UNDER THE MILKY WAY TONIGHT

(Picture courtesy of NASA and the Hubble Space Telescope)

When I was in my early twenties, my New Orleans yahoo friends and I had a favorite past time. When we weren't traipsing around the French Quarter, we'd often take a friend's old VW hippie van out to a quarry near the Pearl River, which skirts the border between Louisiana and Mississippi. There, far from the city lights, we could see stars by the millions, and we'd lie on our backs all night long just talking and watching the cosmic light show that seemed as close to us as our hands in front of our faces.

Lately my mind has drifted back to those magical times, and I find myself wondering when the last time was that I raised my eyes toward the night sky. The trials and travails of daily life here on Terra Firma keep me so earthbound, I'm reminded of a line from the movie Men in Black: "The stars...they really are beautiful you know. We never just look at them any more."

I recall how we could make out entire constellations so easily, without hardly trying, as if God had painted them up there just for our entertainment. Scorpio with its looping stinger tail, and the Libra scales -- they were all there for the viewing, all changing from season to season. These days the demands of work, family, and other responsibilities keep my eyes and attention focused on Earthly things, having taken the place of the magic in the night sky that had once fixated me so. Seldom now do I take the time to look up at the night sky -- but they are still beautiful.

As a boy I had two reflector-type telescopes mounted on tripods, and I remember the utter fascination I had viewing the surface of the moon at night, searching for the "Sea of Tranquility" where Neal and Buzz would one day walk. Both of my telescopes had special view-finder fittings that allowed me to attach a camera to the lens and take snaps of whatever images came into the scopes' tubes. (I remember aiming one of the scopes at the Sun one bright day, without any thought of using neutral-density filtration, and how smoke suddenly began to rise from the device. Okay...so it wasn't a genius move!)

These days my mind is focused on work, family, and an unending parade of responsibilities. Perhaps the worst part of growing older is having to leave the fanciful dalliances of one's youth behind. I work at a computer screen now, staring into a black monitor and racking my brain to resolve meaningless issues that present themselves to me as blips of light on a black surface: A far cry from that wondrous star stuff sprinkled across the velvety night sky at the quarry.

Those nights on the Pearl River, lying on our backs with weird music wafting from hidden speakers inside the VW van, and shooting stars streaking by overhead, were the things of my youth that I just don't get to do any more. The world's weight has dragged me down like the gravity of Jupiter itself, and has forced me to keep my nose to the grindstone and my eyes averted away from the stars that had once dazzled me so. It was a different time, life was newer then, and nearly "weightless" by comparison to the load that I carry today.

As Sia Furler sings on her rendition of Under the Milky Way, the bedazzling magic and mystery of the cosmos are the stuff of dreams and daydreams. It's too bad that life eventually comes along and gets in the way. Long after I am gone, those same stars will still be shining on brightly overhead, light years away from this world. Thus I've vowed to myself to pause every now and then and turn my eyes upwards. It's a direct thread back to my former me -- to my younger self -- that somehow got obscured by Life, but that still resides in my heart to this day.

THE WINDS OF GRACE

It is only three days until my wife's cancer surgery, and I sat on the back porch this morning just watching two butterflies in our backyard garden. They flitted and floated in seemingly aimless directions, paused for a moment to sample the nectar of a flower, and then quickly moved on. How free they looked, I thought. They appeared to be content just to live for the moment, I fancied, floating on the breeze, never minding where it carried them or where they'd end up. Why are we not more like them?

When its time has come the butterfly falls to the Earth and returns to His kingdom. Yes, I believe that God knows even the smallest of Earth's creatures. It never considers why it lives or when or how its days will end. Why is it we humans -- the crowns of His creation -- fret as we do about everything? Why do we complicate our lives, and in so doing, miss out on so much of the sacred gift of life that we've been given? Why can we not live free and unencumbered as the butterflies?

