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Post by RAIVEN on Nov 24, 2007 2:37:13 GMT -7
Christmas Express
~~~By Gary Sledge
The alarm goes off at 4:30 in the morning. It's dark and cold outside, but Don Royston rolls out of a warm bed without missing a beat. It's the weekend before Thanksgiving and he has an assignment, one that he's handled for the last eight years. He's the guy in the red suit who rides the back of the Santa Train from Shelbiana, Kentucky, across the hills of southwestern Virginia, 110 miles through poor villages and old hill towns to Kingsport, Tennessee. The train leaves promptly at 7:30, and he has to pick up the pace to get there. He dresses on board. Royston looks the part of a jolly elf, with a little extra padding in his fur-fringed suit. The rest of the costume is more inventive. The wig and beard are made of yak hair. Not exactly Christmas canonical, but somehow appropriate for the cold. Santa's floppy hat is sewn into the wig so it won't blow off as the train whips down the track.
The Santa Train tradition started in these hills 64 years ago, during the dark days of World War II. Some families have been coming for four generations to gather at favorite spots along the tracks. The event is stitched into the regional ritual of Christmas.
Though the Clinchfield line is one of the busiest freight routes in the region, CSX no longer runs passenger trains on it. Only this one. Once a year, on the weekend before Thanksgiving. It is their gift to tradition and to the proud people of the coal region. Royston and his 36 Santa's helpers collect, pack and give out gifts and candy -- 15 tons of toys and goodies donated by folks and businesses. Handmade dolls, clothes, pretzels, stuffed animals, basketballs, three-ringed binders and pencils for school.
Royston was no athlete in high school, but he's developed a pretty good throwing arm for tossing toys. Here's the thing, he says: "It's when I miss. And a big kid grabs a toy out of the air intended for some little one just behind him. And that kid hauls it in, takes a look around, turns and hands it to the child who really needs it. That touches me the most. That gives me the joy of being Santa."
Angels come in all shapes, sizes and costumes. And all of them bring little miracles with them, prompting others to pass them along.
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Post by RAIVEN on Nov 24, 2007 2:39:00 GMT -7
Trading Places
~~~By Gary Sledge
Some say everyday miracles are predestined. Time and distance do not matter. All that's necessary is readiness, the right circumstance for the appointed encounter. And it can happen anywhere -- on the street, on the job, even on a baseball diamond. In 1999, 11-year-old Kevin Stephan was a bat boy for his younger brother's Little League team in Lancaster, New York. It was an early evening in late July. The sun slanting across the field. The game unfolding in baseball time. Kevin was standing on the grass away from the plate, where another youngster was warming up. Swinging his bat back and forth, giving it all the power an elementary school kid could muster. The boy brought the bat back hard and hit Kevin square in the chest.
His heart stopped.
When Kevin fell to the ground, the mother of one of the players rushed out of the stands to his aid. Penny Brown hadn't planned to be there that day, but at the last minute, her shift at the hospital had been changed, and she was given the night off. Penny bent over the unconscious boy, his face already starting to turn blue, and administered CPR, breathing into his mouth and administering chest compressions.
And he came back.
It was a good thing, for a good kid. Kevin wasn't just a volunteer for his brother's baseball team -- he was a Boy Scout, one who went on to achieve Scouting's highest rank, Eagle. He became a volunteer junior firefighter, learning some of the emergency first-aid techniques that had saved his life. He studied hard in school and was saving money for college by working as a dishwasher in a local restaurant. He liked the people, but the work could be hard and pretty routine. Until the afternoon of January 27, 2006.
Kevin, now 17, was working in the kitchen when he heard people screaming, customers in confusion, employees rushing toward a table. He hustled into the main room and saw a woman there, her face turning blue, her hands at her throat. She was choking.
Quickly Kevin stepped behind her, wrapped his arms around her and clasped his hands. Then, using skills he'd first learned in Scouts, he jerked inward and up, once, twice, administering the Heimlich maneuver. The food that was trapped in the woman's throat was freed. The color began to return to her face.
"The food was stuck. I couldn't breathe," she said. She thought she was dying. "I was very frightened."
Who was the woman?
Penny Brown.
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Post by RAIVEN on Nov 24, 2007 2:40:30 GMT -7
Wreaths of Remembrance
~~~By Gary Sledge
Harrington, Maine, is a long way from the temples of pomp and power in Washington, D.C. It's a long way from the awesome monuments and austere fields of white markers at Arlington National Cemetery. Harrington is one of the poorer towns in a sparsely populated state where industry is not always robust and is sometimes seasonal -- especially for the Worcester Wreath Company, owned by Morrill Worcester. You don't make the Forbes 400 selling green boughs. But it's a feel-good business -- one that transforms the winter-worn front doors of thousands of American homes with a bright green symbol of joy and giving. Morrill Worcester has a lot to remember and a lot to be thankful for. When he was 12 years old, he won a trip to the capital, and it was the groves and white marble memorials of nearby Arlington that impressed him the most. He never forgot it. Every year since 1992, he has given thousands of wreaths to mark graves at Arlington Cemetery, stenciling the snow-covered earth with rings of remembrance. His company makes them, and a local trucking firm hauls the wreaths down. For all of us, every year.
Last year 150 people, veterans and members of the military and Civil Air Patrol, came together to place wreaths on some 5,000 graves, including four at the Tomb of the Unknowns
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Post by RAIVEN on Nov 24, 2007 2:42:18 GMT -7
A Hand on the Shoulder
~~By Dave Berg
Was he dreaming? David Ewart saw a red ball of fire. He shot out of a deep sleep and heard his ten-year-old daughter, Heather, screaming. Then he felt the heat -- like lethal radiation from a blast furnace. Ewart bolted out of bed on the second floor of his home. Downstairs he heard loud popping noises. Glass bulbs, furniture, appliances exploding as fire consumed them.
