Reaching This Goal Isn’t Easy
“Dear God,
“Look, I don’t mean to be blasphemous or anything, but I thought we had an understanding.
“I would write about the crippled children and the Shriners Hospital, we would raise money for them and You would take it from there.
“By now, there wouldn’t be any more crippled children.
“Well, somebody goofed. There’s still lots of them.
“Look, we know You never turn any little child out less than perfect. But it must be the old story. Somebody slipped up in the packaging room. Somebody got the parts mixed up. The quality control gets out of whack. It happens.
“No one’s blaming anybody, but we all know the results. ‘God’s Little Teardrops,’ we called them once. Nobody’s fault. Everybody’s fault. Everybody’s responsibility. An assembly line gone crazy. Feet that point the wrong way. No feet. Bones as brittle as a leaf pressed between the pages of a Bible. No bones.
“The kids didn’t know. They thought everybody came into this world with a steel cage for a head, a steel rod for a leg, a mitten for a hand, a stump for a foot. They thought everybody was born in pieces and had to be assembled like a jigsaw puzzle or a toy on Christmas Eve.
“They didn’t know anything about roller skates or kickball. They thought everybody had to watch television upside-down trussed up like a lassoed steer, swathed in itchy casts. They made the best of it. Nobody gets it all, right? Not everybody gets hands or arms or feet that point in the direction you’re heading or arms with fingers on them. They make do.
“Never as long as I live will I forget the little girl who tapped her artificial legs and told me proudly as if she were the luckiest girl in the world to have them because ‘These can’t break.’ That was all she asked of life: a leg she could stand on.
“Well, we’ll never run out of crippled children. We may run out of Shriners, though. And that will be terrible news to those models that come off Your assembly line with parts missing or put in the wrong place or put on backward in the future.
“So, we’ve got another Shrine football game to promote until such time as You get the glitches out and get the shipping room to shape up. It will be next Saturday night at the Rose Bowl, and as usual it’ll be more than a game, it’ll be a godsend, you should pardon the expression.
“We’re not selling just a charity here. We’re selling history. Jim Plunkett played in this game. So did Mike Garrett, Craig Morton, John Elway, Tony Hill, Freeman McNeil, Lynn Swann, Darrin Nelson, Ronnie Lott. This is no sandlot game. This is tomorrow’s Super Bowl.
“And this year, Brian Anderson will play in it.
“Now, your eye may be on the sparrow, but you may not have noticed Brian Anderson although it’s hard not to, since he goes between 6 and 7 feet and between 240 and 300 pounds and his arms look like pipelines.
“Brian will play tackle for the North squad in the Shrine game Saturday, either way they want him to, on either side of the football, as they say, but nobody has to give Brian any pep talks about the Hospital for Crippled Children. Brian has been there.
“Not as a patient, but Brian’s older brother, Michael, has spent a lifetime in and out of the hospitals.
“It’s an old familiar story: One brother is a big, strapping, fearsome football player and three-letter athlete--and the other can’t walk without screaming.
“I leave that for You to look into, but in Michael Anderson’s case, it was a congenital condition called lymphadema, a disease of the lymph glands that caused blockage and a chronic collection of undrained fluid in the legs. The legs swell up and they make walking painful to impossible and running out of the question. It is a condition not unlike elephantiasis in appearance.
“It qualifies you as a crippled child, and Brian reports his brother has been in and out of Shrine hospitals ‘since birth.’
“It is a rare disease occurring in an infinitesimal portion of the population, but for Michael Anderson, the infinitesimal portion included all of him, and it effectively ruled out the athletic career his brother was able to pursue.
“Epilepsy compounded his problems, and two separate long stays at the Shriners Hospital in San Francisco and operations to remove blockages were heroic but not successful.
“So, Brian Anderson does not need to be reminded how fortunate he is to be able to play a football game for such a worthy cause. He can look down on legs that do not swell to four times their normal size or break down into soggy pits or be super-susceptible to infection. He got lucky.
“They got the order right at the loading dock when they put him together for delivery. He’s going on to the University of Utah and, maybe, the Green Bay Packers or Denver Broncos.
“He will never take for granted legs on which you can not only run, kick, block and tackle but even stand for long periods of time. Nor will he take for granted hospitals that try to correct legs that can’t do that.
“In ordinary industry, goods that get damaged in transit or come disassembled with parts missing are rejects. There’s no such thing in the Shriners Hospitals. Sometimes, even moms and dads refuse to take delivery on their broken packages. The Shriners, never.
“So, they’ll continue to have the game and the repair network it supports until such time as each model comes off the floor with a 60-year warranty that all parts are in working order and don’t need replacing or remodeling. You promised.”