When our time comes, we exhaust all of our resources to gain just a few more months, weeks, days -- whatever it takes -- to hold on to life; hold on to a life that we may not really be living anyway. Why can we not accept that, we too, will one day fall to the ground or simply go to sleep, and awaken in His care, safe in His kingdom?

Perhaps Humanity's greatest curse, as well as a blessing, is that it's endowed with a profound intellect that is driven to ponder things too deeply for its own good. We busy ourselves with all manner of things that, in the end, will amount to little of any consequence once we're gone. We spend precious little time considering the simple things that life offers us for free: The blush of a rose, the sea breeze upon our faces, the sound of a newborn's first cry. It is the devil's own handiwork indeed when Man burdens himself considering his place in the world, his very purpose for being in it, making his days more stressful and complicated than they need to be, and worst of all, blinding his eyes to his Maker's grandest creations.

Being close to mortality these past few days has given me a new outlook. There is so much that I do that will not follow me beyond the final stroke of the clock. Children are suppose to be our immortality, and yet even they are not spared from the ravages of Time. I want to make my life count for something, as we all do, but mainly I want to live life -- take in as much of it as I can -- while there is still time. I've realized that time is not a friend to man but a mortal enemy. It is, by every measure, a merciless enemy to us all, and when it runs out there is no compromising, no bargaining for more of it.

I do not want to fret another minute about things that are beyond my control, things that just don't matter. I have wasted far too much time already playing that game. Time is God's gift to us, not to squander on aimless pursuits, but to savor in the brief span that He has given us. Life is like a breeze of wind that carries the butterfly aloft, but then, with its abating, drops it to the ground with little fanfare. May we all ride the Winds of Grace He has gifted us with while there is still time.

WE CAN BE HEROES

Since today is the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, I thought it would be fitting to write about something I've been pondering for a while: Heroes, and who my own heroes are and why.

Recently, I heard some people asked who their heroes were and they all seemed to have ready responses. I was disturbed that I could not think of a single person who, in my estimation, measured up to what I would consider a deep-blue, front-page hero type. Accordingly, I began to give the question some serious thought as to who my heroes were and why they were personally heroic to me.

It would be easy to come up with obvious names: Neil Armstrong, JFK, Bono, Jonas Salk...Betsy Ross, Diana Ross, Ross Perot -- the hit parade of history's most prominent people is virtually endless. But I felt that my heroes had to be my own personal heroes, and not those proclaimed as such by history, whose great deeds were chronicled by someone else, or who the media had catapulted to fame.

I determined that my heroes had to meet any of three criteria: (1.) They had to be people who were exceptional for who they were or what they did, or (2.) They had to have performed some great task at least once in their life, or (3.) They had faced some great personal challenge in their own lives and had heroically overcame it, they had stared the demon down.

So far I have identified two people who I consider to be MY personal heroes. (I'm still pondering others as I write.) The first is Dr. Gene B., a brilliant neurosurgeon. I call him Gene. I should say Dr. B. or even Dr. Gene, but it's hard to be that detached about someone who saved your life. In the winter of 2005, I suffered a displaced or herniated disc in my cervical spine that was dangerously impinging on my spinal cord, causing me considerable radiating pain and restricting my range of motion. The herniation was so huge, and in such a precarious position, that I was in danger of becoming a full quadraplegic. With the assistance of his associate, Gene and his skilled surgical team worked on me for five hours.

During this time, my dear wife, who was desperate for news of my condition and becoming increasingly more worried as the hours ticked by like days, went into total tirade mode and was verbally accosting the recovery-room staff for information to the extent that they actually threatened to eject her from the hospital if she didn't cease and desist.

Finally Gene appeared in the recovery room, just after they had wheeled me down from the O.R. (I have only vague memories of this, having been under deep anesthesia for so long.) My wife later told me that Gene (a man in his late fifties, early sixties maybe) had the gleeful, bright-eyed look of a school boy who had just kicked a winning field goal. He told my wife that the hernia was the largest one he and his associate had ever seen in all their combined years of neurosurgical practice. Further, he told her that the herniation had so compromised my spinal cord that at first he and his associate did not think they would be able to save me from ending up like the late actor Christopher Reeve: Imprisoned in a wheelchair and slurping my meals through straws for the rest of my life.

