"A light came on"

Eight months ago, Darryl Boyd was a homeless drug addict, dying from AIDS and alienated from his family.

Today, Boyd has been invited to say grace at his mother's Thanksgiving table, his restored place symbolic of how his life has turned in the past year -- nearly six months clean from drugs, off the streets and responding well to AIDS medication. Most of all, it represents what Boyd sees as the restoration of a mother's belief in her son's redemption.

For all these things, he says, "My gratitude and the things I am thankful for are beyond measure."

It was only back in March that Darryl Boyd, who grew up in Haughville and joined the Navy, was impatient for AIDS to kill him.

For three years he had wandered the streets of Indianapolis. For two decades, he had been tormented by a pain too grievous to speak of, and for all that time he had become enslaved by the pills, the booze and the cocaine that helped him escape, if but temporarily.

So, he swallowed a bottleful of pills. And then he swallowed some more. It was his third suicide attempt in 20 years.

Despite his best efforts, Boyd lived. And he woke to the realization that his life could be better; he just needed help. "A light came on," he says.

Boyd entered another drug treatment program -- his 11th -- through the Department of Veterans Affairs. It cleaned out his system. But what really transformed him this time, he said, was the courage to confront the demon that had been tormenting him.

In the Navy, he admits now, he was the victim of what he describes only as sexual trauma, the details of which he has only begun to share with his psychiatrist. Boyd's willingness to admit his pain is what he says makes this rehab trip different.

After he landed in the hospital for the failed suicide, his AIDS was full-blown. His 6-foot-5 frame had melted away to 160 pounds. He thinks he contracted the disease amid the haze of drug use and reckless prostitution he used to sponsor it.

Today, after months of regular medication, Boyd, 44, says the HIV is virtually undetectable in his bloodstream. He is back up to 230 pounds. And he is participating in a new committee of the homeless and formerly homeless that will offer local nonprofit groups advice on how to help people on the street. Eventually, he wants to become a social worker.

For now, Boyd considers himself in transition, living temporarily with his mother, Margaret Sessions, who had tearfully shut the door on him before, which he now sees as a blessing.

He knows some of the relatives who will share the turkey are hesitant to believe his recovery is real.

"It is an opportunity for me to make amends and give back to show my appreciation for everything they have done for me," he said, "even when they put me out."

--- Robert King

Surviving the tornado was just the start

Debi Sanders still can't shake the images.

From her second-story apartment at Falcon Point, she saw the wind whipping debris into a funnel and the sky turn green.

She heard the screams of her friends and neighbors scrambling to round up their children and flee to shelter as the air filled with a freight-train roar.

Sanders and her neighbors would survive the night of May 31, but six months later, Sanders, 45, is deeply marked by the tornado that she thought had destroyed her whole world.

She lost her home, and almost all her belongings. She also lost all that she had tried to accomplish as manager of the apartment complex.

She had worked 60- or 70-hour weeks to clean up the place, befriending residents as she drove out the criminals and restored a rancid pool.

Still, Sanders is thankful, she said, for what that night gave her: a greater appreciation for those things that can't be bought or replaced, such as spending time with her family and sharing deep conversations with her boyfriend, who rode out the storm with her.

She still drives by the Falcon Point complex near Post Road and 42nd Street, sometimes pulling off the road to look at it and remember.

"I felt like I lost my world," Sanders said. "Everything I'd worked so hard for the last four or five years, it was gone."

Since late October, when she finished tying up loose ends at the complex, which has remained closed since the storm, she has been out of a job. She plans to find another in bartending or managing another property; she has an interview next week for a property management position.

Today, Sanders lives in a four-bedroom home on the city's Eastside with her boyfriend and her two dogs. It is decorated with fashionable furniture, rugs and knickknacks. The only remnants of her old life at Falcon Point are the photographs she salvaged and a framed newspaper front page from the day after the storm, which adorns the wall of her home office.

She is moving on, but slowly.

She will celebrate Thanksgiving this weekend with one of her sisters, two brothers and her mom. With tears welling in her eyes, she emphasized that this year, it's especially important to tell everyone she loves them.

"Maybe God shows us the need to step back and appreciate what he gives us (because) as fast as you get it, it can be taken away," Sanders said. "What took me three years to do was gone in 15 minutes."

--- Francesca Jarosz

Putting cancer in its place

Jeannine Meyer usually spends Thanksgiving in the kitchen, sweating over how to keep all 12 dishes hot while she whips together the gravy at the last minute.

