People Care

Life goes on. While Tommi is fighting a war in Iraq, her brothers and sister are (re)building Honda CB750 motorcycles in the garage - a two-month project now evolving so as to take on a life of its own, or so it seems. Anyway, more parts arrived today, and because it looked like it could rain, the FedEx guy delivering them was "looking around" for a safe place to tuck the boxes he'd come to deliver. That's how I caught sight of him and what prompted me to see what he wanted.

Dean the FedEx Man had apparently been to our home before. He remembered the Mazda Protégé that had since been sold and wondered aloud about what project might be underway with the Jeep that was now taking its place, all this while he stacked the boxes of motorcycle parts inside the garage. He asked about my kids ... how many there were and what level of expertise they commanded with which to tackle the bike project underway. We laughed together: I reflecting the various investments a parent finds herself making and he remembering the bike project his own mom and dad had funding for him years ago. "Did you ever finish the bike?" I asked. "Ha. No ... never finished it," his answer exploded in a mix of laughter and disbelief.

And then somehow the conversation turned to Tommi, to the fact that one of my four children was stationed just outside Baghdad right now. Dean stopped his movement for that comment, let an air of sobriety take command of his tone, and said thoughtfully, "That must be hard." "Yes," I answered, and I talked some about Tommi, about the difficulty of always wondering if I'd see her again, the difficulty of knowing she worked each day in such unpredictable circumstances, and the challenge in continuing to live each day with some semblance of "normal" guiding the way. He seemed to understand. He said, "Tell Tommi I said 'hi' when you talk to her again. Tell her I'm pulling for her to get home safe." "I will," I answered from deep in my own thoughts.

I don't really know Dean's story beyond a snippet of the chapter he shared about a failed motorcycle project, but I know that today Dean the FedEx Man cared: he cared about my kids building bikes, about the packages getting in out of the rain, about my daughter in Iraq, and about my mother's heart. "She'll be ok" was the last thing he said to me before getting back in his truck to drive away. I'm hanging on to those words today. "She'll be ok."

Oh, and Tommi ... Dean said to say "Hello."


technorati tags: FedEx, Tommi, Iraq