Eleven-year-old Ruby Kate Chitsey loves asking that question, but it’s not a game she plays at recess. She asks it at nursing homes in the Harrison, Arkansas, area, where she lives. Even more amazing, she then sets out to make the residents’ wishes come true.
Ruby Kate has long been close to older folks. Her mother, Amanda Chitsey, is a nurse practitioner who works at nursing homes in northwest Arkansas, and Ruby Kate often tags along with her in the summer. “I’ve never found them scary at all, so I’m able to just go up to them and ask if they need anything,” she says.
Last May, Ruby Kate noticed a resident named Pearl staring out a window. She seemed sad. “What are you looking at?” Ruby Kate asked. Pearl said she was watching her dog being led away by his new owner after a visit. Pearl didn’t know when she would see her dog again.
Ruby Kate and Amanda asked around and discovered that the nursing home didn’t allow residents to have dogs and Pearl couldn’t afford to pay anyone to look after hers. Because Pearl was a Medicaid recipient, she got only $40 a month to spend on personal items such as clothes, haircuts, and pet supplies. The Chitseys also learned that many nursing home residents are unable to afford even the smallest luxuries. So Ruby Kate decided to do something about it.
She started by asking residents what three things they wanted most in the world. “That’s a lot simpler than going, ‘Hey, what do you want?’” she explains. “They can understand you better.” Amanda worried that people would ask for cars and other things an 11-year-old wouldn’t be able to provide. Instead, they asked for chocolate bars, McDonald’s fries, pants that fit properly, and even just a prayer.
“It broke me as a human,” Amanda says. “We left the nursing home that day and went straight to a store and bought as many items as we could.”
Using their own money, the Chitseys granted the wishes of about 100 people in three months. Then they started asking for donations.
The good people of Harrison responded enthusiastically, so much so that Amanda set up a GoFundMe page, Three Wishes for Ruby’s Residents, hoping to collect $5,000. They hit their goal in a month. After GoFundMe named Ruby Kate a Kid Hero and promoted her story internationally this past January, Three Wishes raised $20,000 in 24 hours and more than $250,000 in five months. With those funds, the Chitseys were able to get more creative: One resident asked for a man cave, so they got him a Walkman and stocked his fridge with snacks. Another wanted to go to a friend’s out-of-state wedding; they gave her money for gas and food.
Earlier this year, Three Wishes for Ruby’s Residents became a nonprofit and launched its first nationwide chapters. One of its new goals is to set up a communal laptop in one nursing home in each state. Ruby Kate doesn’t plan to stop there. “I consider kindness to be my hobby,” she says, “and I’m very good at it.” Ruby Kate isn’t the only youngster with a hobby of kindness. At one New York High School, students turned a single dollar into a truly inspirational act of kindness.
The sound that woke Damian Languell at 8:15 in the morning was so loud he assumed it came from inside his house in Wade, Maine. As he got up to investigate, he heard another sound, this one coming most definitely from outside. Peering out his bedroom window, he spied a tree engulfed in smoke about 500 yards away. A car was wrapped around the tree’s base, its engine on fire.
“I grabbed buckets of water,” Languell told thecounty.me. Then he and his girlfriend ran to the crash site. The wreck looked worse up close. The car, a 1998 Buick Regal, was split nearly in two, and the tree was where the driver’s seat ought to have been, as if planted there. No one should have survived this crash, and yet there was 16-year-old Quintin Thompson, his terrified face pressed against the driver’s side window, in visible pain. Languell, 35, tried dousing the fire with his buckets of water with no success. “When the flames got into the front seats, I realized I had to get him out of there,” he told WAGM-TV.
“I feel like I just did what had to be done,” says Languell.
In an act that a police report described as showing “complete disregard for his own safety,” Languell opened the Buick’s back door and crawled in. Thompson was struggling to get free, Languell says. “That’s when I noticed how bad his legs were.” Using a pocketknife he’d had the foresight to bring with him, he sawed through Thompson’s seat belt.
Now that Thompson was free of the restraints, Languell pulled him out a rear window of the vehicle, then dragged the teen to safety “before the entire car was engulfed in flames,” the police stated.
Although Thompson suffered multiple fractures to his legs, spine, and face, a social media post described him as “looking great, smiling, and joking.” Languell thinks about that day often. Displaying the sort of empathy that compelled him to help, he told WAGM-TV, “My heart goes out to [Thompson]. When you are that close to that level of hurt, you feel it so directly.” Add Languell to our list of real-life heroes changing the world.
In 1963, at age 65, my grandfather, Erwin, decided to tackle a crazy project: He wanted to build a new house. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with the old house. It seemed a waste to demolish it, but something had to give, since it sat where the new house would be. In a moment of inspired frugality, he hired a bulldozer to push the old house far out into a grove of trees. That old house sits there to this very day.
Erwin and his wife, Elida, passed away, and I purchased the farm from their estate. My wife and I raised our sons on this place and have lived here for more than 30 years.
When we first moved in, my wife took one look at the derelict house and declared it a hazard. I agreed and planned on a colossal bonfire. But I deemed it prudent to check out the old shack first, just in case something of value had been left behind.
Our two young sons tagged along, and we waded through the tall grass in the meadow where the old house sat. Time had taken its toll. The front porch had collapsed in on itself, most of the windows were gone, and the siding was falling off. We entered through an open window and got the olfactory impression that skunks had resided beneath the floorboards.
I felt as though I had stumbled onto a time capsule. Here lay the sundry detritus of my grandparents’ lives. A broken chair. Some old clothes in a gunnysack. A thermometer from a grain elevator. But the thing that drew my eye was a cardboard box stuffed with papers. I dug through its contents and was instantly transported back in time. There was a tax return from 1957. Canceled checks from June 1962. Greeting cards from old friends and relatives, now all dead and gone. An uncle’s third-grade spelling book.
I spent most of a pleasant hour going through that box. All the while, I had to answer a stream of questions from my sons about the old house. They were amazed that nine people once occupied the tiny structure, and that they did so without running water or electricity. I related how on cold winter mornings, a pail of water would be iced over even though it sat right next to the cookstove. And they shivered when I told them that in those days the cookstove was their only source of heat.
So it was that the old house was spared the torch.
The years passed, and our visits grew infrequent. The house once again enjoyed the lonely solitude of our meadow. As we hurried through our lives, I might catch a glimpse of it through the trees and wonder: How did they manage? How did they survive the dust storms and the floods and the blizzards and the Great Depression? They must have been made of sterner stuff than I was. I remembered how, as a child, I would struggle to walk in my father’s footprints. Even then, I could imagine no nobler calling than farming, just like Dad.
