Saturday, November 3, 2007

FLOWER MOUND – Twenty-five years stretches ahead of you like eternity, but when you look back, it still seems unaccountably fresh.

That's how it was when I met former Flower Mound Mayor Gary Pressler for a kind of reunion breakfast the other day. We hadn't spoken since sometime around 1983, but we seemed to pick up the conversation where it left off.

A little context: My first reporting job was for a small-town Denton County newspaper, and my first beat was Flower Mound. At the time, it was a quasi-rural burg of 2,000 on the far side of the line where the suburbs peter out into the sticks.

It was my first introduction to the kind of small-town development battles that play out everywhere. I was as green as the first tender bud of spring, and every road-widening or land-zoning drama down at Town Hall seemed to shake the earth.

A lot of the town's top posts were held by professional pilots, because the titanic D/FW Airport was about the only large employer Flower Mound was close to.

The pilots – witty, charming and worldly – were a glamorous lot, and the most glamorous pilot of all was the mayor, Gary Pressler.

He ran a town council meeting with the same laid-back, all-is-well insouciance as that confident, unseen voice that tells you, "We have now reached our cruising altitude of 30,000 feet." He was the coolest public official I had ever met.

I left the job after two years, leaving Flower Mound to its steroidal growth, its development wars, its new generations of leadership. By chance, I ended up back there a couple of years ago. We moved to Flower Mound (placing us among the 48,000 residents who have been added since I first saw the place) because that's where we found a new-house lot we liked.

Gary never left. He went on flying for American Airlines until his retirement; played golf and went skiing and watched his sons grow up to have kids of their own.

He also came so close to death that he stared into its blank eyeballs and resigned himself to its imponderable finality.

"For years, I had bronchitis," he said. "Then my wife and I went to Colorado, and I couldn't carry a pack and hike."

It turned out he had pulmonary fibrosis – a steady, incurable buildup of scar tissue that ultimately destroys the lungs. It's the same disease that this week killed Robert Goulet, who, at 73, ran out of time as he waited for a transplant.

Gary got his diagnosis in 1997, when he was 53. He had to rely on oxygen sometimes, but he could still hike and play golf. The FAA issued him a waiver to keep flying.

But he got sicker as the years passed, he said. Last August, he was down to 13 percent of normal lung capacity, so sick and close to death that the only hope left was a double-lung transplant.

Anxious weeks passed. He knew better than anybody that people on transplant waiting lists die every day.

On Dec. 4, he called his lawyer to finalize details of his will. When he hung up the phone, it rang again – with orders to report to Baylor University Medical Center to get his new lungs.

My old friend Gary Pressler has been breathing for the last year by the grace of a young man named Christopher, who died after a motorcycle wreck on his way to Red Bird Airport – he was, by surprising coincidence, a pilot.

Gary and two other people whose lives were saved by Christopher's organs will meet their donor's mother next month, on the anniversary of his passing. He wants to thank the family of a man he never met, but about whom he talks with the warmth of close friendship.

"I talk to him daily. I say 'Thank you' daily," Gary said. "I hope he knows what he has done."

After all these years, Gary Pressler is the same cool, confident person I met as a rookie reporter – he effortlessly charmed the IHOP waitress – but he also candidly discusses God, miracles, even death as readily as he once talked about paving projects and zoning plans.

His health is far from perfect; he has had repeated surgeries to cope with dangerous infections. Yet he counts every day post-transplant as a bonus, a gift.

"I'm going to have problems, but we can deal with them," he said. "The pleasure of carrying your grandchildren up the stairs and putting them to bed again makes it worth it."

All these years later, I'm a lot older and more cynical than the tenderfoot reporter who covered Town Hall way back when.

But I'm still a little awestruck by Gary Pressler – by his acceptance, his gratitude, his steady faith.

He's still glamorous. It's just a different kind of glamour.