyone I know loves someone and a few people set the standard so high that they touch our hearts to the core.  These are the people who always seem to see the best in us; who reach out no matter how inconvenient, or difficult it may be, just because that is who they are.

These are the people who find the time to put the icing on the cake when no one else even feels like baking a cake. They set their own feelings aside to honor the dead, to lift up the living and redefine our culture's ceremonies and rituals so that their true meaning comes forward in a time when so many mega productions seem to swamp our old traditions.

They don't put the rest of us to shame, because it would shame them in their own hearts to do such a thing.

A grandma dies and as everyone prepares for her funeral, one of the grandchildren is asked to provide the music.  Out of the mists of time love finds a song that has melted hearts for generations.  Found. Updated. Learned, played and sung in a way that honors everyone's feelings in the short space of time allotted, it touches hearts and eases the transition of loving someone who is here to loving someone who now lives in our hearts.

Unassuming and sweet it personifies love at its best.