Gene and his associate had successfully removed the herniated disc without compromising my spinal cord, inserted a bone graft into my spine (along with some Titanium steel hardware), and within a year the graft fused nicely into place. Today I have full range of motion and I am pain-free. During the first of several follow-up visits to Gene's office, I thanked him for what he had done for me. Gene just replied, "We didn't do it," plainly implying that there was another Hand in the O.R. that day, guiding their hands and protecting me throughout the long procedure.

So Gene B., M.D., is one of my personal heroes, along with the Lord God who I know was in the O.R. that day. Together, these skilled men, guided by a merciful God, gave me the gift of a full life, one with full mobility...and promise. I do not question why such a thing had to happen to me. But I often wonder why I was worthy to have received such a gift, and what I should be doing now to "pay forward" the debt that I owe. I'm still working on that one.

And Then There Was Katrina

My other hero also labors in the medical field. It was later the same year (2005), early on the morning of August 29, when Hurricane Katrina made landfall, and my friend Dorothy F., a registered nurse, was on-shift at a New Orleans-area hospital. As most people know, Katrina was not just a hit-and-run, tornado-style storm, but one whose full impact and devastation gradually unfolded over the ensuing days. As aging levees on both sides of the city gave way to the storm's surge and the streets began to flood, the city fell into chaos and anarchy. Thousands of residents had already fled the city, but many had remained behind, to their peril. To worsen matters, electric power was lost to the city's massive pumping system, which was not in service to move water up and out of the city (which is some nine feet below sea level in some areas) and clear the streets of the quickly rising floodwaters.

Area hospitals became easy targets for drug addicts jonesing for a fix, who raided pharmacies for whatever drugs they could get their hands on. Said one observer: The scene was like Baghdad with the city in complete darkness, fires burning, and the silent nights that followed the hurricane's passing were punctuated by gunfire and the occasional Blackhawk helicopter streaking by overhead.

Many doctors and nurses had fled Dorothy's hospital to get out of harm's way and to join their families, leaving the hospital critically under-staffed and patients unattended. But not Dorothy: She stayed at her post throughout the duration of the siege. She had left briefly to evacuate her aging mother and cat from her apartment, but brought them back to the hospital and resumed her nursing duties. She, and a few other professionals who had also remained on-duty, marshaled their combined wit and skill to hold things together.

Dorothy could hear the break-ins coming from the hospital pharmacy. They had used all of the alcohol on her unit to give patients sponge baths, leaving none for themselves. Later, Dorothy and others acquired some alcohol from the abandoned operating rooms so they could cleanse themselves a bit. Patients in the hospital's psychiatric unit, who were stressed to the near-breaking point, were soothed and comforted by Dorothy and the remaining staff as much as was possible under the circumstances. With electric power outages city-wide, the units were only dimly lighted by emergency generators that would go out once their fuel was spent.

Throughout the ordeal, Dorothy's mother and cat sat quietly in a corner, waiting, as Dorothy did what she could with what resources she had. Back at her now-abandoned apartment near New Orleans's Lake Pontchartrain, the floodwaters had destroyed all of Dorothy's belongings, including every stitch of clothes she owned. The only things she managed to save were the two things that were dearest to her: Her mother and her cat. Dorothy's car was parked in the hospital's garage. At any time she could have fled for safety, but her sense of duty and humanity kept her at her station, doing everything she could for patients who, for the most part, were complete strangers to her.

After three long and harrowing days, National Guardsmen finally arrived in Humvees to evacuate everyone. Their instructions to Dorothy and the hospital staff who had remained behind were loud and clear: They were forming a fast-evacuation convoy comprised of the employees' vehicles led and flanked by the Humvees, and they would be making a high-speed "run" for the Crescent City Connection, the twin bridges that connect greater New Orleans to the city's West Bank. Dorothy and her co-workers were told not to stop for anything, to drive up on the sidewalks if a downed tree blocked a street, but not to stop for anything under any circumstances. What a sight it must have been to see Dorothy's little Chrysler PT Cruiser sandwiched between desert-fitted fighting vehicles equipment with 50-caliber machine guns and troops carrying M-16 assault rifles.

