This I Believe: Life Lessons (9 page)

A Lesson I Hold Dear

Kara Gebhart Uhl

I believe I can be both honest and kind, even when the two seem to contradict.

Honesty often throws kindness for a loop. From telling someone there's food in their teeth all the way to telling someone you don't love them even though you know they love you—honest statements, although said with kind intentions, can often seem cruel.

I was sixteen years old, working at an amusement park, when I met Joe. He was older, had long, blond hair, and drove a motorcycle. The first time he called I smiled so hard my cheeks ached by the end of the conversation. He soon became my first boyfriend.

We dated the entire summer. By early fall he had said, “I love you.” I said nothing. In the battle between kindness and honesty, honesty won.

In the months following our breakup, Joe left love notes on my bedroom windowsill. In college, he called twice. The first time we talked. The second time, he left a distraught voice mail. I returned his call and left a short message. I never heard from him again.

Several years later his sister called with news: Joe had committed suicide, months ago. Shortly before his death, his sister said, he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Joe had written a few lines about me in his suicide note, but only now had she gathered the strength to call.

I thought about the first time Joe called, how my cheeks ached. The ache had returned—but this time, it was something much deeper. Not wanting to cry at work, I ran to my car and sobbed, both the finality of what he had done—and the fact that he had thought of me, even briefly, before he did it—sinking in. Once home, I reread his love letters to me. It was then I wanted so desperately to take back my silence, to tell him I loved him—not in a romantic sense, but in a you-deserve-to-live-a-long-life sense.

A few days later I went to a party on what would have been Joe's twenty-seventh birthday to celebrate his life. I met his family. I looked at old photos. I was intrigued to hear about the man he had become; we could have been great friends.

I hated myself for choosing honesty over kindness, for not writing more, for not calling more, for not doing more. I wasn't so bold as to think I could have fixed him. Rather, I was sad that I had to be unkind and tell him I didn't love him.

Several days later, worried I would never find peace, I reread what Joe wrote to me in his note: “How people should be . . . wonderful and I'm glad I had the time with her—still I have a wonderful feeling inside.”

It was then I realized that Joe thought my honesty was kind. His words to me were his way of telling me so, his way of being honest—and kind—to me.

A year later, on what would have been Joe's twenty-eighth birthday, my husband and I put flowers by his grave. I thanked him for a lesson I'll always hold dear: I can be honest and still be kind.

A Taste of Success

Geoffrey Canada

When I say I believe all children can learn, people sometimes misunderstand.

Because I have been working with poor, minority children in Harlem for the last twenty-five years, some people think I am talking about good kids in bad environments—that if you give a bright kid from a poor family a good educational support system, he or she can succeed. That's absolutely true, but that's not what I mean.

You see, I truly believe that all kids can learn. I believe it, I've seen it, I've even tasted it.

Back in 1975 when I was coming out of Harvard Graduate School of Education, I worked in a summer camp in Ossipee, New Hampshire, for kids with the absolute toughest problems: emotionally disturbed kids, autistic kids, oppositional ADHD kids, kids that everyone—even their parents—had given up on.

One of the things that the staff and I did was cook with the kids. These children didn't know baking powder from table salt, but once they had eaten a warm biscuit out of the oven, smeared with melted butter and a drizzle of maple syrup, they were very motivated to learn how to make more.

Suddenly, kids who couldn't sit still or focus were carefully eyeballing ingredients as we measured them out, learning the simple math and spelling lessons we could slip in along the way. By the end of the summer, I remember parents breaking down and crying when they saw the progress their children had made.

The biscuits, by the way, were delicious, and I can still remember the taste of them today—and more important, I still remember the lesson they taught me: that if we, the adults, can find the right motivation for a child, there's hope for that child's education.

Today I run two charter schools and a series of educational programs, and we work with over ten thousand kids a year. I make sure that every single one of my staff understands that I don't accept excuses about kids not learning. You can't blame the kids. In my shop, if a child does not succeed, it means the adults around him or her have failed.

That's because the kids with the really tough problems are not going to suddenly start teaching themselves. I believe that we adults have to help them, and that starts with looking hard at each child, finding out what excites them, and exploiting that excitement shamelessly.

When I was growing up poor in the south Bronx, one of four boys raised by a single mom, I probably looked as if I was heading nowhere, hanging out on the street with my friends and getting into fights and trouble. And I would have ended up dead or in jail like many of my friends if it had not been for a couple of teachers and family members who saw something underneath my teenage tough-guy act. They spotted my fascination with reading, starting with
Green Eggs and Ham
and later with
Manchild in the Promised Land
, and they made sure I had great books to read.

Because of that, I have dedicated my life to going back into the most devastated communities in America and making sure kids like me don't get written off.