Then, one April morning, my father was felled by a massive heart attack, at age 68. The entire family was shocked by his passing, none more than me.
Why I ventured out to that old house on a day shortly after my father’s funeral is still beyond me. It was as though it were calling; even the trees seemed to whisper an invitation to come, to visit, to tarry awhile.
As I stood once again on that ancient linoleum, my eye was drawn to a jumble of papers on the floor. An envelope, yellowed with age, lay on top. A blue stamp on the envelope read “Passed by Naval Censor.” How could I have missed this artifact? My father had served aboard the USS Washington during World War II and had written home whenever he could. My grandmother saved all of his letters.
I removed one letter carefully from its envelope. It was dated September 1944. My father would have been somewhere in the South Pacific at that time and all of 18 years old. I studied the familiar scrawl. Dad wondered how the oat harvest had been and how his uncle’s new team of horses was working out. He supposed that his youngest brother was starting first grade and imagined that he was becoming quite the little man. He asked his mother to greet everyone and said that he missed them all.
It wasn’t hard to read between the lines. Here was a homesick young man, a kid really, who had spent his entire life dwelling upon a sea of prairie grass. Now he was on a different kind of sea, an ocean that was being roiled by the thunder and the lightning of a world at war. At the bottom of the page, in underlined print, my father had passed on one last message. Tears burned my eyes as I read those words he had so carefully emphasized: “All is well here. Please don’t worry. I am doing fine.”
As I left the old house that day, I took one last glance back at it over my shoulder. I don’t care what anyone thinks, I decided. That old house gets to stay there until it rots into the earth.
It was late—an indistinguishable, bleary-eyed hour. In front of me was a large dog, snapping his jaws so hard that his teeth gave a loud clack with each bark. His eyes were locked on me, desperate for the toy I was holding. But he wasn’t playing—he was freaking out.
As I cautiously held my ground, his bark morphed from a yelp to a shout. Then he gave a rumbling growl. That was when my trepidation gave way to something far more primal: fear.
This was no ordinary dog. Dyngo, a ten-year-old Belgian Malinois, had been trained to propel his 87-pound body toward insurgents, locking his jaws around them. He’d served three tours in Afghanistan, weathering grenade blasts and firefights. This dog had saved thousands of lives. Now he was in my apartment in Washington, DC. Just 72 hours earlier, I had traveled across the country to retrieve Dyngo from Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix so he could live out his remaining years with me in civilian retirement.
That first Arizona night, Dyngo sat on my hotel bed waiting for me. When I got under the covers, he stretched across the blanket, his weight heavy and comforting against my side. As I drifted off to sleep, I felt his body twitch, and I smiled: Dyngo is a dog who dreams.
The next morning, I gave him a toy and went to shower. When I emerged from the bathroom, it was like stepping into a henhouse massacre. Feathers floated in the air. Fresh rips ran through the white sheets. In the middle of the bed was Dyngo, panting over a pile of shredded pillows. Throughout the morning, his rough play left scratches where his teeth had broken the skin through my jeans.
On the flight home, Dyngo was allowed to sit at my feet in the roomy first row, but he soon had bouts of vomiting in between his attempts to shred the Harry Potter blanket I’d brought. The pilot announced Dyngo’s military status, inspiring applause from the whole cabin. When we reached my apartment, we both collapsed from exhaustion. It would be our last bit of shared peace for many months.
I met Dyngo in 2012 at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. I was working on a book, War Dogs: Tales of Canine Heroism, History, and Love, and had heard about how Dyngo had saved many lives in Afghanistan. His bravery had earned his handler, S.Sgt. Justin Kitts, a Bronze Star.
In early 2011, Kitts and Dyngo boarded a helicopter on their way to a remote outpost in Afghanistan. Dyngo wore a wide choke chain and a vest that said MWD Police K-9 to indicate that he was a military working dog.
The plan for the day was familiar. The platoon from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division would make its way on foot to nearby villages, connecting with community elders to find out whether Taliban operatives were planting improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the area. Kitts and Dyngo walked in front to clear the road ahead. After six months of these scouting missions, Kitts trusted that Dyngo would keep him safe.
Air Force staff sergeant Justin Kitts and his faithful canine companion on duty in Afghanistan
They were in a grape field a little more than a mile outside the outpost when Dyngo’s ears perked up, his tail stiffened, and his sniffing intensified. It wasn’t a full alert, but Kitts knew Dyngo well enough to know he’d picked up the odor of an IED. He signaled the platoon leader. “There’s something over there, or there’s not,” Kitts said. “But my dog is showing me enough. We should not continue going that way.”
The rest of the soldiers took cover while Kitts walked Dyngo to the other end of the path to clear a secure route out. They’d gone barely 300 yards when Kitts saw Dyngo’s nose start to work faster. His ears perked and his tail stopped. He was on odor again. If Dyngo was right, there were two bombs: one obstructing each path out of the field. They were trapped. Then the gunfire started. Kitts grabbed Dyngo and pulled him down to the ground, his back against a mud wall. The next thing Kitts heard was a whistling sound, high and fast, flying past them at close range. Just feet from where they were sitting, an explosion shook the ground. Dyngo whimpered and whined, his thick tail tucked between his legs. The grenade explosion had registered much deeper and louder to his canine ears. Knowing he had to distract him, Kitts grabbed a twig, and dog and handler engaged in a manic tug-of-war until Dyngo relaxed. Then Kitts dropped the branch and returned fire over the wall.
It turned out that Dyngo’s nose had been spot-on. There were IEDs buried in both places. The insurgents had planned to box the unit into the grape field and attack them there.
Altogether, during their nine months in Afghanistan, Kitts and Dyngo spent more than 1,000 hours patrolling. They discovered more than 370 pounds of explosives. The military credited them with keeping more than 30,000 U.S., Afghan, and coalition forces safe.
The author and Dyngo at home in Washington, DC
The United States has deployed thousands of dogs to combat zones. Depending on the war, their tours have lasted months to years. When it’s time for war dogs to retire, the law specifies that they should be released into the care of their former handlers, if possible. The second option is law-enforcement agencies, and the third is “other persons capable of humanely caring for these dogs.”
According to Douglas Miller, the former manager of the DOD Military Working Dog program, retired war dogs are in higher demand than they were a decade ago. “When I first took this job, in 2009, there were about 150 people maybe on the list,” he says. “That list has now grown to about 1,200 or more people.” But not every civilian anticipates the adjustments the dogs will have to make.
When we met, Kitts told me he’d always hoped he could bring Dyngo home, but his oldest daughter was allergic to dogs. He commented that he was impressed with how much Dyngo, usually stoic around new people, seemed to like me. When he laid his head in my lap, I felt the tug of love. Kitts asked whether I would consider taking Dyngo when he was set to retire.
