Farewell to a friend

Sometimes, life turns on a dime. So it did Sunday evening for my former longtime cameraman and friend, John Weldon, who collapsed and died while lovingly tending his mother's garden. He was 51. John's death jarred me far beyond the expected "life's too short" reaction to such untimely tragedies. When someone dies, we pay plenty of lip service to the notion of making every minute of every day count. I think that goal, taken literally, is too lofty for most of us to fathom, so we slip back into our routines changing neither attitudes nor actions. I wonder what would happen if - every evening around sunset - we challenged ourselves to come up with one thing we did that day to make someone's life better. I don't know but I'm going to give it a try, as a small way of honoring the memory of a kind and generous friend.