Archive for the ‘Good People’ Category
When Rosie Murrell first came through the doors at the Hope & Healing Center, operated by the Church Health Center, she had a specific goal in mind: lose enough weight to qualify for bariatric surgery. Rosie had been seriously overweight her whole life, at one point weighing 437 pounds.
She wanted that surgery any way she could get it, so much so that the fact that she had been diabetic for 20 years, and had eventually increased her insulin intake to over 100 units, wasn’t even her biggest concern. She also had uncontrolled high blood pressure and was working on degenerative joint disease.
“My doctor was pushing exercise, and told me he wouldn’t do the surgery if there was more than a 50 percent chance I’d die on the table,” Rosie said. She’d begun to lose weight before she began at Hope & Healing, though the starvation diet she’d worked out wasn’t really working.
“When (the wellness counselor) told me I’d have to increase my calories” to keep losing weight, Rosie said, “I cried and cried.” Read the rest of this entry »
And in this case, the more is more interfaith cooperation, says Eboo Patel, founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, which seeks to “build mutual respect and pluralism among young people from different religious traditions by empowering them to work together to serve others.”
Read more about what Patel has to say about religious pluralism in my Sunday column here and learn more about the Interfaith Youth core here.
You read John Beifuss’ story today about the movie that’s going to be filmed in Memphis in October, right?
Well, there’s a chance part of it might be filmed in The Commercial Appeal newsroom. So we were all talking about who we’d like to meet if the opportunity arose. Of course, the guys were all about Kate Beckinsale, and some of the gals were imagining fawning over Matt Dillon, but Alan Alda is who I want to shake hands with. I just admire him as an actor and a person and think he’d be interesting to talk to.
My co-worker Carolyn, who works out of our Germantown office, was on the conference phone and said two people just asked her “Who’s Alan Alda?”
My daughter and I were driving on Central near the UofM when traffic started slowing. When the car in front of mine drove on, I could see the problem. There was a tiny white and gray kitten struggling to get out of the road. She’d already been hit by a car — one of her legs wasn’t working right. She looked incredibly scared and frantic.
I put my hazard lights on and slowed to a stop. By the time the traffic got around me and I could safely get out of the car, I couldn’t find the kitten. She had just been right there and I knew she couldn’t go very far in the shape she was in. I looked under my car just in time to see her tail disappear as she climbed up into my wheel well. Now what was I going to do? I couldn’t get to her and I couldn’t drive anywhere.
