John was so delighted when Amy brought him three large cans with plastic lids. He also couldn’t stop talking about a a tiny Halloween visitor who’d looked dazed and confused on our porch as he asked her, “Do you know what a glow stick is? Do you want a glow stick?” He waited through her silence then asked, “Do you want a chocolate?” He listened to her silence and dropped one into her bag beside the glow stick. “Do you want another?” A silence, another candy, and another question, “Do want another candy?” and so she as a result of a furthered silence she left with three chocolates.
My favorite visitor came huddled in the midst of a large group of polite teens. “Does anyone like red pens?” John called out. Some kind of vague response was given and he when to work giving everyone first a glow stick, then three chocolates, then red pens, and not a pen each, BUT AN ENTIRE PACKAGE OF TEN RED PENS! Our porch couldn’t quite contain everyone at once so the group, like a swarm of eels, rotated itself up and down the stairs and in and out itself so each of its portions could be graced by John’s beneficence.
Finally John dropped the last pack, he’d brought out, into a bag and asked, “Did everyone get red pens?” and a small voice answered, “If you don’t have a pen left its OK, but if you don’t mind I”d like a chocolate. You don’t have to give me a pen.”
The teens parted around an old homeless guy and John asked him to wait and loaded him up with a glow stick, three chocolates and a pack of pens.
As john closed the door he over heard a teen making his way down the sidewalk wondering out loud, “Red Pens?” which thrilled John no end. He loves creating a new way to looking at old things.
Near the end of yesterday, as he remembered a perfect Halloween and gloated over his gift of new used tin cans he said, “No one could have told me at twenty that at sixty-two I’d be so excited by empty cans!” Senility or true joy?  nancymauerman.com