Inspiration

There's a fairly busy regional airport about a mile from where I work, and it happens to include a fairly large restaurant. It's nothing terribly fancy, more like a jumped-up country diner than anything else, a place where you can get a pretty decent patty melt or BLT or hamburger or bowl of chili, but are not likely to find, say, grilled Ahi tacos with mango salsa or cilantro-infused crab tenders wrapped in chilled lettuce.

A couple of weeks ago I went to this restaurant with a friend of mine. We found that they had extensively fixed up the restaurant and augmented its decor by hanging literally hundreds of model airplanes from the ceiling. Most of them are nicely done indeed, and many of them are fairly rare. I'm no expert on collectible model airplanes, but I know enough about model airplanes to know that the old XF-91 Thunderceptor hanging from the ceiling was a legitimate collector's item, along with the Martin Mariner, the F-86 "Dog Sabre" and others.

But that wasn't what I found inspiring.

My friend has suffered no end of difficulty. She was diagnosed with lymphoma some years ago and has undergone radiation treatments, chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants. I've seen her lose all her hair. I've seen her lose about half of her body weight. I've seen her immune system be completely destroyed. I've seen the burns on her neck from radiation treatments. I've seen her come out of remission and have to go through it all again.

And then just when it couldn't get much worse, it did. The chemotherapy severely damaged her mitral valve and she had to have open-heart surgery to have it replaced. Then during that surgery, the nerves leading to her vocal cords were damaged and she lost most of her voice (and her voice with its powerful New Jersey accent was always one of her best features). Her husband left her, unable to deal with her illness. For a while I fully expected each of my visits with her to be the last - and I think she expected it too.

But we were sitting there eating lunch and she was telling me about the time she managed to hold on to Jon Bon Jovi's butt for nine minutes while having him sign things. I found that little story vastly inspiring. In spite of everything that happened, she was able to sit there and experience the pure joy of her nine minutes with Jon Bon Jovi all over again. If she can get excited about Jon Bon Jovi's butt, she must be feeling pretty good. If she can laugh about her open-heart surgery scar and claim that it makes her look like she has more cleavage than she really has, but must be doing okay.

I'm so lucky it is almost embarrassing. My wife suffers from a failed hip replacement operation that left her in a wheelchair and in chronic pain. A friend of mine has a genetic bone disease that has left her in a wheelchair and with bones so brittle they can be broken just sitting down. Another friend of mine has to live every day with the prospect of losing her lymphoma remission and a voice that doesn't work right because of the open-heart surgery. They are inspiring to me, not the groovy collectible model airplanes hanging from the ceiling of the restaurant.

So here I sit with my minor cold and minor sinus headache, feeling very foolish at my lack of intestinal fiber and very lucky that my worst health problem, really, is a tendency for some of my eyebrow hairs to suddenly freak out and turn into Frankenstein hairs.

Author's Note: I'm not terribly comfortable talking about people that are meaningful to me on this blog. They didn't sign up for that, after all, so if any of you have read this and didn't appreciate being mentioned, I apologize.