Chicken Soup Unsinkable Soul Read online

  When Dr. Gibbs wasn't saving lives, he was planting trees. His house sat on ten acres, and his life's goal was to make it a forest.

  The good doctor had some interesting theories concerning plant husbandry. He came from the "no pain, no gain" school of horticulture. He never watered his new trees, which flew in the face of conventional wisdom. Once I asked why. He said that watering plants spoiled them, and that if you water them, each successive tree generation will grow weaker and weaker. So you have to make things rough for

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  them and weed out the weenie trees early on.

  He talked about how watering trees made for shallow roots, and how trees that weren't watered had to grow deep roots in search of moisture. I took him to mean that deep roots were to be treasured.

  So he never watered his trees. He'd plant an oak and, instead of watering it every morning, he'd beat it with a rolled-up newspaper. Smack! Slap! Pow! I asked him why he did that, and he said it was to get the tree's attention.

  Dr. Gibbs went to glory a couple of years after I left home. Every now and again, I walk by his house and look at the trees that I'd watched him plant some twenty-five years ago. They're granite strong now. Big and robust. Those trees wake up in the morning and beat their chests and drink their coffee black.

  I planted a couple of trees a few years back. Carried water to them for a solid summer. Sprayed them. Prayed over them. The whole nine yards. Two years of coddling has resulted in trees that expect to be waited on hand and foot. Whenever a cold wind blows in, they tremble and chatter their branches. Sissy trees.

  Funny thing about those trees of Dr. Gibbs's. Adversity and deprivation seemed to benefit them in ways comfort and ease never could.

  Every night before I go to bed, I check on my two sons. I stand over them and watch their little bodies, the rising and falling of life within. I often pray for them. Mostly I pray that their lives will be easy. "Lord, spare them from hardship." But lately I've been thinking that it's time to change my prayer.

  This change has to do with the inevitability of cold winds that hit us at the core. I know my children are going to encounter hardship, and my praying they won't is naive. There's always a cold wind blowing somewhere.

  So I'm changing my eventide prayer. Because life is

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  tough, whether we want it to be or not. Instead, I'm going to pray that my sons' roots grow deep, so they can draw strength from the hidden sources of the eternal God.

  Too many times we pray for ease, but that's a prayer seldom met. What we need to do is pray for roots that reach deep into the Eternal, so when the rains fall and the winds blow, we won't be swept asunder.

  Philip Gulley

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  A New Day for Dorothy

  As the lady talked, I tried to concentrate on the beautiful room around us instead of on her words. For she was telling me about Dorothy, her eight-year-old daughter, the middle one of her five children, a mentally retarded child.

  ''She's never spoken a single word," the mother repeated. "The doctors say it's hopeless. We took her up to Boston last year and. . . ."

  I fixed my thoughts on the green damask draperies framing tall windows that looked out on Park Avenue. How handsome the whole room was, with its crystal chandeliers, its concert-grand piano, its fresh flowers everywhere. What a lovely woman the mother was, an opera singer whose name I had known even before her letter came asking me if I would consider a job with Dorothy.

  Yes, a lovely womanand especially her love for this little girl whom all the experts said should be put away. The love was the thing to concentrate on. And so while pretending to listen, I closed my ears to the results of reflex tests and encephalograms. In my years of working with retarded children I had discovered that my attention

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  must not go to the lacks but to the special strengths of such children.

  There was strength in each one of them, I was sure. I believe that a little of God lives in every one of us, and that to bring it out is the only job of any teacher.

  Dorothy and I met the next weekend. With me it was love at first sight: this beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed childsurely a very lovely person lived in such a form. For her part, Dorothy only stared at me with inscrutable eyes.

  "It's one of her quiet days, thank heaven," her mother said. "On her wild ones, there's no controlling her." My mind considered those wild days. I liked the sound of them. They told me there was a person heretrapped in whatever chemical or physical prisonbut an individual struggling to be seen and recognized. I told her mother I would try the job for a month.

  It was a hard one from the beginning. In the afternoons I would take Dorothy to a special class for retarded children. She just sat in a chair, staring straight ahead, making no effort to join in the activities.

  "She's unreachable," her teacher told me. "I don't know why they keep sending her."

  I gazed around the room at the other children, all engrossed in simple mechanical tasks, and I silently agreed with Dorothy. What was challenging about fitting a square peg into a square hole? With her parents' permission we stopped going there.

