THANKS FOR EVERYTHING.

Byline: DENNIS McCARTHY 

Today, I get to write one of my favorite columns of the year - looking back instead of forward and revisiting some of the very special people we've met this past year.

It's a crazy business, writing a daily newspaper column. You pass through people's lives like you've got a bus to catch - always moving on because there's another deadline looming, and the boss wants to know what you've got for tomorrow.

Today's history, and yesterday's long gone in the newspaper business.

Sometimes, though, you don't want to move on. You want to hang around a column awhile longer, have a few drinks, maybe buy someone dinner because you've barely scratched the surface of their story and personality.

You want to know more about them because they've accomplished something unique in this place where we live and work.

They've made us take a break from all the crime stories, government waste, murder trials and bureaucratic foul-ups that drive us crazy to remind us that sanity and, yeah, even goodness still prevail in our neighborhoods.

So here's to the winners on this day we give thanks. Your stories have inspired us, sometimes made us cry, and always made us feel, which is the most important thing.

Thanks to Patricia Abdullah, a Caucasian Muslim woman who gave Mike Jones, an African-American Christian man, one of her kidneys to keep him alive.

If you believe in karma, believe in this. After it was determined that Abdullah was a perfect tissue match for Jones, the surgery was set for the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 11.

It had to be rescheduled to the 25th because of a scheduling conflict with one of the transplant teams. And a lot of other stuff happened that day, too, none of it good.

``After all that happened on the 11th, it was like maybe this surgery was supposed to be postponed so we could somehow become a sign of hope and healing for the future,'' said Abdullah, of Sherman Oaks.

Thanks, too, to Daniel Abboud - a 27-year-old American with a Middle Eastern last name - who wanted to do something after Sept. 11 to help the families of all the people killed by terrorists.

The owner of Superior Signs in Tujunga raised more money selling T-shirts for the Red Cross disaster relief fund - more than $50,000 - than anyone in this city.

It didn't matter how his last name was spelled or what his ancestry was, Abboud said. It only mattered that he cared.

Thanks to 18-year-old Kristina Lopez, the comeback kid, for showing us how kids with physical disabilities and illnesses should be treated - not by embarrassing and ostracizing them, as Kristina was by her former school when she suffered epileptic seizures, but by embracing them.

The comeback kid's now working as an aide with special-education kids over at Hart Street Elementary School in Canoga Park.

Thanks to grandpa Chuck Schmelter, who we met in April, pounding the streets of his hometown Thousand Oaks every day looking for all the help he could find for his grandson, Nico Bellucci, 5, who suffers from an incurable kidney disease.

The kid's a battler who isn't going to give up, his grandpa said, and neither was he. Nico's still hanging in there, his mom said this week.

Thanks to Burbank's Ernie Simons, a heavy-equipment operator on the Blue Line, for showing us the soft side of some tough guys.

Ernie and his crew rescued a United Nations litter of puppies they found in the Santa Fe train yard in Chinatown, and kept them alive until they found homes for all of them.

And thanks to 49-year-old Rose Espinoza for opening Rosie's Garage so kids living on some pretty tough streets in dangerous neighborhoods have a safe haven to go to after school, someplace they can read and learn.

Thanks to LAPD traffic Officers Richard Sauer and Ernest Jimenez for taking the job home with them last February, when they started a college trust fund for 6-year-old Jamie Lopez, who survived a horrific car crash that took the lives of her mother and sister.

Thanks to 5-year-old Madeline Gomez, who showed us you don't have to see to be an artist. The little San Fernando girl is legally blind, but has drawn the praise of her teachers and doctors as an incredible artist with a photographic memory.

Her mom, Katherine, has been taking Madeline to museums, aquariums and anywhere else where she can expose her daughter to beauty before she loses the remainder of her sight.

Thanks to Los Angeles County prosecutor Mike Noyes for being a hero, and stepping forward to donate part of a lung to save Jessica Plance, a 16-year-old girl he had never met.

And thanks to Lidia Furmanski for putting her own life in jeopardy 60 years ago to hide and rescue Jewish children from the Nazis in her Warsaw neighborhood.

Thanks to Lee Seitz and the Polio Survivors Foundation in Reseda for not giving up their fight with the U.S. Postal Service, which wanted to squeeze them for a few extra cents by charging the group postage for its monthly mailing, even though it qualified for free mailings.

And thanks to some senior men who have made a big impact on this Valley. To 75-year-old Big Ed Rasky for running the L.A. Marathon to send kids terminally ill with cancer to summer camp.

Thanks to 80-year-old Don Shroyer, assistant principal at Broadous Elementary School in Pacoima, for coming out of retirement to help turn around one of the California schools with the lowest-ranking test scores.

And thanks to 81-year-old Cy Battison, who retired this year as camp director of Glendale YMCA's Camp Fox program. He spent 53 years telling scary stories to generations of boys sitting around a campfire.

And thanks to Fidel Ramirez, a gardener, and his wife, Macaria, a production line worker for 22 years, for letting us into their Van Nuys home to show us their wall of fame - the college diplomas of their nine children.

Proud parents, leaving plenty of room up on that wall for the future diplomas of their grandkids, too.

Great people, great stories to remember on Thanksgiving Day 2001.

CAPTION(S):

4 photos

Photo:

(1) Kristina Lopez is now a California State University, Northridge, student and special-education assistant at Hart Elementary.

Evan Yee/Staff Photographer

(2) Ernie Simons, a heavy-equipment operator on the Blue Line, and his buddies at work cared enough to rescue a doomed litter of puppies, care for them and find good homes for all of them.

John Kennedy/Special to the Daily News

(3) Neither race nor religion mattered when Patricia Abdullah learned friend Mike Jones needed a new kidney. She was glad to give him one of hers.

John McCoy/Staff Photographer

(4) Surrounded by her paintings, Madeline Gomez is legally blind, but her teachers say she shows remarkable artistic talent.

Andy Holzman/Staff Photographer