But this year, the family is dining out. Meyer hasn't the energy to cook her traditional feast.

She has lung cancer, the serious Stage 4 kind.

So Meyer; her husband, Bob; her 13-year-old son, Bobby; and the whole Meyer clan of grandparents and siblings will be together today, but someone else will do the cooking.

The chemotherapy has left her hair thinning, her skin itching and her body bothered by a host of other annoyances, but Meyer expects to be the most thankful person at the table.

"I was trying to make a list of things that I'm thankful for, but there are so many things," said Meyer, 55. "I'm thankful that I'm alive right now."

After experiencing neck pain and some strange slanting of her fingernails -- a symptom of pulmonary problems -- she saw a doctor. Eventually, X-rays revealed a tumor on her right lung.

The final word came on the last day of 2007: cancer, advanced.

"It was devastating," said Bob Meyer, the man she married in the early 1970s, divorced and married again 15 years ago.

Jeannine and Bob are convinced that a positive attitude, lots of loving support and her physician, Indiana University's Dr. Nasser Hanna, are a good prescription for survival. Her tumor has shrunk to half its size.

So on this Thanksgiving -- featuring dinner for 12 at Hollyhock Hill, a family-style restaurant on the Far Northside -- Jeannine Meyer is counting some real blessings: the strength for long walks; supportive bosses who cut her some slack when she's tired; parents, still alive in their 80s, who will be with her at dinner today; and a husband she knows will never leave her side.

--- Robert King

Holiday pressure? That's nothing

Dick Ulring is thankful that he is still a virtual unknown, a man who avoided the kind of monumental blunder that could catapult him to national humiliation.

The pressure started for Ulring two years ago, rising steadily to a blood-pressure-spiking pinnacle this summer. He was the man responsible for designing and installing the lifeline of the new Indianapolis International Airport: its baggage-handling system.

Consider some of the great failures in aviation baggage history, such as the system Denver unveiled in 1994 that tossed and shredded bags, or the mayhem this spring at London's Heathrow when a new system lost thousands of bags.

The Indianapolis system offered plenty of pitfalls: two miles of conveyors, complete with $1 million scanning machines to identify problem bags.

Then there was the $15,000 a day it might cost his company, Siemens Airport Logistics Group, if he missed his deadline.

Pressure.

But at 69 and on his last job before retirement, something more was at stake: the desire to end on a positive note, to leave the record unblemished, to spend afternoons golfing with no regrets.

The final test was the airport's Nov. 11 opening. "You always have that gnawing stomach, that uneasy stomach," Ulring admits now, "when it comes to that first opening day."

But the baggage system came through just fine. Ribbons were cut. Speeches were made. And, most important, passengers got their bags.

He went home that night just as anonymous as he had been that morning.

So, dining at home today in Camby with his wife and a friend, Ulring will give thanks. "I would say," he pauses, thinking back, "it is probably the best Thanksgiving in the last three years.''

--- Robert King

With their soldier home, life is good

Life at the Williams home on the Far Eastside has been calmer since Nov. 11. That's when Angielena Williams' husband, Sgt. 1st Class Ross Williams, returned from a nine-month deployment in Iraq to once again be a father and a husband.

Now the Indiana National Guardsman resumes his duties as the enforcer -- and the comedian when things get hectic in the household of six kids, ages 7 though 17.

For Angielena, he is a sounding board and workout partner who helps her relax while she balances duties as a day-care owner, full-time college student and CPR instructor.

But for the better part of a year, he has been missing from the family, his place taken by longing and worry.

"I missed his jokes, his family stories," said his 14-year-old daughter, Taylor. "He makes us feel together as a family."

In Iraq, Williams served in the brigade's headquarters, helping soldiers and civilians pursue a college education.

Angielena worried about her husband constantly, unable to sleep soundly without him. A car door slamming at night would trigger thoughts of a bomb, and she'd rush an e-mail off to make sure he was unhurt. She kept his picture as a screen saver on her computer and kissed it every night before going to sleep.

Ross Williams will spend most of today at Camp Atterbury, helping other returning soldiers with demobilization. But Angielena said that even having him a short distance away makes life feel normal again.

"Just to have him in the house for a couple hours before the kids go to bed makes all the difference," she said. "It really takes a huge weight off."

--- Francesca Jarosz