For me, adopting Dyngo would mean adopting new schedules, responsibilities, and costs, including a move to a larger, more expensive dog-friendly apartment. The list of reasons to say no was inarguably long. Even so, over time, that little feeling tugged harder. I weighed all the pros and cons and then disregarded the cons. On May 9, 2016, I was on a plane to Phoenix.
“You sound scared.”
I’d called Kitts as soon as I heard Dyngo growl. He counseled me through that first night, intuiting that what Dyngo needed to feel safe was a crate. My friend Claire had a spare one and helped me put it together. We’d barely put the door in place before Dyngo launched himself inside, his relief palpable and pitiable.
The next day, and during the rest of the first week, I had one objective: to wear Dyngo out. I chose the most arduous walking routes, the steepest leaf-laden trails. The pace was punishing.
Other challenges presented themselves. Dyngo had arrived with scabs and open sores on his underbelly. Tests revealed a bacterial infection that required antibiotics and medicated shampoo baths. Since I could not lift Dyngo into the bathtub, I would shut us both into the small bathroom and do the best I could with a bucket and washcloth, leaving inches of water and dog hair on the floor.
Then there was Dyngo’s nearly uncontrollable drive for toys—or anything resembling a toy. Instilled in him by the rewards he’d received during his training, this urge sent him after every ball, stuffed animal, or abandoned glove we passed. The distant echo of a basketball bouncing filled me with dread. My desperation grew when Dyngo began to twist himself like a pretzel to clamp down on the fur and flesh above his hind leg, gripping himself in rhythmic bites, a compulsion known as flank sucking.
Struggling for order, I set up a rigid Groundhog Day–like routine. Each day, we would wake at the same hour, eat meals at the same hour, travel the same walking paths, and sit in the same spot on the floor together after every meal.
I don’t remember when I started to sing to him, but under the streetlamps on our late-night walks, I began a quiet serenade of verses from Simon & Garfunkel or Peter, Paul & Mary. I have no idea whether anyone else ever heard me. In my mind, there was only this dog and my need to calm him.
One night that summer, with the DC heat at its most oppressive, I called my father. I told him things weren’t getting better. “Give it time,” he said. “You’ll end up loving each other, you’ll see.” When Dyngo would pull away from me, straining against my hold on the leash, I found that hard to believe.
Sometimes, when Dyngo stared at me from behind the bars of his borrowed crate, I wondered whether he was thinking back to his days of leaping out of helicopters. Did he miss the sound of gunfire? Did he crave the adrenaline rush of hopping over walls and the struggle of human limbs between his teeth? What if, in my attempt to offer him a life of love and relaxation, I had stolen his sense of purpose?
Military dogs get to a point where they’re living for their jobs, just as human service members do, says Matt Hatala, a former Marine handler who deployed to Afghanistan. “That has been their identity—that is it—for years and years. And when you get out, you kinda go, ‘What the heck do I do now?’ And you can never really find that replacement.
“That dog’s been through situations you’re not going to be able to understand and might not be able to handle,” Hatala continues. He acknowledges that things weren’t always easy after he brought home Chaney, his former canine partner. The black Lab was still ready to work, but there wasn’t any work to do. Chaney developed a fear of thunderstorms—which was strange, Hatala says, because he had never before been scared of thunder, or even of gunfire or bombs.
Among the former handlers who’d worked with Dyngo was S.Sgt. Jessie Keller, who had arranged the adoption. As Dyngo and I struggled to adapt to our new life, Keller offered me some thoughtful suggestions. But something changed when Keller sent me a text message—“If u don’t feel u can keep him please let me know and I will take him back.” In some ways, this was the thing I most wanted to hear. But a resolve took hold: I was not going to give up this dog.
During our early months together, Dyngo admirably maintained his military duties. As we made our way down the hall from my apartment, he would drop his nose down to the seam of each door we passed and give it a swift but thorough sniff. He was still hunting for bombs. Every time I clipped on his leash, he was ready to do his job, even if, in his mind, I wasn’t ready to do mine. He’d turn his face up, expectant and chiding. And when I didn’t give a command, he would carry on, picking up my slack.
I tried to navigate him away from the line of cars parked along the leafy streets, where he tried to set his nose toward the curves of the tires. How could I convey to him that there were no bombs here? How could I make him understand that his nose was now entirely his own?
Over the next nine months or so, Dyngo gradually learned to let his guard down and settle into domesticity, and I adjusted to life with a retired war dog.
After months of retraining, Dyngo can now walk in the neighborhood without feeling that he’s on duty.
It has now been more than three years since I brought Dyngo home. He has learned how to play, maybe for the first time, without anxiety. The borrowed crate was dismantled two years ago. His flank sucking has all but disappeared. All the rugs lie in place, the couch cushions and pillows sit idle and unthreatened. Dyngo and I are rarely more than a few feet apart—he follows me around, my lumbering guardian. He is now truly my dog.
Every once in a while, as I run my thumb along the velvety inside of his left ear, I see the faint blue of his ID tattoo, #L606. He exhales a low grumble, but it’s one of deep contentment.
I can take Dyngo out without worry now. He is gentle with dogs who are smaller or frailer than he is. He has even befriended a feisty black cat.
Dyngo’s dozen years of rough-and-tumble life are finally catching up with him. His stand-at-attention ears have fallen into a crumple. The marmalade brown of his muzzle is swept with swirls of white and gray. He is missing more than a few teeth and walks with a bit of a limp.
Early in 2018, Dyngo and I drove up to my parents’ home in Connecticut. It was an unusually balmy day in February, and we rode with the windows down, Dyngo’s head raised into the slanting sun. He made friends with the neighbors’ dogs, dragged branches across the muddy yard, and took long evening walks with my father in the downy snow.
Back home again, when we pulled into our building’s circular driveway after two weeks away, I looked on as he jumped down onto the concrete. His face changed as he reoriented himself to the surroundings, finding his footing along the uneven sidewalks and making a beeline toward his favorite tree spot. As we entered my apartment, he nosed his way inside, then pranced back and forth between his bed and bowls. He danced toward me, his eyes filled to the brim with an expression that required no interpretation: We’re home! We’re home!
Princess Diana should have led a storybook life: At age 20, she married Prince Charles and went on to have two handsome sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, whom she loved dearly. But then her marriage unraveled, and Princess Diana’s suffering eventually became public knowledge. It was only after she finally broke free of her unhappy marriage that she had a chance at happiness. Then, sadly, her life was tragically cut short just one year after her divorce, when she was killed in a car crash on the last day of August 1997. She was only 36. Find out the 10 conspiracy theories that still surround Princess Diana’s death.