When the convoy reached the twin bridges it encountered a military checkpoint, setup to prevent rampaging looters from crossing the bridge and endangering the city's West Bank. With a quick glance, the troops manning the checkpoint realized that Dorothy and the others were no threat and waved them all through. As Dorothy drove through the checkpoint, with her mom and kitty riding shotgun, she threw a big kiss to the guardsmen -- that's Dorothy! From here she headed west toward Dallas, Texas where she had relatives.

When Dorothy first arrived in Dallas it was hard for her to get on her feet. She had lost all of her clothes in the flood, and with no job and little money, she was forced to buy used clothing at a local Goodwill store. A hard-working professional nurse her whole life, Dorothy was personally embarrassed to do this, but a friend told her that there was no shame in it. Just as she had done in New Orleans, Dorothy did what she had to do, the whole time maintaining a good sense of humor in the face of great personal loss. Such is her innate sense of optimism and faith.

Dorothy continues to live in the Dallas area today and still works as an RN. She says she will never live in a Gulf coastal state again. (Who can blame her?) The PT Cruiser has been replaced by something newer and she flies into New Orleans only on rare occasions to visit her friends and relatives who still live there.

Dorothy never received any sort of medal or commendation for the personal and professional sacrifices she suffered throughout the duration of the worst natural disaster to strike the coastal United States. At a time when so many people were blaming other people for the city's destruction, mostly for political reasons, those silent heroes who rose above and beyond the call of duty were all but forgotten. Indeed, no single book will ever fully chronicle the deeds of charity, ministration and comfort that Dorothy (and others) rendered to her fellow citizens. It seems that only the misdeeds get the headlines in such situations.

So this is why Dorothy F. is my other hero: For standing her ground as the floodwaters rose all around her, and refusing to abandon her post for the sake of her fellow man. Dorothy, along with Dr. Gene, are my personal heroes because they both meet two of my hero criteria for who they are and what they do for others.

"We Can Be Heroes Just For One Day" (David Bowie)

My conclusions are simple. It's been said that there are no "born" heroes, but that heroes are just ordinary people who've been thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and yet rise to meet those circumstances head on, unwaveringly and without hesitation. This is as close to a definition of heroism as I can think of.

I believe that the capacity for heroism resides within each of us. Heroic deeds do not need to be large in scope. Some people are honored with the Congressional Medal of Honor for valor under fire, others receive commendations for planting our flag on the Lunar surface. But the frightened parents who rush their deathly sick child to the emergency room in the middle of the night are heroes, too, at least to their child. The little man who works behind the cash register at a neighborhood convenience store on the night shift, who's at high risk of being killed in an armed robbery but does so to feed his family, is also a hero.

As the song says, "We can be heroes," too. We all have within us the capacity for heroism, for heroic deeds, given the fickle misfortunes of Life. Indeed we are heroes every day without even realizing it: Wherever we go and whatever do, we take what we assume to be "acceptable risks" each and every day. (For some people, just stepping out the front door is an act of great heroism, as is the case with those who suffer from Agoraphobia.)

There is one thing that I believe protects us in all situations, and that is God who watches over us during our most dire trials and tribulations. The heroes who perished at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 -- many of whom still remain entombed in a watery grave within the sunken U.S.S. Arizona -- did not awaken that Sunday morning knowing that it would be their last day on Earth. Still, they manned their battle stations and did their best in the face of a great evil. In worldly terms, they did not prevail on that day. But I like to think that they all reside in a place of honor in His kingdom, forever in His care. Win or lose, live or die, Life will call upon us all to act heroically at some juncture in our lives. But God has given each of us the capacity to do this, and come what may, He is always in control of the situation.