  Dorothy's problem everywhere, it seemed to me, was the nonexpectation of everyone around her. I remember breakfast one morning when the other four children and their nurse had come into town. The others quickly finished their cereal but Dorothy, dazzled by the activity around her, hadn't touched hers.

  "Just spoon it into her!" the nurse cried impatiently.

  "She can eat by herself," I said. "I guess she's just too

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  interested in what's going on."

  "Interested?" Nurse gave a snort of contempt. "She doesn't have any more idea what's happening than that canary! It's a shame she's allowed at the table. She just upsets the other children."

  It wasn't true. Dorothy's brothers and sistersespecially her older sister Marthaseemed genuinely happy to be with her. But even Martha had fallen into Nurse's habit of talking about her ("Dorothy looks nice today." "Dorothy's hair needs combing. Shall I do it?") rather than to her. It was so easy to assume that because she had no words she had no understanding either.

  I understood the problem. I felt it most during our daily walk in Central Park. It was October, warm sunny Indian summer, and Dorothy and I spent hours just walking. When the silence threatened to absorb us both, I sang.

  I started with the hymns I remembered from my own childhood back in England. Dorothy seemed to like the songs, for her feet marched in time to the music and her head nodded rhythmically.

  We also brought sketch pads and crayons to the park. I was fascinated by some drawings I had found in Dorothy's room, a pattern of graceful waving lines, drawn over and over again. What it meant I had no idea, but it certainly wasn't "scribble" as Nurse impatiently called it.

  And so we would sit on a park bench and sketch. I drew trees and strolling people and the loft skyline beyond the park, and Dorothy drew pigeons. I saw the very first time what they were, not perhaps the outside of pigeons like other people draw, but the souls of the birds instead, the very way it feels to be a pigeon. Faster than my eyes could follow, her hand moved: the wings in flight, the thrust for the neck, the self-important walk.

  The golden autumn passed too swiftly. Then a day dawned when the rain streamed down the tall windows

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  and wind rattled the doors. So Dorothy sat on the piano bench beside me as I sang the songs I had sung in the park. I started off with one of Fenwicke Holme's "Songs of the Silence."

  Halfway through this joyous song the miracle happened. One moment I was singing alone, the next Dorothy was singing with me, word for word in perfect tune. Electrified, I played on and on without a break, praying that the spell would not be broken. What a memory! How marvelously her mind had retained the words of song after songfar better than an average eight-year-old!

  I heard someone sob. I turned and saw Dorothy's mother in the doorway, tears streaming down he
r cheeks, unable to do anything but hold out her arms to her child.

  From that moment on, life was different for Dorothy. From singing, it was not far to speaking, although words with music always came first. We made up songs for everything.

  "Water, a washcloth, see what I mean?

  Knees that are dirty will soon be clean!"

  "At the planetarium I can watch the stars;

  There is Venus, here is Mars."

  Other changes took place in Dorothy. Her tensions disappeared along with the frustrations of a spirit bottled up; so did her wildness. The nurse never adjusted to the difference in her and took another job.

  As Dorothy continued to learn I lengthened my stay: just another month until she learned the alphabet. When I left, Dorothy was a poised, self-sufficient thirteen-year-old.

  Normal? Not if normal means "average." All of us have strong points and weak points, and in Dorothy everything is extreme. But this means extremes of knowing and expressing that most of us never reach.

  Those wavy lines, for instance, the ones she drew again

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  and again? When she had enough words she told me, "That's what the wind looks like."

  Dorothy, your eyes see deep down, important things. Your ears hear silent things, your world is set to music. Oh, if God left something out of you, it was only to fill it with himself.

  Frances E. Leslie

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  My Mother's Greatest Gift

  Optimism is a cheerful frame of mind that enables a tea kettle to sing though it's in hot water up to its nose.

  Anonymous

  I was ten years old when my mother was left paralyzed by a spinal tumor. Prior to that, she had been a vital, vibrant womanactive to an extent most people found astonishing. Even as a small child, I was awed by her accomplishments and beauty. But at thirty-one, her life changed. And so did mine.

  Overnight, it seemed, she was flat on her back, confined to a hospital bed. A benign tumor had incapacitated her, but I was too young to comprehend the irony of the word "benign," for she was never to be the same.