All that was left of the princess were her final wishes, as set forth in her last will and testament. Sadly, even those never came to fruition.
Princess Diana’s will
Princess Diana’s will, which she’d signed four years earlier and then modified several months after her divorce, according to Cheat Sheet, provided that
75 percent of her jewelry and possessions should be divided between Prince William and Prince Harry, with the remaining 25 percent divided among Diana’s 17 godchildren.
£50,000 should go to her butler.
The remainder of her estate (£21 million, which would be the equivalent of $25.8 million now) should be placed in trust for the princes until each turned 25.
The will named Princess Diana’s mother and sister as the executors, meaning that the two were tasked with distributing Diana’s estate… in accordance with her wishes. And therein lies the rub.
A Princess’s wishes… overridden
In December of 1997, Diana’s mother and sister went to court and obtained a “variation order,” permitting them to distribute the princess’s estate differently from how she’d specified: Under the variation order:
The two princes would not receive their shares of Diana’s estate until the age of 30 (although they would begin receiving income distributions at age 25).
Instead of splitting 25 percent of Princess Diana’s jewels and possessions, each of the godchildren would receive a single memento, chosen by the executors. And none of that would happen until the younger prince, Harry, turned 30 in 2014.
Fast forward to 2014
In 2014, Prince Harry received his share of his mother’s estate (two years earlier, Prince William had received his). During the intervening 17 years following the variation order, 150 items from Princess Diana’s possessions were traveling the world as part of an exhibition put together by Princess Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer. Proceeds from the exhibition (admissions and such) raised more than $2 million.
Diana’s family say the proceeds went to a charitable fund created in Diana’s memory. Since Princess Diana was highly charitable during her lifetime, one could argue that her wishes weren’t entirely trounced.
What remains a mystery is why Diana’s family ignored her wishes. What would Diana have said? How do Prince William and Prince Harry feel about the way their mom’s wishes were disregarded? All we know right now is that Prince William, Prince Harry, and their respective families still find ways to honor Diana’s life. Here are 20 rarely seen photos of Princess Diana’s life.
Everyone agrees that a luxury liner set sail on April 10, 1912, and sank five days later, taking the lives of around 1,500 of the 2,223 aboard. But that’s pretty much where the consensus ends. Some insist the ship that sank wasn’t the Titanic, but rather, the nearly identical R.M.S. Olympic. As the story goes, the Olympic had been damaged in an accident the year before, but in order to score a bigger insurance payoff, the ships’ common owners passed off the Olympic as the Titanic and then deliberately sank it. While there are lots of holes in this Titanic theory, serial numbers found on parts of the ship that didn’t sink support it. Here’s why we remain fascinated by the Titanic after more than a century.
The theory: Engineers designed the Twin Towers to withstand the impact of a commercial jet airplane. Yet, both towers collapsed within two hours of being hit. Could the towers have been rigged with explosives (demolition-style) prior to the planes hitting?
The consensus:Snopes discredited this as not scientifically sound, and the world may never know how these optimally-engineered towers collapsed so quickly. All of these conspiracy theories actually turned out to be true.
For Holly Winter, September 11, 2001, was going to be the day of a blissful reunion for her and her college friends—but her own mother’s intuition saved her. Winter, who lived in Denver at the time, tells Reader’s Digest, “I was supposed to be at the Twin Towers on September 11 with my two best friends from college, who lived in Chicago and New York City. Because the NYC-based friend worked non-stop, Winter and her other friend coordinated their calendars for a surprise breakfast picnic on September 11 in New York at his office in the original One World Trade Center. “It was the only date that worked for both of us. Our plan was to fly into the city the night before, then show up at his office at 8:00 a.m. with a breakfast of champagne and caviar—his favorites.”
She continues, “I called my mom who lived in upstate New York to let her know her I was coming to town, and she told me she was coming to visit me instead. I begged her to change her trip, reminding her that she was retired, so her schedule was more flexible. She refused, saying it felt like the right time to visit.”
Winter canceled the trip with her friends. “My Chicago friend decided to make the trip without me. The surprise worked as planned and they called me at 8:00 a.m., and we laughed and talked for a while. I hung up so that they could enjoy the visit without keeping me on the phone. I lost them both.” Read on to learn the 13 powerful lessons surviving the 9/11 terrorist attacks taught one woman.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Tom Frey reported to duty as a detective for the New York City Police Department. Like many on that fateful morning, he never imagined it would be the day his life changed forever. After the Twin Towers collapsed, Frey was assigned to Ground Zero where he set up DNA testing sites for families to bring personal items of loved ones to be tested and worked alongside a bucket brigade for rescue and recovery. When the debris was transferred to a landfill on Staten Island, Frey spent eight months painstakingly sifting through the dust and rubble, looking for human remains. “We worked for weeks with no days off, searching for body parts and pieces of the planes. In the very beginning, we only had paper masks at Ground Zero, but once we moved to the landfill we were given hazardous material suits. When the Red Cross brought us lunch each day we had to take the masks and hoods off to eat, and the white dust, asbestos, and whatever else from the rubble blew onto us and our food. It was really rough.” Even after the rubble had been cleared, Frey says he worked for years assisting in the identification of remains from the attacks and notifying families of victims.
“It caused a fire in my lungs”
In February 2016, Frey says everything “hit the fan.” After routine check-up and blood work with his doctor, Frey got a call from the nurse the following day. His white blood cells were elevated, and after more testing, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer common among first responders of 9/11 due to the toxic debris ingested when the towers collapsed. “I went through nine rounds of chemo and started having a little shortness of breath. I saw a pulmonologist who diagnosed me with pulmonary fibrosis—he said it was a combination of the debris dust and chemotherapy that caused it.” One of the chemotherapies Frey received contained bleomycin, and pulmonary fibrosis is a side effect. “I asked him what we do to treat it, and he said, ‘nothing.’ He said that the chemicals I breathed had created a sort of fire in my lungs, and it scarred them.”
Frey went home and researched the condition, and what he found shocked him. “It said I had three to five years to live. I thought I had written it down wrong. I went to my oncologist and told him what I read. I asked, ‘What do I do? This can’t be true.’ He said he was going to pray for me.” Pulmonary fibrosis is a progressive and fatal lung disease characterized by scarring in the lungs that reduces function. Symptoms include shortness of breath, dry cough, gradual weight loss, fatigue, aching joints, and clubbing of the tips of fingers and toes. About 200,000 Americans are affected by the disease, and 50,000 are diagnosed annually. There are many forms of the disease, and it can be caused by environmental exposure to toxins and certain medications, as in Frey’s case. Treatment options include medications to slow the progression of the disease, supplemental oxygen, steroids, and clinical trials.
