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Watching him whisk my mother and her luggage along with acrobatic ease, Curtis looks like an airport skycap rushing to a connecting flight.

But this is one journey nobody books in advance — from the broken hip ward to the rehab wing. Nor would she have picked this particular gown for traveling. Baby blue is not her color. Plus, it opens in the back.

"Don't get any ideas," Mom warns over her shoulder as the orderly rolls the wheelchair into an elevator.

By now, it's almost a week since she slipped on the attic stairs, enough time for us to get her makeup from home, call her hairdresser and think past the misfortune of this predicament to some of the lucky breaks.

There are, for example, these nurses, doctors and therapists. Not to mention this guy Curtis, who I'm watching push my mom's chair with one hand, and with the other, pull her cart of belongings without so much as tipping over a flower vase.

But the greatest gift was the one my brother gave her last Christmas — a cell phone she swore she would never use. As she lay splayed at the bottom of the attic stairs, she remembered that useless little gadget in her purse, on the floor a few feet away.

She dialed my sister's number and, with none of the irony of the situation lost on her, delivered the line she's parroted to us a hundred times.

Only this time, she meant it.

"I've fallen. And I can't get up!"

The second-chance people

No, we never know what's around the corner. That can be a good thing, as it was for our old friend Myra Ann Dean, whose hitch with the Peace Corps in Suriname was profiled in this space a couple of Sundays back.

A number of readers said Myra Ann's story of reinvention gave them "hope," and also writing in was the former UNCG college friend who snapped the 1972 picture of Dean with a boa constrictor outside the old Science Building on Campus Drive.

"I remember that day. She had this snake, and everybody else was afraid of it," recalled Sarah Gabbay, laughing. "Feminism at its worst. I never thought I'd miss Nixon."

In the meantime, coincidentally, came this e-mail from another former Greensboro resident who is seeing the world with the Peace Corps.

Roland Russoli Sr., Habitat's former volunteer director here, was profiled in this space in December, a year after his son Andrew was killed on a Marine Corps mission in Iraq.

The father was based in Mongolia at the time and has now arrived in West Africa, where this week he had just unpacked his computer and a carton of liquor (for cuts and bug bites). In a pensive moment, Roland was reflecting on the sheer unpredictability of life, which seemed so planned out when he was a third-grader back in Allentown, Pa.

"If I would have gone to a fortuneteller at the Allentown Fair and been told that I would go to war in Vietnam, have dozens of occupations, multiple marriages, multiple divorces ... then at the age of 60 spend two years in Outer Mongolia ... and follow that to a dust bowl in West Africa," he wrote, "I would have curled up into a fetal position and would have probably stayed in that fortuneteller's tent forever."

No time for regrets, he says: "Life's too short not to play it forward."

Take wing with butterflies

Finally, a new charity benefit promises to take off: It's "Picnic Under the Stars" this Saturday evening at All-a-Flutter Butterfly Farm, 7850-B Clinard Farm Road, High Point.

With proceeds to Groceries on Wheels food and friendship program for the elderly poor, the picnic features a children's comedian, butterfly program and movie. For details, visit http://www.all-a-flutter.com or call 988-8899.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lahearn@news-record.com.