Everyday Heroes by Jodi Lea Stewart

A few years ago, a man named Scott came to repair the dishwasher in a house we were leasing. He was bowed in the shoulders and wore knee-high therapeutic socks.

He walked slightly lopsided and breathed heavily with effort as he bent to check out the appliance. His knees hurt. His hands were swollen with neuropathic pain. Over the course of the next half hour, Scott shared some of his life with me in a voice clear and strong.

It didn’t take long before I realized a bona fide hero was standing in my kitchen.

More about that later.

Scott told me he was worried that he was losing weight and that his 6’2” frame seemed to be shrinking. His strength wasn’t what it used to be either. Not long ago, he said, he could wrestle a fat, new refrigerator from the back of his truck and install it single-handed. Now he uses an assistant – Frank – to help with that kind of physical stuff.

Lately he had been experiencing a lot of tiredness after the three kidney dialyses he receives each week.

“Used to, I’d be down for a few hours, then get right up and start working again. Now I’m tired for hours afterward,” he said.

Scott happens to hold the record for the longest living male to receive kidney dialysis in the state of New Mexico. When I met him, he’d been doing it every week for 22 years.

The dialysis is the result of his taking bullets to the abdomen during the Vietnam war. Lying alone and bleeding in the jungle, he did something that saved his life.

“I stuffed my wounds with leaves,” he told me. “Now you’d think I’d get infected, but the leaves I used turned out to have a penicillin-like effect. How about that?”

How about that, indeed.

Beautiful like a hero

I’ve been thinking a lot about Scott since I met him that day. He inspired me. I have a feeling he inspires everyone he meets. He’s called a workaholic by his coworkers, and he’s a tad vain about his appearance. 

I told him he was looking good, and I meant it.

Come to think of it, Scott looks just like a hero to me, and that’s a beautiful thing to behold.

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The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a hero as a person (or animal) who is admired for great or brave acts. 

I think heroes are something more. I believe they are icons on which we project our greater selves. Deep in our psyches – maybe in our DNA – we want to believe that if pressed, we will rise to heights of courage and greatness. Heroes make us aspire to flee mediocrity and pursue the impossible. 

 Some of my heroes:

Gerard Butler!! How did he get in there? Gracious! You just never know where Gerard will show up, do you? 

Who are some of your heroes? We'd love to hear about them.

Blackberry Road is published by Sundown Press and is available on Amazon.

Trouble sneaks in one hot Oklahoma afternoon in 1934 like an oily twister. A beloved neighbor is murdered, and a single piece of evidence sends the sheriff to arrest a Black man that Biddy *a sharecropper’s daughter* knows is innocent. Hauntingly terrifying sounds seeping from the woods lead Biddy into even deeper mysteries and despair, and finally into the shocking truths of that fateful summer.

 The Accidental Road, Sundown Press, debuts September 2019.

A teen and her mom escaping an abusive husband tumble into the epicenter of crime peddlers invading Arizona and Nevada in the 1950s. Stranded hundreds of miles from their planned destination of Las Vegas, they land in a dusty town full of ghosts and tales, treachery and corruption. Avoiding disaster is tricky, especially as it leads Kat into a fevered quest for things as simple as home and trust. Danger lurks everywhere, leading her to wonder if she and her mother really did take The Accidental Road of life, or if it’s the exact right road to all they ever hoped for.

Jodi Lea Stewart was born in Texas to an "Okie" mom and a Texan dad. Her younger years were spent in Texas and Oklahoma; hence, she knows all about biscuits and gravy, blackberry picking, chiggers, and snipe hunting. At the age of eight, she moved to a vast cattle ranch in the White Mountains of Arizona. As a teen, she left her studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson to move to San Francisco, where she learned about peace, love, and exactly what she DIDN'T want to do with her life. Since then, Jodi graduated summa cum laude with a BS in Business Management, raised three children, worked as an electro-mechanical drafter, penned humor columns for a college periodical, wrote regional western articles, and served as managing editor of a Fortune 500 corporate newsletter. 

She is the author of a contemporary trilogy set in the Navajo Nation and featuring a Navajo protagonist, as well as two historical novels. Her current novel, Blackberry Road, is available on Amazon. Her next historical novel, The Accidental Road, debuts in September 2019. She is hard at work on her sixth novel set in New Orleans and St. Louis. She currently resides in Arizona with her husband, her delightful 90+-year-old mother, a crazy Standard poodle named Jazz, one rescue cat, and numerous gigantic, bossy houseplants.