My first taste of success came way back at that summer camp in Ossipee, New Hampshire. It came with a plate of steaming hot biscuits that tasted so good I believe they could have brought a tear to your eye.

A Grace of Silence

Andrew Flewelling

I believe in silence.

Growing up in Wellesley, Massachusetts, my playground was the small, stone church where my father was minister. I remember riding my big-wheeled tricycle silently down the blue, carpeted center aisle and that the perfect refuge for hide-and-go-seek was under the altar cloth, because no one thought I would actually hide there. But it's the cool silence of that stone church that I remember the most. It was heady and gave me life. It was there that I could escape the scrutiny and expectations of being a child of color and the son of a preacher.

My white father brought his black wife and children to this blue-blooded community in 1968. Our world was changing. My experiences showed me that the attainability of the American Dream conflicted with the reality that my black skin seemed to tell people that I was still a threat, that I was base in the eyes of our free and equal society. I learned to step aside when passing white ladies on the sidewalk even while on my way to the elite private schools I attended.

In the silence of my father's church, beneath the sun-illumed stained glass, I could hear my own voice—it told me I was smart and helped me dream a life worth living. Outside the church, the deafening discord of society told me I was a subordinate person and someone to be feared.

As I got older, the noise of our civilization—television, movies, history, religion—began to dictate the way I thought I ought to live my life. Our cacophonous world not only drowned out my inner voice, it told other people how they should feel about me and those who look like me. I'm sorry they saw me as a monster. If only they could tune out the noise to hear my thoughts, the ones at my core, then they might realize how wrong they were about me. And maybe they would be free to see themselves in a new light as well.

When I was twenty-five, I found the strength to rediscover my inner voice. It happened at the bedside of my dying father. In the soft quiet of our conversations, he told me to be my own man. He helped me recognize the noise of the world so I could learn to stop listening to it. He encouraged me to see my weaknesses and illuminate my strengths. For the first time since I was a child, I was able to hear the voice of my spirit. It told me what I value and how I ought to live my own life.

I believe in a silence that allows me to stop paying attention to the world around me and start listening to my heart. In the years since my father's death, I try daily to hear the silence amid the noise of career, children, war, recession, and success. Most days I find it as I walk with my daughters in the woods behind our home. It's the church of my adult life. I tell my girls about the grandfather they never knew and the lessons he gave me. I tell them how he saved my life.

I tell them I believe there is a voice inside all of us that needs to be heard.

Do Talk to Strangers

Sabrina Dubik

I believe that we
should
talk to strangers. By engaging in unexpected, friendly conversation with strangers, our lives can be affected in ways that are extraordinary. I learned this valuable and life-changing experience during my sophomore year of college. I was a student and part-time waitress in Chicago, and I spent most of my time at work engaging in as little “real” conversation as possible. This was not done intentionally, but rather instinctively. Growing up, I was used to phrases such as, “Don't talk to strangers” and “Mind your own business.” As a result, I didn't talk to unknown people at work, beyond taking orders and the occasional weather chat. Similarly, I never struck up a conversation on a three-hour plane flight or knew the name of the woman I rode the train with every day. But the process of keeping to myself ended in a life-changing way.

One night, a little old man, probably in his eighties, came in and sat in my section. I took his order and went on my way. But I noticed that he came in week after week and always sat at one of my tables. Slowly, I began having short conversations with my new guest. His name was Mr. Rodgers, but he insisted that I call him Don. I learned that he and his wife had gone to dinner and a movie every Saturday. Since she had died, he carried on the tradition alone. I began looking forward to him coming in and telling me his movie reviews. I also knew his order by heart: a half of a chicken salad sandwich, a cup of potato soup, and a bottle of Coors Light (which he never finished).

As the weeks went on I began to sit and really talk with Don. We talked about his wife, his days flying in the war, his son who had grown and moved away. Eventually, we began to talk about my ambitions—going to school, my new husband, and the anticipation of my future.

About four months after meeting Mr. Rodgers, I received a call at home from a nurse telling me that Don was in intensive care at Chicago's Mercy Hospital. He was experiencing complications from an emergency heart surgery and had begun to bleed internally. I immediately drove to the hospital to see him. The first thing he did was thank me for urging him to visit the doctor. At first I didn't know what he was referring to. Then I remembered that about three weeks earlier, Don was complaining about chest pains and I gave him the number for a doctor I knew. At the hospital, the nurses asked, “Are you his daughter?” and I replied, “No, I'm his waitress.”

Since meeting Don, I have learned that strangers can become acquaintances, and even friends. I recently found myself really talking to customers at the restaurant. I have had a lot more fun, the time has gone by faster, and I have gotten to know some of the people I see on a regular basis. Don taught me that life can be much more enjoyable if I engage in friendly conversations. After all, I became more than just his waitress. I became his friend.