Best Helping Hands

When she's not sneaking the peanut butter, this highly trained capuchin is the best caretaker a guy could have.

• Best of America

Dream Car

Minnie grabs a bag of popcorn from the top of the refrigerator and puts it in the microwave. She slips a DVD into the player and, snuggling in front of the TV with Craig Cook, the man in her life, tears open the bag. Making sure it isn't too hot, she places a kernel in Cook's mouth before snacking herself. And so it goes: one for you, one for me, as they watch a movie together.

A typical couple's date night? Not quite. Cook is a 41-year-old quadriplegic, and Minnie is a 5-pound, 15-inch-high capuchin monkey.

Eleven years ago, life was very good for Craig Cook. The handsome former college quarterback was earning a top salary as a design engineer. He owned two homes -- one in Orange County, California, and another in Bullhead City, Arizona, where he, his fianc&ecacute;e and her five-year-old son spent weekends riding their WaveRunners on Lake Mohave. Cook was an adrenaline junkie who loved motorcycles, dirt bikes and his brand-new Camaro convertible. "That was my dream car, a real showboater and fully loaded with horsepower," Cook says.

Tragically, Cook was a passenger in that car on a warm evening in January 1996, when life as he knew it came to an end. An out-of-town office colleague had begged Cook to let him drive the Camaro with the top down. Not used to California's cloverleaf interchanges, he took the ramp too fast and, just as Cook warned him to slow down, careened over the edge. The car plummeted 50 feet and rolled once. At six-foot-three, Cook, wearing his seat belt, took the full weight of the convertible on his head.

Doctors at the Western Medical Center trauma hospital in Santa Ana told him he'd broken his neck. His C5 vertebra -- at the same level as his Adam's apple -- had shattered with such force, shards of bone were driven into his spinal cord. (Amazingly, the driver walked away physically unharmed.) "If we don't operate, you will die," a doctor told the barely conscious Cook. The ten-hour surgery saved his life but could not restore his mobility. He was paralyzed from the neck down.

When Cook came to, he could see that his fiancée was holding his hand, but he couldn't feel it. His doctors told him if he worked hard at physical therapy, he might get some movement back in his shoulders. In denial, Cook told himself he would walk again.