Everyday Heroes
From time to time I wonder if I met an everyday hero in the street whether I’d recognise them without their full kit on. Well, would you? Then I realise, I probably wouldn’t. Why? Because I have this caricature image in my mind of a comic book ‘super hero’ whose larger than life and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! How could your everyday hero compete with that? The truth is they can’t. And they don’t.
Fred
Your everyday hero is sometimes craggy, like Fred was. A crusty New Zealand-born bloke who had “a cock-eyed dream that a bunch of Anzacs could wipe out cataract blindness in the world, just like TB and smallpox.” Fred was Fred Hollows, he has a bunch of mates that keep that cock-eyed dream alive. To my mind, he was an everyday hero.
He didn’t stand too much on ceremony Fred, in fact he was a tough old bugger for his cause. There’s that about everyday heroes, they’re gritty and they rarely take no for an answer and they go where no-one else dares to go. They’re stubborn as hell for all the right reasons.
Libby
An everyday heroine could look like Louisa Lawson, Roma Flinders Mitchell, Stella Miles Franklin or Oodgeroo Noonuccal whose actions wove them into the fabric of Australian history. Libby was an everyday hero. She was mine.
I’d like to think that we were like most girls having lunch together. Laughing about this or that. Feeling tempted to flick the stuff that passed for food in the cafeteria at each other but remembering our manners and didn’t. You probably wouldn’t have given us both a second glance. Most people didn’t.
She was my everyday hero because she could make the early chemo-clouded days feel like a day on the beach at Waimarama. Her friendship was like soft sand beneath my bare feet and her balding smile kept us both warm like the sun in summer. You could feel it on your skin long after the sun set.
Everyday heroes can pack a punch like no one else can and I think in reality they’d make your average super hero appear like a wuss. They leave us better people than when they first met us, they do it without even thinking about it. It’s their legacy but they never realise it at the time.
I miss Libby, I miss her everyday smile. It’s what they’re known for these everyday heroes. They give away smiles without so much as a second thought of whether they might get one back in return, it’s how they are. So, everyday heroes, are they a myth or a legend? Depends who you ask. Trust me, if you don’t know what you think now, you will after you’ve met one.