A new normal
After completing his chemotherapy treatment plan (minus the bleomycin), Frey began scouring the internet to learn more about pulmonary fibrosis. His searching led him to the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation, a site he says has made all the difference in his journey with the disease. “I saw that people on the website referred each other to the Mayo Clinic. I met with a doctor at the Jacksonville, Florida center and started a treatment plan. I started pulmonary rehabilitation and began using oxygen.” Frey’s cancer is now in remission and he will be eligible for a lung transplant once he has been cancer-free for five years. “I just keep moving. If you keep moving, you keep living.”
Many of Frey’s colleagues that responded to the World Trade Center attacks also have pulmonary fibrosis, as well as cancer due to the toxic chemicals they ingested during recovery efforts. “I know many from the police department have been diagnosed, and I’m sure the fire department is the same. A study recently came out showing that diagnoses’ are rising for the first responders of September 11th.” Frey’s lung function is currently at 50 percent, and he says it’s stable- a good sign.
Today, the retired detective is an ambassador for the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation, traveling the country to encourage others with the disease. “It becomes an elephant in the room, you think maybe it will just go away, but it doesn’t. With every breath you know it’s there. If you have this, you have to go to the foundation’s website and get the resources. Go to the support group meetings. Doctors only have 15 minutes to offer you, but these people are going through the same thing. Some have lived with this for years. They give me hope.” Read on for 12 more secrets the government doesn’t want you to know about what happened on September 11.
Justin played with an Ouija board one day with several of his friends. They asked questions, but instead of the planchette moving to certain letters, it began to move in a strange pattern. “It went to all four corners of the board and made an X,” he tells Reader’s Digest, “then it just went in circles.” The next time he used the board, it was with a different friend at his house. Again, the planchette moved in the same strange pattern. “I felt like it was some kind of hex,” he continues. Later that night when he was sleeping, he felt a forceful hand grab his arm and wake him up. Everyone else in the house was sound asleep.
Soon after Savannah Phillips got buckled into her window seat on a United Airlines flight from Oklahoma to Illinois this past May, she glanced over at her seatmate. He was in his 60s, wore bright yellow sunglasses, and was busy texting. The font was unusually large and the screen was bright, making it easy for Phillips to read what he was tapping out: “Hey Babe, I’m sitting next to a smelly fatty.”
“It was like confirmation of the negative things I think about myself on a daily basis,” the 33-year-old mother wrote in a Facebook post after the flight. Soon tears streamed down her cheeks as she hugged the cabin wall, trying to make herself as small as possible.
Sitting a row behind them and across the aisle was Chase Irwin, a 35-year-old bar manager from Nashville, Tennessee. He could see the man’s texts, too—and he could see Phillips. “I noticed [her] looking at his phone,” Irwin told wsmv.com. “I was sick to my stomach. I could not have this guy sit next to her this whole flight and her thinking he’s making fun of her,” he told Nashville’s NewsChannel 5.
In an instant, Irwin had unbuckled his seat belt and was hovering over the texter. “Hey, I need to talk to you,” Irwin told him. “We are switching seats—now.” When the texter asked why, Irwin said, “You’re texting about her, and I’m not putting up with that.”
The texter acceded quickly. Irwin took his place next to Phillips and was soon cheering up his new seatmate.
“He encouraged me not to let that guy get to me and that everything was going to be fine,” Phillips wrote. And he was right. She and Irwin spent the rest of the flight chatting like old friends.
With her faith in humanity restored, Phillips wrote on Facebook, “The flight attendant told him that he was her hero. He wasn’t her hero—he was mine.”
What looks like a lovely country home in upstate New York is actually one of 42 buildings that made up the Trudeau Sanitorium for people with tuberculosis (before the advent of current antibiotic treatment). Located in the Adirondack Mountains, this was America’s first such sanitorium. If you look carefully at the photo taken in 1948, you can see a white-clad nurse ascending the front steps to care for her patients.
Making sure a preschooler in isolation doesn’t feel isolated
Quinn Waters has seen a lot of tough things in his short three years of life. So when the preschooler was put in isolation in his home as part of his treatment for brain cancer, his family prepared themselves to help him endure one more heartbreaking hardship. But then the Waters’ neighbors stepped in, deciding that while they couldn’t do anything about the cancer, they could certainly keep Quinn entertained. At first, it was just nearby friends doing silly puppet shows, juggling, singing, and playing games outside the large window where the little boy watched, delighted. As word spread, however, more and more people showed up—from the community and then from around the country. Quinn, nicknamed “The Mighty Quinn,” and his family have now been visited by athletes, police departments, dance teams, and he even got his own private concert from the Dropkick Murphys, all from his “quindow.” “The fact that there’s so much bad news, you see something like this and everybody wants to get on board with it. No one wants to see a little kid be sick,” his father Jarlath Waters told Fox26. “Every single person who has shown up has done wonders for him.”
Tired from a full day’s work, Rosa Parks boarded a Montgomery bus on December 1, 1955 and forever became one of the inspirational people who changed the world. When she refused to obey the driver’s order to give up her seat and move to the back of the bus so a white person could sit there, she was arrested for civil disobedience. Parks’ act of defiance, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that followed, are recognized as pivotal moments in the civil rights movement.
It was America’s deadliest wildfire in at least 100 years and the most destructive in California history. The Camp Fire started at 6:33 a.m. on November 8, 2018, touched off by faulty electrical transmission lines in the town of Paradise. It burned for 17 days and consumed 153,336 acres north of Sacramento. In all, the fire caused $16.5 billion in damage, destroying nearly 19,000 buildings, leaving 50,000 homeless, and killing 85. The beauty of this beautifully named place was gone.
Shane Grammer grew up 15 miles away in Chico, and he followed the news of the fire’s deadly path from Los Angeles, where the 47-year-old father of three works as a creative director for Disney’s theme parks. Grammer still has friends in the Paradise area. When his childhood buddy Shane Edwards posted pictures of his white chimney—the only part of his house to survive—Grammer felt helpless. And then he had an idea.
“I’ve got to paint that chimney,” he told Inside Edition. “I’m not trying to say anything. It’s just that I’m an artist. And it was an opportunity for me to express and be an artist.”
Grammer’s choice of black and white paint was deliberate: They’re the colors of smoke.
On December 31, amid the rubble, charred trees, and burned-out husks of cars, Grammer spent three hours spray-painting a strikingly eerie black- and-white image of a woman on the chimney—a reminder, perhaps, of the beauty of life, or even just of life itself.
