- Great News Day
- Posts
- One retired chief is turning Ground Zero steel into thank-yous
One retired chief is turning Ground Zero steel into thank-yous
In partnership with
Free email without sacrificing your privacy
Gmail is free, but you pay with your data. Proton Mail is different.
We don’t scan your messages. We don’t sell your behavior. We don’t follow you across the internet.
Proton Mail gives you full-featured, private email without surveillance or creepy profiling. It’s email that respects your time, your attention, and your boundaries.
Email doesn’t have to cost your privacy.
Good morning, friend.
A quiet issue today. A retired firefighter working alone in a workshop on Long Island. Two little girls in Colorado with a pitcher of lemonade and a friend to build a playground for. Jaguars walking somewhere they have not walked in seventy years. And a wallet, tucked back under a welcome mat, with all the money still in it.
Not a bad way to start a week.
🌱 Today's Mindset
The muscle most of us forgot to build
Most of us are pretty good at giving. We know how it feels. A friend needs a ride, we pick up the keys. A stranger drops their groceries, we bend down without thinking. Somewhere along the way we learned this is one of the ways to be a decent person, and we practiced it until the muscle got strong.
Receiving, though. That one gets less practice.
Watch what happens the next time someone tries to hand you a compliment. Or pay for your coffee. Or say something kind about your work. Something small in most of us starts deflecting almost before the sentence lands. We wave it off. We change the subject. We insist on returning the favor immediately, before the balance can settle in our direction for even a second.
We tell ourselves this is modesty. Usually it is a habit dressed up as modesty. And it is quietly costing us.
Kindness is a current. When you close the receiving end of it, you do not just miss the gift someone was trying to give you. You also send them a small, wordless message that they cannot give to you. They will remember that message the next time they think of offering. The current, which was ready to flow both ways, becomes a one-way street.
Today, when someone tries to give you something, try this. Take a breath. Then say thank you and stop talking. That is it. Do not explain. Do not deflect. Do not promise to return it. Just receive.
Notice what it feels like to let a good thing land. If it feels strange, that is only because the muscle is out of practice. It comes back quickly.
The current runs both ways. Today, let it come toward you.
⭐ Today's Bright Lead
78 tiny Twin Towers, made by hand, going home to the people who lived it
John Ricketts in his Plainview, Long Island workshop. Photo: William Farrington for the New York Post.
John Ricketts worked the Pile for weeks after September 11. He is retired now, a former FDNY battalion chief, and for the last five years he has been spending his days in a workshop in Plainview on Long Island, sanding and cutting and gluing.
He is building Twin Towers. To scale. Seventy-eight of them so far, each one encasing a piece of rusted steel recovered from Ground Zero.
He is giving them away. Almost all of them go to the firefighters who ran toward the World Trade Center that morning and made it home, and to the families of the ones who did not. Sixty-five have already been delivered. He is hoping to hand out the last thirteen by Christmas.
"It's a special group of people in the Fire Department," Ricketts told the New York Post from his workshop. That is most of what he wants to say about it. The towers do the rest.
Twenty-five years on, the shape of that morning is a lot of things to a lot of people. In one small shop on Long Island, it is 78 quiet acts of remembering, mailed out one at a time, arriving on the mantels of the people who never forgot.
Read the full story at the New York Post
🌍 More Good Today
A lemonade stand in Colorado just built a playground
On Saturday, Berthoud, Colorado cut the ribbon on S'Miles Playground, the town's first fully inclusive, wheelchair-accessible play space. It was inspired by nine-year-old Miles Bowling, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, and it was largely paid for by Miles and his friends running lemonade stands. "We did lemonade stands two times every year, and we finally got this done," Miles told CBS Colorado at the opening. The stand is staying, by the way. Miles wants to use it to fundraise for the next one.
Argentina's jaguars are back, and they brought friends
The jaguar had been gone from the Argentine province of Corrientes for more than seventy years. In January 2021, three of them were released into the Iberá wetlands: a mother named Mariua and her two cubs. By the end of 2024, the wild population had grown to 33. By May of this year, according to Argentina's National Parks Administration, it had passed 50. Corrientes, where the cat had lost 95% of its historic range, is now one of the great jaguar refuges in South America. The top of the food chain has been quietly put back where it belongs.
She bought cleared cane land in Queensland. Then she planted 119,000 trees.
Ten years ago, Annie Schoenberger bought 18 hectares of cleared former sugarcane land near Wonga Beach, Australia, and started putting native rainforest back on it. She was not alone: Rainforest Rescue and hundreds of volunteers came back year after year, seedling after seedling, planting more than 90 species. This past May, the Queensland Government looked at what had grown and classified the whole 18 hectares as high-conservation-value vegetation, giving it formal Category A protection. Cassowaries, spectacled flying-foxes, and more than 75 other native species are already using the land. Rainforest, the slow way. It works.
🔬 Science of Joy
A brain disease with no treatment... just got one
Alexander disease is rare. It affects fewer than one in a million people. It is a progressive neurological disorder, most often diagnosed in children, and for as long as doctors have known about it there has been exactly one thing to offer families: help managing the symptoms while the disease got worse.
On September 3, that changed. The FDA approved Zanvastro, known generically as zilganersen, for children and adults with Alexander disease. It is the first treatment ever approved for the condition, and rather than chasing symptoms it goes after the protein buildup that drives the disease itself.
In the trial that got it approved, older children who had been losing the ability to walk started walking faster. Younger children, who had been declining across a broader motor assessment, improved on that assessment while the untreated group kept slipping. This is early data on a small population, and it is not a cure. But for the first time, there is a medicine that treats what the disease actually is.
For families who have spent years being told to manage and wait, that is an enormous door swinging open. Ionis Pharmaceuticals says the drug will be in the United States in the coming weeks.
💛 Bright Find
Sponsor slot
This is the spot in the letter where we hand you one small, worth-it thing... a book, a tool, a lovely bit of somebody's craft. We are picky about it, so it is open today.
If you make something you'd want a room full of quietly hopeful people to know about, hit reply. We read every one.
✨ One More Smile
Ashli Jones, 22, lost her wallet somewhere in Casper, Wyoming last week. Driver's license, debit card, credit card, Social Security card, all the cash they needed for bills. She and her boyfriend Kaden searched the city. Nothing.
They came home, defeated, and there was an envelope tucked under their welcome mat. Inside: the wallet. The cash. The cards. All of it, untouched. "It was like it was never opened," Kaden told Cowboy State Daily.
Their good Samaritan left one clue on a small note. His name is David. That is all they know about him.
Thank you, David. Wherever you are.
See you tomorrow, friend. Practice the receiving muscle today. Let a good thing land.
With warmth,
The Great News Day team
Reply