The Drive In

So at the drive in last night on the eve of my 25th wedding anniversary we packed the kids into the old Volvo and watched Scarlett Johansson save the world by shooting a Katniss Everdeen-like arrow into a supersized dinosaur whale to extract blood that will prevent heart disease.  If you ask me, this is a much bigger deal than GLP-1s for obesity, remote monitoring for the elderly, telehealth, and AI combined, it’s a second chance for things like donuts, diners and devil dogs, even if a potentially awkward problem for healthcare investment into companies that rely on people needing cardiac care. By the end of the film, Scarlett did the unimaginable and resisted letting a pharmaceutical company convert the blood into a gazillion dollar blockbuster product, instead deciding to just “give it to everyone.” Which was not predictable at all. “I totally called it,” Jack said as he finished off the popcorn bucket, which in Scarlett Johansson’s Hollywood story is actually now feasible, even encouraged, without a lick of risk of a heart attack.  This Hollywood patient assistance program is sort of a reminder to me that if we’re lucky to find a cure, we ought to just share our good fortune to make a difference, at least what we can, which is sort of the way I think of the 25 years with my bride. Only for me, I’ve probably been the one lucky to have the good fortune that I got lost in Brighton Mass that night back in the summer of 1998, and somehow stumbled upon this girl on a stoop….it’s a mystery to her how I found my way down that driveway, especially all these years later when I still get lost in my own house. As those Indigo Girls once said, maybe all we need is to meet in the middle of impossibility - to take a risk like Scarlett for the greater good - and be equal partners in a mystery…