The McDonnells lived in a small brick house in Larchmont, a suburb of New York City. Jim was foreman of mail carriers at the post office where he had worked for 25 years. Married in 1960, he and Anne were childless.

On the evening of the eleventh anniversary of their marriage, carrying out the garbage, Jim McDonnell slipped on icy steps, and struck his head. A few days later, driving to work, he lost control of the car, hit a telephone pole, and banged his forehead against the windshield. The following day he fell off the stairs, and again he banged his head. Found unconscious, he was hospitalized for three days with a cerebral concussion (脑震荡). One day in the same month, Jim borrowed a friend’s station wagon and drove to Kennedy Airport to pick up Anne’s brother and family. When he returned the borrowed car at 10 p.m., he was unaware that the wallet containing his identification had slipped out of his pocket onto the floor of the car. After that, he was never seen again.

So what really happened to Anne’s husband? During his walk home, Jim had indeed blacked out (昏厥), losing all ability to remember who he was and where he lived. What happened then is unclear. The next thing he knew was that he was in downtown Philadelphia, a city he had never visited before. Seeing signs advertising the services of a James Peters, a real estate broker, Jim adopted James Peters as his own name. He had no past; his only reality was the present. James Peters got a Social Security card, which could be obtained at that time without showing a birth certificate, and took a job in a health club. He next worked at a cancer research institute, cleaning out animal cages. He also got a night-shift job at the P&P luncheonette, where he became well known for his omelets (煎蛋卷), as well as his kindness and good humor.

About a month before Christmas 1985, colleagues noticed that Jim had grown unusually quiet and depressed.

Anne had just returned home from Christmas Mass, where she lit candles and prayed for Jim.

It’s funny that you can always tell when somebody’s laughing behind your back. Jodie hadn’t really heard anything, maybe a whisper, but when she turned around, the girls in the back row of the class were looking at her, trying to hide smiles and laughs. She looked back at her teacher. Mr Swales was talking about what people do all day. He also wanted to find out what his students wanted to be when they grew up.

He called on Billy Miter first. “My daddy works in a bank,” Billy Miter said. “I guess I want to work in a bank too. There’s lots of money in the bank.” My parents have a grocery store,” Emmy Disal said. “Papa’s behind the counter and Mama keeps the cash register. But I want to be an airline pilot.”

Jodie liked it when Mr Swales asked them questions like this. He was about to call on Jodie when the girls in the back row burst out laughing.

Shirley Danes yelled, “Jodie’s daddy is a garbage man!”

Everybody in the class laughed out loud. Everybody except Jodie, that is. She felt her face turn bright red. She looked around the whole classroom. Everyone was laughing. Some kids were even holding their noses.

Jodie looked at Mr Swales. He was angry. He almost never raised his voice, but now he did.

“Silence! I want everybody to quiet down this instant.”

The laughter stopped immediately. The sound of cars and people going by out on the street came through the windows.” You should be ashamed of yourselves,” Mr Swales said. “Being a garbage man… I mean, is a difficult and enormously useful job. We should all be grateful to Mr Harris. Where would we be without him? Up to our cars in garbage, that’s where. How would you like that?”

“It’s not funny,” Mr Swales went on. “Garbage is a serious matter. I think you all owe Jodie an apology. And after that, you’re all going to write Jodie’s father, Mr Harris, a nice letter to tell him how much you appreciate what he does for all of us. In other words, keeping our city clear.”

Everyone said “Sorry, Jodie”, but Jodie could tell they didn’t really mean it.

Jodie’s father came to walk her home from school as usual.

In 2017 I graduated from a medical school and started to train the seniors for recovery as a therapist in the Brookdale Lake Senior Living Center where I met Hoffner, who had lived there for roughly the past decade, for the first time.

Hoffner, a lady of 104 years old now, grew up in Chicago and worked as a telephone operator for Bell Company for more than four decades. She never married or had children, but she enjoyed beach vacations and driving her small blue car touring all over the country.

She loved sports and was kind to everyone she met. She watched every Chicago Cubs game on a TV in her room and also enjoyed watching “MASH” runs. She stayed active, walking several blocks to the grocery store multiple times a week and going on walks to have a look at the neighbor’s dogs. She was known for carrying candies — Heath bars, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and dark chocolate — in her walker.   She shared her candies with everyone she met, but she always kept some for me.

I remembered that afternoon I and one of my patients were figuring out when the meal was served when Hoffner invited us to eat supper with her in the dining area. Since then, we three ate dinner together almost every night and Hoffner started calling me grandson.

One night two months ago, I carelessly told Hoffner over dinner that I was going skydiving in Ottawa. When Hoffner said she wanted to go, too, I thought she meant as an observer. “No, no, no, I want to jump out of a plane,” Hoffner said. My heart sank because I knew clearly what it meant to jump from an airplane at about 13,500 feet high. It might injure her.

But she made up her mind and started to do everything to prepare for it. She went to the doctor to have a check and asked me to make a training plan. With her walker she kept training every day.   

One day, I went to the dining hall and saw her sitting in a corner, sad and alone.

“Jump,” with the order of the pilot, I jumped out of the plan e following her.