Freeki Tiki Boat Tours

J.C. Walter Jr. Transplant Center.

Houston Methodist Hospital performed its first transplant in 1963, a kidney, and since then, has built a program focused on providing the highest level of care to patients in need of life-saving transplants. Dr. Michael DeBakey performed one of the nation’s first heart transplants at HMH in 1968. And over the course of its 60-year transplant program, surgeons also performed the nation’s first successful single lung transplant in 1987 and the first heart-lung transplant in Texas in 1985. Houston Methodist was ranked first in the nation last year in volume of multi-organ transplants.

Sometimes serendipitous things happen. Generally we just say, “Humph, that’s odd” and go on. But occasionally we are struck a bit more deeply and our thoughts linger awhile on the two seemingly unrelated events. That happened to me recently in Clear Lake and in Uvalde.

There is a yard in our neighborhood (okay, my yard), where the lady of the house has a small stand from which she hangs a little garden flag pertinent to the season or the current holiday. Sometimes the flags are generic, for fall or spring for instance. Sometimes they are very specific like the Polish flag for Dyngus Day (my heritage, not hers). As I was pulling out of the driveway for a Hill Country trip a couple of weeks ago, I noticed she had put out a new one—for spring I assume. It said “Bloom where you are planted.”

I was amused by the sentiment and thought that, in addition to it being cute, there was probably some great wisdom in that statement. Then I drove on to Uvalde, the first stop in what was to be a trip to Concan, Leakey, Garner State Park, Lost Maples and Bandera.

We began the trip by meeting a group of old friends for lunch, some I hadn’t seen in over ten years. We decided to gather at the square in front of the Uvalde Opera House and then pick our restaurant. As I hiked up the sidewalk (when you are old, even an amble is a hike), I couldn’t help but notice, in a crack in the pavement, a tiny plant struggling to survive in the hot, dry, shadeless area. On closer inspection, I could see it had a miniscule white flower, not more than a quarter inch across. Here, in this most inhospitable location, this little flower fought for food, water and a place to grow. And in that life and death struggle, it still managed to bloom. I thought back to the garden flag in my front yard. What a perfect example of that sentiment.

It wasn’t but a few short seconds later that I realized, “No, this is all wrong!”