Grammer posted the image on Instagram. The victims of the fire, especially, could not contain themselves. “Beautiful and haunting,” one said. Another posted, “You bring beauty and hope.”
Suddenly, Grammer realized that what he had thought was a purely artistic expression had morphed into something deeper, the hallmark of true art. “When the first mural moved so many people in this community, I knew I had to come back up,” Grammer told KRCR-TV in Redding. Over a period of three months he returned eight times, painting 17 portraits of victims and Biblical figures on walls, pickups, and shards of buildings. “There is hope,” he explains. “There is beauty in the ashes.”
Outside one house, he found a photo of an eight-year-old named Eleanor. Seeing it as a sign, he painted a mural of her on the lone wall of her home that was left standing. It was, Grammer says, “a stamp that life was here and that life can continue to be here.”
Some of Grammer’s beautiful paintings. On the left is his portrait of Eleanor.
The portrait had special meaning for the home’s owner. Eleanor’s father, Greg Weddig, recalls how she used to play just feet away from where the mural was painted. “She would constantly be digging in the mud. And it was right below the kitchen windows, so we could always keep an eye on her,” he says. “The tree that was there was this beautiful maple that just made everything in the kitchen red.” Eleanor herself returned once to admire the painting.
Grammer’s work in Paradise has now become a movement. He has traveled the world painting murals in dark places that sorely needed some light: an orphanage in Tijuana, Mexico; a youth ministry in San Francisco; a nonprofit for child sex-trafficking survivors in Cambodia. “I want to do something powerful and create art that moves people,” he says.
Ironically, that first painting, on the chimney in Paradise, survived only a few months—the bulldozer is a cruel art critic. Grammer couldn’t be more delighted. It means that the spirit of Paradise is rising again.
Colorado’s grays peak rises 14,278 feet above sea level, high enough that trees can’t grow toward the top, though there are plenty of shrubs, rocks, and boulders. It was in this unforgiving terrain that Bev Wedelstedt was unlucky enough to rupture the anterior cruciate ligament and meniscus in her left knee.
It was August 2018, and Wedelstedt, 56, was on her way back down the trail with three friends. A storm was brewing, and they were anxious to get off the mountain. When they approached a rocky drop of a couple of feet, Wedelstedt decided that instead of shimmying down on her butt—the safe way to go—she would leap. She landed on her left leg.
Then she heard the snap.
Every step after that was agony. Before long, she had to stop. As one friend ran down to get help, a number of other hikers, all strangers, attempted to help Wedelstedt down the narrow trail by walking on either side of her to support her weight, but that proved slow and dangerous. One man “was so close to the ledge I could see rocks tumbling down from where he stepped on them,” Wedelstedt says.
Finally, one hiker, Matt, asked her, “How do you feel about a fireman’s carry?” Before she knew it, he had lifted her over his shoulder. “Now, I’m not tiny,” says Wedelstedt, a former college basketball star. Matt clearly couldn’t carry her all the way down by himself. So six hikers and one of her friends took turns carrying her while she tried to make light of a difficult situation: “I told them I wanted to meet a lot of guys, but this isn’t the way I wanted to do it.” Three hours and two rock-strewn miles later, this human conveyor belt finally met the medics, who took Wedelstedt to the hospital.
She has mostly recovered from her ill-fated hike, but Wedelstedt knows she’ll never shake one thing from that day: the memory of the band of strangers who came to her rescue. “I’m still in awe.”
Pam Bales left the firm pavement of Base Road and stepped onto snow-covered Jewell Trail. She planned a six-hour loop hike through New Hampshire’s Mount Washington State Park. She had packed for almost every contingency and intended to walk alone.
A piece of paper on the dashboard of her Nissan Xterra detailed her itinerary: start up Jewell Trail, traverse the ridge south along Gulfside Trail, summit Mount Washington, follow Crawford Path down to Lakes of the Clouds Hut, descend Ammonoosuc Ravine Trail, and return to her car before some forecasted bad weather was scheduled to arrive. Bales always left her hiking plans in her car, as well as with two fellow volunteers on the Pemigewasset Valley Search and Rescue Team.
It was just before 8 a.m. on October 17, 2010. She’d checked the higher summits forecast posted by the Mount Washington Observatory before she left:
In the clouds w/a slight chance of showers. Highs: upper 20s; windchills 0–10. Winds: NW 50–70 mph increasing to 60–80 w/higher gusts.
Based on her experience, Bales knew that her hike was realistic. Besides, she had two contingency plans and extra layers of clothing to better regulate her core temperature as conditions changed; the observatory had described conditions on the higher summits as “full-on winter.”
The hike up the lower portion of Jewell was pleasant. Bales felt excited as she walked up into snowy paths. At 8:30 a.m., still below the tree line, she stopped and took the first in a series of on-the-trail selfies; she was wearing a fleece tank top and hiking pants, and no gloves or hat because the air was mild. The sun shone through the trees and cast a shadow over her smiling face.
Pam Bales took selfies at 8:30 a.m. (left) and 9:15 a.m. to document her climb up Jewell Trail on Mount Washington, which is known for its extreme weather swings.
Less than an hour later, she took another photo, after she’d climbed into colder air and deeper snows. She now donned a quarter-zip fleece top and gloves. An opaque backdrop had replaced the sunshine, and snow shrouded the hemlock and birch.
She still smiled. Above her, thick clouds overloaded with precipitation were dropping below Mount Washington’s summit, where the temperature measured 24 degrees F and the winds gusted about 50 mph in fog and blowing snow.
At 10:30 a.m., the weather was showing its teeth. Bales added even more layers, including a shell jacket, goggles, and mountaineering mittens, to shield herself from the cold winds and dense fog. She made her way across the snow-covered ridge toward Mount Washington and began to think about calling it a day. Then she noticed something: a single set of footprints in the snow ahead of her. She’d been following faint tracks all day and hadn’t given them much thought, because so many people climb Jewell Trail. But these, she realized, had been made by a pair of sneakers. She silently scolded the absent hiker for violating normal safety rules and walked on.
By 11 a.m., Bales was getting cold, even though she was moving fast and generating some body heat. She put on an extra top under her shell jacket and locked down her face mask and goggles system. Good thing I packed heavy, she thought. She decided to abandon her plan. Summiting Washington was just an option. Returning to her SUV was a requirement.
Strong gusts of wind screamed as they attacked her back and left side. The cloud cover had transitioned from canopy to the equivalent of quicksand, and the only thing keeping Bales on Gulfside Trail was the sneaker tracks in the snow. As she fought the wind and heavy sleet, her eyes searching for some type of shelter, the tracks made a hard left-hand turn off the trail.
