Fun fact: at the risk of doxxing myself, I can walk today because of the free surgeries I got as an infant from the Shriners. I was born with some pretty fucked up legs, and the Shriners did a lot of work to make them mostly right.
My wife was born in small-town Texas with such a bad eye muscle defect that she would have been legally blind and unable to learn to read. She was walking down the street in the closest bigger city with her family in like 1989, and a doctor that just happened to be developing an experimental surgery (now standard) for that exact condition just happened to walk by and notice. The Shriners facilitated the surgery, and now she's fine.
That's awesome! Super lucky too. Like, what are chances? For me it was pretty standard. My family Dr gave us a referral to them, and they took the case. I don't remember any of the surgeries since they all happened before I was 2.
I don't remember the surgeries but I do remember visiting the hospital in Chicago a few times as a kid. Really cool place, I remember having a lot of fun there, in between getting X-rays.
This post reminds me of his passage in his book in which some kid pushes his daughter on the playground.
He fantasizes about walking up to the kid and pushing him down lol. But I believe at the end he just grabs his daughter and leaves.
"I remember taking my daughter to the playground once when she was about two. She was playing on the monkey bars, hanging in mid-air. A particularly provocative little monster of about the same age was standing above her on the same bar she was gripping. I watched him move towards her. Our eyes locked. He slowly and deliberately stepped on her hands, with increasing force, over and over, as he stared me down. He knew exactly what he was doing. Up yours, Daddy-O — that was his philosophy. He had already concluded that adults were contemptible, and that he could safely defy them. (Too bad, then, that he was destined to become one.) That was the hopeless future his parents had saddled him with. To his great and salutary shock, I picked him bodily off the playground structure, and threw him thirty feet down the field.
"No, I didn’t. I just took my daughter somewhere else. But it would have been better for him if I had."
Oh, his fantasy was actually worse than what I remembered.