Wandschneider mug

Fifty years ago a guy in my shape would have moved from cane to crutches to wheelchair and maybe from beer to whisky in living with a hip joint as it ground down to bone on bone. Now, following a well trod path of Wallowa County neighbors to Dr. Paul Duwilius’ Portland door, I just got a new hip and a new start at the everyday things of life.

It’s a miracle of course and a matter of good luck. Duwilius is a pioneer in minimal-invasion hip replacement surgery a field worked by many physicians on thousands of patients over the past half century, who have constantly advanced materials, tools, and procedures to allow metal and plastic to replace bone and cartilage within a functioning piece of human anatomy and he happens to practice in Portland. I happen to live in Wallowa County, where Dr. Scot Siebe and the medical community keep track of such things, and where seasoned orthopedist Brad Stephens decided to semi-retire. And where retired doc Lowell Euhus has personal experience with Duwilius and hip replacement. When I got home, two days after surgery, Euhus and Stephens began checking in on me.

And here is where miracle and luck meet the ordinary, the flow of neighbors and events and places that make nestling places in the world. Neighbors lined up to bring evening meals; grandchildren, sensing my limits, have become more sensitive; son Matt left his own family to spend a couple of weeks nursing me; friends found it a good time to install a new stove. And the sun shone daily.

It strikes me that millions of people in millions of villages and city neighborhoods across the globe live this way, adding their ordinary to the miracles and luck that touch most lives. They do their doctor jobs and research jobs and their everyday jobs that add to the accumulation of a community’s and sometimes the human community’s welfare. They voluntarily help the neighbor, run to the daughter or father in need, and offer experience and expertise to the situation at hand.

Paul Duwilius does five or six such surgeries a week on a regular basis, shares his work and research with thousands of other surgeons, and ran off recently to the Dominican Republic for a three-week flurry of new hips for patients without another prayer. He is supported by a clinic and a hospital full of nurses, therapists, and others who make it all work. There are thousands like him out here, and millions of co-workers and sons and daughters and neighbors picking up on their miracle-making work. Bless them all!

But these things, this hip, remind me too that I am no island, but a human being highly related to and dependent on the work of the past and the very specific situation I am in today: here, in Wallowa County, among friends, raising grandkids, watching people grow and good friends pass, welcoming the new and trying to pitch in, be a part o-f it all in my place on earth.

-I thank you all, friends and neighbors, for being part of my life, for helping me along in this rough patch. I hope I will do as well by you. At the same time, I caution us all, in this end-time of the year, that miracles and chance and the ordinary that have got us to this place have not been so kind to others, that the chance that put me here put others in harm’s way somewhere in the world, that the miracles of good surgery arrive too late for millions, and that the good offices of neighbors, when struck by the wrong kind of match, can pit them against each other, and do. I’ll celebrate this holiday season with praise to the miracle workers and the helpers, and eyes and ears to those who’ve been dealt harder hands.