As soon as school was out the year I was eleven I traveled to southern California to stay with the family of my mother’s next younger sister. A teacher, she and her husband (a school principal) and their two daughters (one and two years my junior) were off for the summer. I had never been away from home and the sojourn turned out to be quite an adventure (and another story). The time spent with my new-found cousins was magical and as sure as I was that our time together would never end so also was I convinced that the bonds we forged would transcend the vast geographic and lifestyle distance.
Alas, it was to be forty years before I had a reunion with one of the sisters and boy did we have a lot to catch up on. Family was, of course, a key topic of discussion and at the top of that list was my mother. She had died only a few short years after our adventuresome summer together so I was quite surprised to learn that my cousin had any memories of her. As it turned out, one of them had been formative.
Apparently when my California family took me home at the end of our summer together both families had gone out to breakfast. And my mother ordered pie. Pie for breakfast. That singular eccentric act had so emboldened my cousin that she had gone onto challenge and defy her fair share of conventions and in the process grown a successful life. All the while I never had a clue about that facet of my mother’s personality. The seed of that lesson was destined to take root in my garden, however.
In my late 20s I met Dorothy, a woman of my mother’s generation, who was to become my lifetime mentor/friend/paragon. She embraced life with the belief that all things are possible and some time after the age of 50 founded the Can’t Miss a Thing (CMAT) club. Thereafter I don’t believe she did.
For her 75th birthday she parachuted. 
When she was 80 she met the Dalai Lama. 
Days before she died at age 91 she had a root beer float for lunch!
Cosmic Gardener - Cultivating a Life 