7/29/05 Noah Benchek is busy.

He is gathering as many of the brightly colored balloons that hover under the ceiling as he can and making them into a giant bouquet. He is doing what any ordinary 7-year-old boy would probably do in the same situation, laughing, running and hiding shyly behind his mom and dad when approached by people he doesn't know.

But Noah is far from ordinary. Last year he was airlifted to Children's Hospital in Los Angeles after being diagnosed with a brain tumor.

"I saw the CAT scan," said his grandmother, Ellie Krock. "It looked like the whole left side of his brain."

He underwent extensive radiation treatment and endured having to eat his meals through a feeding tube for more than six months. It wasn't much of a summer. This year promises to be much different.

These days Noah is cancer-free. He still has to make trips south for quarterly MRIs but he is able to go to the beach whenever possible, is anxious to start first grade in the fall and enjoys playing soccer. But this weekend he and his family will be setting off on a trip that promises Noah his first close up look at something he is really fascinated by - a real volcano.

The trip was made possible by a partnership of the Make-A-Wish Foundation, Sunset Auto Center General Motors Corporation, and United Auto Workers. It will be the second wish that the automobile dealer has helped to grant, said owner Cheryl Bedford.

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"We've been involved for about five or six years," Bedford said. "It's extremely gratifying."

Noah, his younger brother Luke, his mother and father Kristina and Robert Benchek, and grandmother will all leave for Hawaii on Sunday. The family will spend five days and four nights on the island of Kona. He and his family will take a helicopter tour (a little more fun than Noah's last trip when he was airlifted to Los Angeles), ride in a submarine, attend a luau and pay a visit to Volcanoes National Park, and of course take some time to swim, relax and lie on the beach.

"They can't wait to go to Hawaii," Robert Benchek said of his two young sons. "They are really looking forward to swimming in the ocean and the pools."

Noah now has a volcano-shaped cake and piles of presents, including a camera and photo album to record his trip, beach mats, crayons, a special Make-A-Wish hat and pin and plenty of other things that will come in handy on a beach. He watches anxiously as Bedford cuts the cake as she makes sure he gets a big piece of what is actually white cake with strawberry filling but could be lava if you imagined hard enough. Although he said earlier he hoped the cake was going to be chocolate, it doesn't seem to bother him as he pops a piece into his mouth, sits down on a beach mat on the showroom floor and looks up at the balloons overhead.

The Make-A-Wish Foundation grants the wishes of children with life threatening medical conditions. To refer a child to Make-A-Wish Foundation, call 1-888-899-9474.

Shelly Ingram can be reached at 736-2313, Ext. 105.