NEVER TOO LATE TO LEARN

  In 2000, Ernie Schmidt started filling notebooks with stories from his life — stories written in neat cursive about picking rocks, shooting gophers and thistles.
   He was 64 years old, and for the first time in his life, he had learned how to write. It was almost as though he knew he had a small window of time, and that two years later, a stroke would make it painfully uncomfortable to hold a pen.
  Schmidt, who is now 82, expressed how meaningful this new skill was in a letter he wrote 18 years ago to READ Saskatoon, the organization that helped him learn it. Little did he know the impression he had left on them.