Excerpt
The Heroes Next Door
Saturday afternoon I was relaxing in the family room after having spent a hot, sweaty morning working in the yard. I glanced up and saw a woman run through our side yard, heading for the front door. As I met her there she asked frantically, Can you help? My fathers very sick!
Stepping outside, I saw a big man sprawled on his back in the street beside his SUV, being given mouth-to-mouth by another man. Not long after that, the neighbor across the street came from her home and began to pump the mans chest. It was difficult, because she had a cast on her right arm and each pumping motion shot pain through her. As she and the man began to switch places another neighbor woman took her place and began mouth-to-mouth, so not a second would be lost.
The mans painfully contorted face was a mottled mix of purple, gray and yellow. His body was limp. He had no pulse, no respiration and his pupils were dilated. The CPR continued, as time seemed suspended. Then someone said, We have a pulse! A short time later we heard the first delightfully shrill sounds of approaching sirens.
It took less than five minutes for the Southlake Mobile Intensive Care Unit to arrive and take over. In that time, three people I have known for years became more than friends and neighbors; they became the best kind of heroes. They breathed life back into a man who almost certainly would have died had they not acted promptly and unselfishly.
But theres more to the story. Jim was the man who arrived first. He was returning home from an errand he planned to get done earlier in the day. A big man himself, he pulled Andy from his vehicle and laid him on the ground. Jim is a business consultant, but hes also an unpaid volunteer with the Southlake Police.
Ann, the woman with the cast, is a cardio-pulmonary specialist retired from a medical teaching career. She has administered CPR hundreds of times, but never on a blistering hot concrete street with no medical equipment.
Colleen, the woman who took over from Ann, had just completed CPR training as a requirement for her part-time job as a water aerobics instructor. Like Jim, Colleen was on an errand she had intended to take care of earlier. She traveled less than 200 feet before stopping to help.
What are the odds? Two trained and willing people converge almost simultaneously in front of the home of a medical expert as a man was having a serious heart attack. Gods odds are 100 percent. Surely he must have a plan for Andy.
Christmas Decorations
The colorful signs of Christmas are scattered throughout our home: boxes of decorations in hallways, garlands running up the stairways, strings of lights on trees outside, and ornaments covering every available inch of table space, each awaiting its perfect spot on the tree.
I enjoy this time of year, even with the stress we bring on ourselves as we weigh what remains to be done against the time left to do it. I go from table to table, box to box, looking fondly at the ornaments and decorations weve collected over the years. A tiny wooden sled reminds me of a happy December weekend some 30 years ago when Claudia and I hand-painted dozens of ornaments with my parents so our tree wouldnt look so bare.
A hand-blown glass ball from Bronners, in Frankenmuth, Michigan, brings back memories of our visits there when our son was a toddler. I smile at the considerable collection of Tigger ornaments as I recall the joy each one brought our daughter. Pooh, who? Tigger was all that mattered to her.
The two-story colonial house in Claudias Snow Village, the first of her modest collection, resembles our house in Connecticut, which is why the kids and I liked it when we found it in a store in the quaint little village of Clinton, where we lived. A shiny crystal ornament evokes thoughts of a trip to Ireland with Claudia and a visit to the Waterford factory.
These are more than ornaments; theyre memories, and I see them everywhere I look. But theres one that stopped me cold when I came across it last night. Made of metal, its about ten inches long, with a flat head on one end and a blunted point at the other. It represents the nails that pierced the hands and feet of Christ on the cross.
Holding the nail in my hands brought forth even stronger emotions than all the warm family memories surrounding me. What a cruel instrument! What was it doing here, among all these fragile, shiny things? I could almost feel the nail going through my own flesh, and then I imagined myself being nailed to a cross; and I shuddered.
In that moment, I began to realize the unfathomable depth of Gods gift to us, and how much he loves us. Sitting there among so many powerful reminders of love and family, I thought of my own children, and I marveled how anyone could give such a gift.
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