Liz Field answers the question:

What is the nicest thing a non-family member has ever done for you?

Well, Phil, since you asked this question a couple weeks ago, I've been thinking a lot about it, and there have been a lot of really nice things that non-family members have done for me. I'm going to focus on a story because I want to keep it kind of light, and it's also recent. 

As a lot of people know at The Shift Network and of course my friends and my family know this about me, I used to follow a band around called the Grateful Dead back in the '80s and '90s, and there’s a community of people involved in that. And one of the values of this community is kindness. So, there were a lot of little examples of kindness going around, but one thing that Deadheads would often do for each other is give each other concert tickets, and these were called “miracles.” It's just one of the little things that I always loved about that community.

Then, when that band ended in 1995, I slowly drifted away from that scene and wasn't part of any kind of groups that were happening after that or any kind of post-Grateful Dead stuff. I really kind of floated pretty far away from that. Flash forward to 2015, I had now been married and divorced. I had three kids. I was in the thick of raising teenagers, and I bought tickets to go see Fare Thee Well in Chicago, which was their celebration of 50 years of the Grateful Dead.

So just going to that experience sort of brought back that community of people into my life and this central value of kindness. And I met, because now, we have social media, I met a bunch of other people in this Grateful Dead scene through social media. And then soon after the Fare Thee Well shows, another band was announced, and this band is called Dead & Company. They're still touring today.

My daughter was 17 at the time. She really wanted to come to Fare Thee Well with me, but I didn't take her. And so, we decided to try and go see a Dead & Company show. I had one daughter in college on the West Coast, and we had all decided to meet in California for the winter holidays. And it just so happened that Dead & Company were going to do some shows in San Francisco. So, we weren't able to get tickets. They sold out right away. They were like super-hot tickets, and I just put out on my Twitter feed that I was looking for tickets, and a total stranger bought them for us.

When we met him at the show the first night, he just gave them to us. So, it was our miracles. He basically wanted to miracle my daughter to her first show and so gave us tickets. This was a total stranger. His name is Ted. I still don't know his last name, but I think that it was just a really great example of something really kind that often happens in this group of people. These weren't cheap tickets. This was like $300 worth of tickets, and I know he doesn't have the means to really just give that away. So it was pretty special and something that we'll always remember.

I'm really happy to have this scene back in my life now. It's been a lot of fun. I've met so many wonderful people and friends and I have this great community back in my life.
 

Liz Field is a Marketing Writer on the Shift Community Transformation Team.