Message on a napkin: A true story from Mason City.

The photo is a closeup of a napkin. A common napkin found in a restaurant. The restaurant in question was in Mason City Iowa. The benefactors of the meal were members of the AirCare team of flight RNs, medics and pilots based in Iowa City Iowa, at the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics. The 'team mates' being memorialized were based in Mason City Iowa. The AirCare team from Iowa City had been attending a memorial service for three of their colleagues killed in the crash of their Air Medical helicopter the week before.  The person who left the note on the napkin is unknown. Whoever it may have been they saw the AirCare team, sensed the somber tone around their table in that restaurant, and reached out in sympathy, showing their support in a way we all understand. If food is love, this is a way to demonstrate our care and empathy in trying times. In such times as these, when the media is engulfed in cynicism and harshness, when most of what we see day to day is judgement and a kind of wary distancing from each other, it's awfully good to know that, once in a while, others see our shared grief and respond in purely human terms. It would be easy to brand the gesture a commercial ploy to burnish the restaurant's image, or to dismiss the picture as a clever piece of 'P' shopping. But the note is real, and just because it came from Mason City Iowa doesn't make it less meaningful somehow, just another Midwestern show of sympathetic cliche'. Having spent considerable time in Iowa, I'm compelled, even without seeing the actual napkin or reading lab results as to its authenticity that it is genuine and heartfelt. Just reading it, I know that whoever wrote it meant every word, that the gesture was real.