From Hidden Brain Media, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is my unsung hero.

I don't know the name of my unsung hero.

I'm 75 years old now. I would like to talk about my heroes.

My unsung hero is the man in the Panama hat on the flight to Boston. As the plane

near touching, and he just says, today you tomorrow me, and I never saw him again.

Today's story comes from Lesher Day.

In 2017, after a long battle with Alzheimer's, Lesher's mother Stephanie passed away. But years before that, before anyone knew about her disease, Stephanie was living a pretty normal life.

She would often make the 45 minute drive to visit Lesha and her two granddaughters

in another part of Connecticut. It was a route she had driven hundreds of times.

But one day, when she was supposed to come to Lesher's house,

Stephanie didn't show up.

You know, the morning passed passed morning turned to afternoon I wasn't

hearing from her and at that time my mother didn't have a cell phone so I had no

way of reaching her. Much much much later in the day, my phone rang and it was my mother.

And, you know, she sounded fine, she didn't sound like she was in any kind of trouble. She was actually laughing. So I said, what happened, mom? I thought you were supposed to be at the house. And she said, oh, I have a story to tell you.

It turns out she was headed in my direction and she just completely missed the highway

exit to my town and she kept going and she must have driven a really, really long time, at least an hour,

because she ended up leaving the state of Connecticut.

And by the time she realized that she was lost, it turns out she was in Rhode Island.

So when she realized she didn't recognize the landscape, the highway signs,

everything looked different, she pulled over to a gap. the And she must have explained to him that she was lost.

And I think it probably in the conversation that she had with this stranger,

...