Three hundred and fifty people, friends and family, had attended Ewart's annual Christmas party at his home in Valencia, California. David was a giver. He'd coached youth baseball and soccer teams, played his violin for any teacher who asked, and had taken music to the jungles of Peru for his church. Music was always the centerpiece of the festivities, as it was of David's life. A renowned violinist, he has played on film scores for such composers as John Williams and Randy Newman. That night, as always, he played his Stradivarius-era violin while his guests sang "Silent Night."
After the party, he and his 77-year-old mother, Esther, put out the candles -- all but one, overlooked and left burning on a holiday paper tablecloth.
Now, as Ewart started down the hall to alert his parents and three children, he said a silent prayer: God, if it is your will, save us. The heat was hellish. But then he felt a hand on his shoulder -- and something that was not quite a voice guiding him, giving him direction: the bedroom window.
He kicked out the window screen and told Heather to jump onto the patio cover, crawl to the edge and drop to the ground, ten feet below.
Next he headed for his two sons, Jonathan, 13, and Michael, 15, who were screaming with pain. The air in their room was superhot, and every breath felt like liquid fire. David led Jonathan to the window.
He returned for Michael, who was now helping his grandparents, trapped in their room behind a jammed door. Michael threw himself against it and finally burst through. David guided his mother, then Michael, to safety.
Only his father remained. The 81-year-old's face was badly burned. He lost his footing and fell. David took his hand and helped him to the window. Too weak to hold on, his father rolled off the patio cover to the ground.
Finally, David escaped. Seconds later, the second floor exploded. Yet all the while, he felt he was being led, under protection.
The family survived, though David and Michael suffered extensive third-degree burns. They were placed in induced comas and swaddled in burn bandages. For weeks, it wasn't certain they would live. But Ewart's many friends in church and the community organized fund-raisers and blood drives. Jay Leno staged a benefit performance. It took weeks of skin grafts before they were released, and months of physical therapy followed.
Many angels came to the Ewarts' aid. But that first one? Was it a dream? Firefighters say they are mystified as to how the family survived. David Ewart is no
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Post by RAIVEN on Nov 24, 2007 2:43:22 GMT -7
After Katrina
~~~By Blake Bailey
A month after we'd evacuated, I returned to New Orleans for the first time. My former life in a suburb near Lake Pontchartrain seemed a dream. There -- buried in waist-high debris -- was the lawn I'd lovingly mowed two days before the storm. Inside was the kitchen I'd cleaned, the hardwood floor I'd polished on my hands and knees, the furniture I'd assembled myself, the Persian rug I couldn't really afford -- all of it rancid, moldy, buckled and reeking. I tiptoed around the waterlogged books, breathing through my mouth. The only thing salvageable in my daughter's nursery was an old Pooh Bear perched on a highchair above the water line. I grabbed it and left. My wife, Mary, and our one-year-old daughter had moved to New Orleans just two months before the storm and settled into the first house we'd ever owned. Now we'd lost everything.
For the next few months, we lived like nomads, first with friends in Oxford, Mississippi, then with family in Arkansas and Oklahoma, and finally in a dingy apartment in Gainesville, Florida, where Mary was finishing a doctoral degree at the university.
Meanwhile, our daughter's weight dropped to the bottom-five percentile on the growth chart, and I tried to forget my own stress, the better to negotiate with insurance companies, banks and FEMA without the benefit of official documents lost in the flood. I was also working on a biography of novelist John Cheever, whom I'd once considered the unhappiest of men.
Before I returned "home" to see if anything could be salvaged, I'd taken our 1998 Suzuki to a shop to have the AC fixed. After hours of diagnosing the problem, the mechanic told me the repair would cost roughly the Blue Book value of the car. I decided to cut my losses. An office employee was writing up the invoice for all the labor when she noticed my Louisiana license plate. "You from New Orleans?" she asked. I said I was. "No charge," she said, and firmly shook her head when I fumbled for my wallet. The next day, I went for a haircut, and the same thing happened.
After our lease expired on the dingy apartment in Gainesville, we tried to find a rental house that we could afford while also paying off a mortgage on our moldy, ruined house in New Orleans. We looked at a lot of places, and they were all grim. We'd begun to accept that we'd have to live in drastically reduced circumstances for a while, when I got a very curious e-mail from one James Kennedy in California. He'd read some pieces I'd written about our ordeal for Slate, the online magazine, and wanted to give us ("no strings attached") a new house in a subdivision he was building in Mandeville, across the lake from New Orleans: "This is not a gimmick, not a scam," he wrote.
It sounded way too good to be true, but I replied, thanking him for his "exceptional generosity," and added that we had no plans to move back to New Orleans. Around this time, too, a poet at the University of Florida offered to rent us his lovely Victorian house while he went to England on sabbatical; the rent was less than some of the awful hovels we'd looked at, but still a burden under the circumstances. I mentioned the poet's offer to James Kennedy, and the next day he FedExed a check covering our entire rent for eight months.
Throughout this ordeal, the kindness of strangers has done much to restore my faith in humanity. It's almost worth losing your worldly possessions -- mere possessions, I should say -- to be reminded that people are really nice when given half a chance. Indeed, it's not a bad thing to start life over from scratch with that knowledge in mind.
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