Day 5

Bobbi Larson was fixing breakfast for her family when her cell phone rang.  She picked it off her lap, answered it on speaker, lay it on the counter and said, “Bobbie Larson, can I help you?”

Bobbie was a software engineer for Jackson Aerospace.  The company worked on projects for the military and NASA.  At twenty four the five four one hundred fifteen pound brunette married a guy she met at a bike race. He was helping with communications. She was a competitor in the race, her third year of racing.  She finished second in the women’s competition just ten yards behind the leader, a thirty old who had been racing mountain bikes on steep and rocky Pennsylvania trails since she was seven.  They had exchanged the lead in seven times in the last four miles.  Jeremy saw the awesome finish with both of them giving it everything and watched Bobbie congratulate the winner and walk away crying.

He walked over and introduced himself.  Sixteen months later they were married.  A pair of healthy twin girls were born prematurely nine months later and a brother joined the family in just less than two years. Jeremy was a High school Chemistry teacher and thus had a fixed schedule that allowed Bobbie to travel for her work.  The job had its up sides, it allowed her to work about half of her time at home.  It seemed perfect.  With the family responsibility she stopped racing.  It somehow wasn’t important as it was before.  Her interests changed some but she still liked the biking environment so she got her ham radio license a month after the wedding.  She and the family went to some races as spectators but most were spent working with Jason as communications. Sometimes they manned one position, other times they covered two and were separate.  The three children followed as hams by their twelfth birthdays and started participating.

The week before the twins’ fourteenth birthday Bonnie got off the scales in the bathroom after her shower and complained about the fifteen pounds she had gained over the last fifteen years and vowed to lose them in the next three months.  She left the office on a business trip at noon.  About one thirty Jeremy got an emergency call at school.  Bobbie had been in an accident at the airport and was in the hospital.  The caller indicated she was badly injured but not in a life threatening situation.  She had been pinned between two cars in a parking garage.  Jeremy took the kids from school to the hospital.  On the way he called her mom.