"One minute everything is good."

My all time favorite movie is "While you were sleeping" starring Sandra Bullock and Bill Pullman. The story centers around a CTA worker who has no family to speak of so she works on Christmas day. That very day, her secret crush, "Peter" whom she has never met is robbed at the station and falls to the train tracks below. "Lucy" heroically leaps on the tracks and rolls his dead weight to safety while thinking it appropriate to comment on how good he smells. When she gets to the emergency room a misspoken comment is taken for truth and she becomes "Peter's" fiance. Before she can clear up the misunderstanding she is welcomed into "Peter's" family in a fashion reminiscent of a tidal wave flattening a beach front resort. For seven days while Peter lays in a coma, she gets to know his brother, "Jack" and all the other Callahan's. "Ox" the father figure is quick to point out, "We are in the estate furniture business, we buy furniture from dead people." In one poignant scene, following "Peter's" recovery from the coma, where he has selective amnesia because he can't remember Lucy, go figure, Ox is sharing Dunkin' Doughnuts with Jack and their conversation goes something like this..."Life is a pain. You work hard, try to provide for the family. Then for one minute everything is good. Everyone is well. Everyone is happy. In that one minute you have peace." Ox says. Jack responds,"Pop, this isn't that minute."

Lucy's next to the last line of the film is, "Life doesn't always turn out the way you plan." So my one minute when everything was good happened in Missouri as represented by the photo from the St. Louis zoo. It was a cold blustery day outside but inside it was a tropical rain forest. The next day I would fly home and learn that my mother was not a surgical candidate for tumor removal in Ogden and we would need to seek medical expertise at the Huntsman Cancer Center. More doctor's visits and more tests later, the cancer is too extensive and invasive for anything other than pallitive radiation and chemotherapy. So it is with a very heavy heart that I challenge you to be kinder than you think you need to be because Life doesn't always turn out the way you plan. Make a "special" minute today and hug someone you love.