So here's my family's story:on a day like today, you might feel exhilarated, like you've been just shot out of a cannon at the circus and even invincible.
Don't ever forget that incredible feeling.
But also always remember that the moments we have with friends and family, the chances we have to do things that might make a big difference in the world, or even to make a small difference to the ones we love.
All those wonderful chances that life gives us, life also takes away.
It can happen fast, and a whole lot sooner than you think.
In late March 1996, soon after I had moved to Standford for graduate school, my dad had difficulty breathing and drove to the hospital.
Two months later, he died.
I was completely devastated.
Many years later, after a startup, after falling in love, and after so many of life's adventures, I found myself thinking about my dad.
Lucy and I were far away in a steaming hot village walking throught narrow streets.
Threre were wonderfully friendly people everywhere, but it was a desperately poor place.
People used the bathroom inside and it flowed out into the open gutter and straight into the river.
We touched a boy with a limp leg, the result of paralysis from polio.
Luch and i were in rural India, one of the few places where polio still exists.
Polio is transmitted fecal to oral, usually through fithy water.
Well, my had had polio.
He went on a trip to Tennessee in the first grade and he caught it.
He was hospitalized for two months and had to be transported by military back home, his first flight.
My dad wrote, then, I had to stay in bed for over a year, before I strated back to school.
That is actually a quote from his fifth grade autobiography.
My dad had difficulty breathing his whole life, and the complications of polio are what took him from us too soon.
He would have been very upset, that polio still persist even though we have a vaccine.
He would have been equally upset that back in india we had on our shoes from walking through the contaminated gutters that spread the disease.
