So we were boarding our flight to Texas for our nephew’s wedding.

The ground crew was consulting with the flight crew. The outside of the plane, they said, was…scratched.

The flight attendant’s initial reaction was, What do you mean, scratched?

The rest of the passengers came on. We sat. We went nowhere. We waited.

I don’t know if it took 45 minutes to make the decision or if that was to check if they had places to put all these people going to three different cities along the way, but they called ours first: “There are nine of you going to Dallas. Please collect your bags and exit the plane.”

And thus began our trip to Vegas, Albuquerque (Hi Maura!) and at last Texas, twelve+ hours airport to airport. At least we didn’t have to move from plane to plane after the initial change, and since those flights were jam packed the guy who sat on our row stayed on our row the whole time and we were all the best of friends by the time we finally got off. To the point that at one point I handed him my Rachel Remen book, “My Grandfather’s Blessings,” turned to page 263, When It Works, and said to the dad of teenagers, Three pages. I think you’ll like this story.

He dutifully read it, closed the book, and went, Wow. That was intense. I think I need a copy of this book.

I offered him mine, but it was my reading material so he turned down the offer but he made careful note of the author; I told him she’d gone to bed in her college dorm at 16 and had woken up six months later from her coma and that was her first instance of Crohn’s disease. She’d gone on to be an incredible doctor. Her grandfather had been a rabbi in Russia who had had nightmares of a black wing snuffing out the lights in all the synagogues in eastern Europe and had gathered his congregation and fled to America just ahead of the Russian pograms and then Hitler.

This good man from Texas had just gotten a glimpse into the heart of a good Jewish woman who had willed a baby boy who had been brought to the ER moments too late to come back. To live. To experience this life.

And thus the moment in her medical internship when the attendings brought the parents in to say goodbye to their son after they’d had to call him–and the little boy, now in Rachel’s arms, IVs and EKG leads and all, had cried and reached towards his mommy.