VillageLivingOnline.com
January 2014
Village Living Volume 4 | Issue 10 | January 2014
Run the villages
neighborly news & entertainment for Mountain Brook
Miraculous match The unlikely story of one gift and two journeys of faith
Leslie Naff and Shaun Pezant stand outside the chapel at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, where they first met. Naff donated one of her kidneys to Pezant last spring. Photo by Madoline Markham.
By MADOLINE MARKHAM
The Village 2 Village run has a new starting line and a new Dry-Fit shirt this year. Find all the run and after party details inside.
Community page 16
Fresh tastes of Italy
There’s a new Italian restaurant in Mountain Brook’s dining scene. Learn more about the Italian-born-and-raised chef’s menu in this issue.
Food page 12
INSIDE Sponsors ......... 4 City ................... 6 Business .......... 10 Food ................. 12 Community ..... 14 School House.. 20 Sports ............. 23 Calendar ......... 26 Faith ................ 27
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Leslie Naff and Shaun Pezant first bonded over music. On Wednesday nights Naff would sits in the chapel of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and meditate as Pezant played the piano. Although they were separated by the length of the chapel, they were more intertwined than either could imagine — closer than a sibling, some could say. “I had never thought about donating a kidney, and if I had a top-10 list [of people I thought I would donate a kidney to], Shaun would not have been on it,” she said. After all, most kidney donors are blood relatives. From the beginning Pezant’s talent for writing and directing music is known to many. Each Sunday, he leads the music for morning worship services at Church of the Holy Apostles in Hoover and the evening contemporary service at St. Luke’s, where he has been a member for 14 years. But for most of his life he chose not to reveal deeper parts of himself beyond his closest circle of family and friends. In his 30s he met his birth mother for the first time and learned she had a genetic kidney disease. As he soon found out, he had it, too. Over the course of his adulthood, polycystic kidney disease gradually caused abnormal growth in his kidneys. He originally thought it would not affect him until he was in his 60s or 70s, but by age
44, his kidney function had started to plummet. Each of his kidneys, normally about the size of a fist, had grown to be the size of a 2-liter bottle of soda. By the end of 2012, he was a few months away from needing dialysis, and about a year from death if he did not receive a transplant. Around the same time, Pezant’s wife, Judy, was recovering from chemotherapy, a mastectomy and radiation due to her Stage IV breast cancer, which was diagnosed in late 2012.
For years, Pezant had only told his closest friends about his kidneys. Even after he knew he needed a transplant and no one he had told was a match, he shied away from telling others. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, there are currently 106,080 people on a national waiting list for a kidney, a number significantly higher than for any other organ.
See GIFT | page 24
2014 Year in preview What to watch for around Mountain Brook this year See page 8
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VillageLivingOnline.com
The former Piggly Wiggly site in Crestline Village is vacant heading into 2014.
2014 will bring the completion of the first phase of Lane Parke development, including 276 new apartment units.
The wooded area at the intersection of Overton Road and River Run will be transformed into a river park by year’s end.
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