Now she felt genuinely alarmed. She was sure the hiker could not navigate in the low visibility and was heading straight toward the challenging trails of the Great Gulf Wilderness. Bales stood there, stunned. The temperature and clouds were in a race to find their lowest point, and darkness was mere hours away. If Bales continued to follow the tracks, she’d add risk and time to the itinerary she’d already modified to manage both. But she could not let this go. She turned to the left and called out, “Hello!” into the frozen fog.
Nothing. She called out again: “Is anybody out there? Do you need help?”
The strong westerly winds carried her voice away. She blew into her rescue whistle. For a fleeting moment she thought she heard someone reply, but it was just the wind playing games with her mind. She stood listening, then turned and walked cautiously in the direction of the single set of tracks. Her bailout route would have to wait.
Bales followed the tracks gingerly for 20 to 30 yards, struggling to remain upright. She rounded a slight corner and saw a man sitting motionless, cradled by large boulders. He stared in the direction of Great Gulf, the majesty of which could only be imagined in the horrendous visibility. She approached him and uttered, “Oh, hello.”
He did not react. He wore tennis sneakers, shorts, a light jacket, and fingerless gloves. His head was bare. He looked soaking wet. Thick frost covered his jacket. His eyes tracked her slowly, and he barely swiveled his head.
A switch flipped. She stopped being a curious and concerned hiker. Her informal search now transitioned to full-on rescue mission. She leaned into her wilderness medical training and tried to get a firmer grip on his level of consciousness. “What is your name?” she asked.
He did not respond.
“Do you know where you are?”
Nothing. His skin was pale and waxy, and he had a glazed look on his face. It was obvious that nothing was connecting for him. He was hypothermic and in really big trouble. Winds were blowing steadily at 50 mph, the temperature was 27 degrees, and the ice pellets continued their relentless assault on Bales and the man who was now her patient.
The prospect of having to abandon him in the interest of her own survival was horrifying, but she’d been trained in search and rescue; she knew not to put herself at such risk that she would become a patient too. She also knew she didn’t have much time. As he sat propped up against the rocks, she stripped him down to his T-shirt and underwear. Because he wouldn’t talk and she was in such close contact with him, she gave him a name: “John.” She placed adhesive toe-warmer packs directly onto his bare feet. She checked him for any sign of injury or trauma. There was none. From her pack, Bales retrieved a pair of soft-shell pants, socks, a winter hat, and a jacket. She pulled the warm, dry layers onto his body. He could not help, because he was so badly impaired by hypothermia.
Bales next removed a bivouac sack from her pack, holding it firmly so the winds would not snatch it. She slid it under and around his motionless body, entombing him inside. She activated more heat packs and placed them in his armpits, on his torso, and on each side of his neck. Bales always brought a thermos of hot cocoa and chewable electrolyte cubes. She dropped a few cubes into the cocoa, then cradled the back of his head with one hand, gripped the thermos with the other, and poured the warm, sugary drink into his mouth.
Over the next hour, John began to move his limbs and speak. Slurring his words, he said that when he had left Maine that morning it had been 60 degrees. He had planned to follow the same loop as Bales. He had walked that route several times before. He said he had lost his way in the poor visibility and just sat down here. Even as he warmed up, he remained lethargic.
Bales recognized that he would die soon if they didn’t get out of there. She looked her patient squarely in the eyes and said, “John, we have to go now!” She left no room for argument. She was going to descend, and he was going with her. The wind roared over and around the boulders that had protected them during the 60-minute triage. She braced him as he stood up, shivering, and with a balance of firmness and genuine concern, she ordered, “You are going to stay right on my ass, John.” This wasn’t the way she usually spoke to people, but she had to be forceful. He seemed moments away from being drawn irrevocably to the path of least resistance—stopping and falling asleep. That was not going to happen on her watch.
She figured that the only viable route was back the way they’d come. As the pair retraced their steps on the ridge, visibility was so bad that they inched along. Bales followed the small holes in the snow that her trekking poles had made earlier. Leaning into the headwinds, she began to sing a medley of Elvis songs in an effort to keep John connected to reality—and herself firmly focused.
She was trying hard to stay on the trail, and trying even harder not to let John sense her growing concern, when he dropped down into the snow. She turned and saw that he seemed to be giving up. He curled in a sort of sitting fetal position, hunched down, shoulders dropped forward, and hands on his knees. He told her he was exhausted and had had enough. She should just continue on without him. Bales would have none of it. “That’s not an option, John. We still have the toughest part to go, so get up, suck it up, and keep going!” Slowly he stood, and she felt an overwhelming sense of relief.
Bales and her reluctant companion had traveled just under half a mile when they arrived back at the junction of Gulfside Trail and the somewhat safer Jewell Trail. It had been around 2 p.m. when they’d started down. The sun would set in three hours. Although the trees would protect them from the wind, it was darker under the canopy. Bales switched on her headlamp, but with only one light between them, she had to move slowly down a steeper section, then turn to illuminate the trail so John could follow. She offered continuous encouragement—“Keep going, John; you’re doing great”—and sang a dose of songs from the 1960s.
Their descent was arduous, and Bales dreaded that he would drop in the snow again and actively resist her efforts to save him. Just before 6 p.m., they arrived at the trailhead, exhausted and battered. Her climb up to the spot where she located John had taken about four hours. Six hours had passed since then.
Bales started her car engine and placed the frozen clothing she had taken off John inside so that the heater could thaw them. She realized he had no extra clothing with him.
“Why don’t you have extra dry clothes and food in your car?” she asked.
“I just borrowed it,” he told her. Several minutes later, he put his now-dry clothes back on and returned the ones Bales had dressed him in up on the ridge.
“Why didn’t you check the weather forecast dressed like that?” she asked. He didn’t answer. He just thanked her, got into his car, and drove across the empty lot toward the exit. Right around that time, at 6:07 p.m., the Mount Washington Observatory clocked its highest wind gust of the day, at 88 mph.
Standing there astonished and alone in the darkness, Bales said to no one, “What just happened?”
Bales wouldn’t get an answer until a week later, when the president of her rescue group received a letter in the mail, a donation tucked between its folds. It read:
“I hope this reaches the right group of rescuers. This is hard to do but must try, part of my therapy. I want to remain anonymous, but I was called John. On Sunday October 17, I went up my favorite trail, Jewell, to end my life. Weather was to be bad. Thought no one else would be there. I was dressed to go quickly. Next thing I knew this lady was talking to me, changing my clothes, giving me food, making me warmer. She just kept talking and calling me John and I let her. Finally learned her name was Pam.
