My family’s school vacation was utterly unremarkable. There were no trips to any fascinating or glamorous destinations, unless one considers Trader Joe’s exotic.

A couple of snowstorms required some moderate shoveling, but most of the time the young Youngs busied themselves with a variety of electronic pursuits, while their father prepared meals, scrubbed sinks and tubs, vacuumed, did laundry, graded papers, paid bills, and caught up on some correspondence.

I also dabbled in parenting, which is a polite way of saying I engaged my reluctant offspring for a couple of hours at a time in activities not involving phones or computers. I was pleased that while they are occasionally reluctant to give up their electronic pacifiers, each child did so before I had to disable our internet connection, or go to the fuse box in the basement and cut the electricity.

But to give credit where credit is due, my children may be learning more from their virtual realities than I give them credit for. We played a variety of traditional (non-electronic) board games during the week, and the results were humbling. While I can regularly best the kids in card games involving bidding, engaging them in “Boggle,” a game where players vie to create as many words as they can from a board filled with random letter cubes, has gone from amusing to challenging to humiliating.

My smirking 18-year-old, who like virtually every other high school senior thinks he knows more than his father, toys with me, considering it embarrassing if his score isn’t triple what mine is during any particular round. Recently his 13-year-old brother has begun to emulate him, beating me far more often than I can top him. As a parent it’s rewarding to see one’s children excel at cerebral pursuits, but as their nominal competitor it’s somewhere between embarrassing and humiliating to have them consistently kicking proverbial sand into my proverbial face. It’s bad enough getting slaughtered, but it’s worse not being able to comprehend half the trash talk they’re directing my way as we tally up the scores.

I also did some writing, but not the type I had anticipated. Two people who affected my life in small but significant ways passed away last week, which necessitated finding the right words to express both sincere sympathy and heartfelt gratitude to each man’s family.

I hadn’t seen Ben Gordon in close to three decades, but he was special to me nonetheless. His son was on a high school freshman baseball team I mentored in the late 1980s, and even though I was relatively new to coaching I recognized him as special. He wasn’t the lone parent who came to every home and away game, but he was the only one who always came by afterward with brief words of encouragement, win or lose, and regardless of whether his son was in the starting lineup, or had played at all. That simple kindness made him one of the first role models I chose after having reached nominal adulthood. At that time I consciously vowed to be the same sort of supportive parent to my children, assuming I ever fathered any, that he was to his.

Jim Connellan had just turned 80 or so when he and I began encountering one another at youth baseball and soccer games nine years ago; my oldest son and his grandson were frequent teammates during their formative years. It was clear he was a supportive grandparent, but what became equally obvious once I got to know him was he was just as kind and supportive to everyone he encountered as he was to his wife Joan, their four children, their 11 grandchildren, and their three great-grandchildren.

We’d make small talk at the games, but it didn’t take long for Jim to show genuine interest in my children and me. Once armed with that knowledge he provided equal doses of sincere encouragement, thoughtful kindness, and gentle wisdom to each generation of our family.  A line in his obituary read, “There were no strangers to Jim, just friends he hadn’t met yet.” Truer words were never written, or spoken.

When I was younger I dreaded going to funerals; they were, in my still-developing mind, all about pointless sadness and crushing grief. But age has altered my attitude. I now consider attending memorial services a privilege. Besides reminding me of how fortunate I am to be physically capable of attending such affairs, I now recognize such formal farewells as the second-most appropriate way of saluting those who spent their lives positively influencing others by embodying altruism, generosity, and graciousness.

So what’s the best way to honor ordinary, extraordinary difference makers like Jim Connellan and Ben Gordon?

Emulate them.

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