In the summer of 2006, Glen, then about fifteen years old, was horribly burned in a gasoline explosion. He was treated first at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond but was soon transferred to the Cincinnati Shriners Hospital burn unit, one of the very best burn treatment centers in the nation. We first met him when we brought him home to Petersburg,Virginia, that same year. In the years since, Childrens Flight of Hope has made it possible for him to return to Cincinnati for the many surgeries that have restored function to his gruesomely burned body. Today, 7 December 2009, Childrens Flight of Hope once again flew Glen to Cincinnati, but this was a special day for all of us, for Glen, his mother who has made those trips with us, and for those of us who have come to know them both. This will be Glens last surgery and it may be his last trip with us. Glen has grown up. Later this month he will turn nineteen. He has a full-time job, at which he hopes to save money for college. And his doctors at the Shriners Hospital have decided that he has ceased to grow as vigorously as he did as a teenager and so they can now remove the last of the skin they left intact to allow for his grown when he was first injured.

I can remember Glen on some of those early flights a shy, somewhat awkward young boy coping with the pain and disfigurement of a gruesome injury and the self-consciousness of adolescence. I remember the first time he really opened up when another one of our pilots Sid Graham and I took Glen and his mother to lunch at the Skygalley, the small restaurant at Lunken Airport. Whereas I had always been reticent to engage Glen, Sid drew him and his mother out in his gracious manner. We sat outside on the patio and for the first time Glen talked to us about his plans to buy a car, his plans to finish school, and even exhibited some of the nave boastfulness that should be a normal part of adolescence. Ever since, Glen and his mother have seemed like old friends and we have become part of his family story.