Tim was adopted from Korea, so there was no family member to serve as a donor.

His condition was that his bone marrow had not produced platelets and red cells. It did produce some white cells, but very reduced amounts.

You form a common bond with people who go through the same thing you do.

People tend to think of Brisbane as a sleepy, sub-topical place. I don't know. It's like Baltimore or something. I don't know. You would hear the family dramas going on behind closed doors.

Christmas is the marriage of chaos and design. The real sound of life, for once, can burst out because a formal place has been set for it. At the moment when things have gotten sufficiently loose, the secret selves that these familiar persons hold inside them shake the room...An undercurrent of clowning and jostling is part of the process by which we succeed finally in making our necessary noise: despite the difficulty of getting the words right, of getting the singers on the same page, of keeping the ritual from falling apart into the anarchy of separate impulses. From such clatter--extended and punctuated by whatever instrument is handy, a triangle a tambourine, a Chinese gone--beauty is born.

The horn is perhaps the least efficient instrument of the brass family, but it produces the most beautiful sound of all.