“Conditions were horrible and I said to leave me and get going, but she wouldn’t. Got me up and had me stay right behind her, still talking. I followed, but I did think about running off—she couldn’t see me. But I wanted to only take my life, not anybody else’s, and I think she would’ve tried to find me.
“The entire time she treated me with compassion, authority, confidence, and the impression that I mattered. With all that has been going wrong in my life, I didn’t matter to me, but I did to Pam. She probably thought I was the stupidest hiker dressed like I was, but I was never put down in any way—chewed out, yes, in a kind way. Maybe I wasn’t meant to die yet. I somehow still mattered in life.
“I became very embarrassed later on and never really thanked her properly. If she is an example of your organization, you must be the best group around. Please accept this small offer of appreciation for her effort to save me way beyond the limits of safety. NO did not seem to be in her mind.
“I am getting help with my mental needs. They will also help me find a job and I have temporary housing. I have a new direction thanks to wonderful people like yourselves. I got your name from her pack patch and bumper sticker.
“My deepest thanks, John.”
In the nine years since she saved John, Bales has become something of a hiking legend. It’s a title she never sought or wanted, but one she certainly has earned. All that matters to her is that she was moved deeply by the man’s gesture and his reference to the fact that she made him feel that he mattered.
Some people have asked me whether I, in finally recounting this story for the public, tried to find John. The thought of searching for him felt wrong. As I’ve reflected more on this story and its relation to mental health, my response to that question has evolved. I have in fact found John, and he is very close by me. John is my neighbor; he is my good friend, a close colleague, a family member. John could be me.
At some point in our lives, all of us have found ourselves walking with a sense of helplessness through a personal storm. Alone, devoid of a sense of emotional warmth and safety and smothered by the darkness of our emotions, we’ve sought that place just off trail where we hoped to find some way to break free of our struggles. Sadly, some do follow through. Many are able to quietly self-rescue. Others, like John, are rescued by people like Pam Bales.
I paid off my student loans thanks to winning a trivia contest
In 2002, Saurabh Jindal was a recent college graduate and so broke he couldn’t even pay his graduation fees. Then he decided to enter a trivia contest called This Time, You Are the Champion, the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. “I ultimately ended up winning the equivalent of $2,000 which was a substantial amount in India,” he says. “The winnings not only allowed me to erase my loan for college but it helped me make the Travel Talk app.” He adds that the win also made him a bit of a celebrity in his small town, garnering him invitations to speak at local functions. “Winning the contest was a great experience for me as it gave me confidence and made me feel happy to be in the limelight for a bit,” he says. Whether you’re thinking of going on a TV contest yourself or just enjoy the local trivia night at the bar, keep up your skills with these 50 trivia facts only geniuses get right.
The phone rings. I wait for the answering machine to get it, but for some reason, it’s not picking up. I exhale, annoyed because I know the call is either going to be for my wife, Susan (she’s the only one who receives calls on the home line, and she left to take Alyce to school ten minutes ago), or it’s the latest of 300 attempts to sell me something I have absolutely no interest in.
“Hello,” I say, an edge in my voice.
“Daddy, it’s me.” It’s Alyce, my 12-year-old daughter. “Mommy was just in a car accident.”
My heart stops and then begins pounding.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“Is Mommy?”
A deep sob. “I don’t know … I don’t think so. Come quick.”
I sprint a few blocks to what looks like a shoot for a disaster movie. Fire engines, police cars, and ambulances are randomly parked in the street; helicopters circle. A city bus is on the wrong side of the road. In front of it are the smashed remains of Susan’s car.
Susan is pinned under the dashboard. There is no front windshield—no front end, for that matter. Alyce is standing on the corner crying, covered in tiny shards of glass but uninjured. Inconceivable.
Susan isn’t so lucky. But she is alive. It turns out she has broken nearly every bone in her body, and she will spend almost three months in the hospital.
More than two years later, Susan and I were at an event at our synagogue celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Our temple’s cantor and musical director, Danny, rushed up to us. He said excitedly, “There’s a woman here tonight from one of the church choirs who you have to meet!” He returned with an African American woman with a bright, glowing smile. She told us she lived in the apartment building by where the wreck had happened. That morning, she had rushed to the street, still in her bathrobe, and seen Alyce standing by the side of the wrecked car, crying. She approached her, asking, “Is that your mom in there?” Alyce nodded, and the woman said, “Let’s pray together.”
Sweet, innocent Alyce looked at this woman wearing a cross around her neck and said, “OK, but you should know I’m Jewish.” The woman smiled. She took Alyce’s hand, held it to her chest, and said, “That’s OK. In here we’re all the same.”
Alyce told her that she needed to call me, but her backpack with her phone was trapped inside the crushed vehicle. So the woman lent Alyce her phone.
After the accident, she said, she had continued to pray for our family.
We had our picture taken together, and as were saying goodbye, she hugged us all warmly. We realized we had never been formally introduced, so she said to me, “I’m sorry, I never got your name.” I told her it was Doug, and she paused, as if maybe she hadn’t heard me. I repeated, “Doug, like Douglas.”
She looked at us and said, “Wait, your name is Susan?” Susan nodded. “And your name is Douglas?”
The woman put her hand over her heart. “Oh my goodness,” she said. “My name is Susan Douglas.”
For more on this harrowing story, get a copy of Douglas Segal’s book, Struck.
When a baby orphaned monkey was severely bullied by other monkeys at a zoo in China, a kindhearted dog named Sai Hu came to his rescue. Whenever the little monkey senses he is in danger, he jumps up onto Sai Hu’s back for protection. Sai Hu chases away anyone who comes against the little monkey; he’s the best bodyguard any creature could ask for. Here’s what you need to know before adopting a rescue dog.
The theory: Engineers designed the Twin Towers to withstand the impact of a commercial jet airplane. Yet, both towers collapsed within two hours of being hit. Could the towers have been rigged with explosives (demolition-style) prior to the planes hitting?
For Holly Winter, September 11, 2001, was going to be the day of a blissful reunion for her and her college friends—but her own mother’s intuition saved her. Winter, who lived in Denver at the time, tells Reader’s Digest, “I was supposed to be at the Twin Towers on September 11 with my two best friends from college, who lived in Chicago and New York City. Because the NYC-based friend worked non-stop, Winter and her other friend coordinated their calendars for a surprise breakfast picnic on September 11 in New York at his office in the original One World Trade Center. “It was the only date that worked for both of us. Our plan was to fly into the city the night before, then show up at his office at 8:00 a.m. with a breakfast of champagne and caviar—his favorites.”
What looks like a lovely country home in upstate New York is actually one of 42 buildings that made up the Trudeau Sanitorium for people with 