  I still have vivid images of her before the paralysis. She had always been gregarious and entertained frequently. She often spent hours preparing hors d'oeuvres and filling the house with flowers, which we picked fresh from the gardens that she kept in the side yard. She would get out the popular music of that era and rearrange the furniture

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  to make room for friends to abandon themselves to dance. In fact, it was Mother who loved to dance most of all.

  Mesmerized, I watched her dress for the evening's festivities. Even today, I remember our favorite dress, with its black skirt and midnight-lace bodice, the perfect foil for her blond hair. I was as thrilled as she the day she brought home black lace high-heeled pumps, and that night my mother surely was the most beautiful woman in the world.

  She could do anything, I believed, whether it was play tennis (she won tournaments in college) or sew (she made all our clothes) or take photographs (she won a national contest) or write (she was a newspaper columnist) or cook (especially Spanish dishes for my father).

  Now, although she could do none of these things, she faced her illness with the same enthusiasm she had brought to everything else.

  Words like "handicapped" and "physical therapy" became part of a strange new world we entered together, and the child's rubber balls she struggled to squeeze assumed a mystique that they had never before possessed. Gradually, I began to help take care of the mother who had always taken care of me. I learned to care for my own hairand hers. Eventually, it became routine to wheel her into the kitchen, where she instructed me in the art of peeling carrots and potatoes and how to rub down a good beef roast with fresh garlic and salt and chunks of butter.

  When, for the first time, I heard talk of a cane, I objected: "I don't want my pretty mother to use a cane." But all she said was, "Wouldn't you rather have me walk with a cane than not walk at all?"

  Every accomplishment was a milestone for us both: the electric typewriter, the car with power steering and brakes, her return to college, where she earned a master's degree in special education.

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  She learned everything she could about the disabled and eventually founded an activist support group called The Handicappers. One day, without saying much beforehand, she took me and my brothers to a Handicappers meeting. I had never seen so many people with so many disabilities. I returned home, silently introspective, thinking how fortunate we really were. She took us many other times after that and, eventually, the sight of a man or woman without legs or arms no longer shocked us. My mother also introduced us to victims of cerebral palsy, stressing that most of them were as bright as we weremaybe brighter. And she taught us to communicate with the mentally retarded, pointing our how much more affectionate they often were compared to "normal" people. Throughout all of this, my father remained loving and supportive.

  When I was eleven, Mother told me she and Daddy were going to have a baby. Much later, I learned that her doctors had urged her to have a therapeutic abortionan option she vehemently resisted. Soon, we were mothers together, as I became a surrogate mom to my sister, Mary Therese. In no time at all, I learned to change diapers, bathe and feed her. Though Mother maintained maternal discipline, for me it was a giant step beyond playing with dolls.

  One moment stands out even today: the time Mary Therese, then two, fell and skinned her knee, burst into tears and ran past my mother's outstretched arms into mine. Too late, I glimpsed the flicker of hurt on Mother's face, but all she said was, "It's natural that she should run to you, because you take such good care of her."

  Because my mother accepted her condition with such optimism, I rarely felt sad or resentful about it. But I will never forget the day my complacency was shattered. Long after the image of my mother in stiletto heels had

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  receded from my consciousness, there was a party at our house. I was a teenager by then, and as I saw my smiling mother sitting on the sidelines, watching her friends dance, I was struck by the cruel irony of her physical limitations. Suddenly, I was transported back to the days of my early childhood, and the vision of my radiant, dancing mother was before me again.

  I wondered whether Mother remembered, too. Spontaneously, I moved toward her, and then I saw that, though she was smiling, her eyes were brimming with tears. I rushed out of the room and into my bedroom, buried my face in my pillow and wept copious tearsall the tears she'd never shed. For the first time, I raged against God and at life and its injustices to my mother.

  The memory of my mother's glistening smile stayed with me. From that moment, I viewed her ability to overcome the loss of so many former pursuits and her drive to look forwardthings I had taken for grantedas a great mystery and a powerful inspiration.

  When I was grown and entered the field of corrections, Mother became interested in working with prisoners. She called the penitentiary and asked to teach creative writing to inmates. I recall how they crowded around her whenever she arrived and seemed to cling to every word, as I had as a child.

  Even when she no longer could go out to the prison, she corresponded frequently with several inmates.

  One day, she asked me to mail a letter to one prisoner, Waymon. I asked if I could read it first, and she agreed, little realizing, I think, what a revelation it would be to me. It read: