Hope’s Daughters. R. Wayne Willis
or children flying multicolored kites. The patient in the other bed would just close his eyes and enjoy imagining those scenes in his mind.
One night the man next to the window died. As soon as it seemed appropriate, the other man asked the nurse if he could be switched over to the bed by the window. She moved him, and soon after she left the room he managed to raise himself on one elbow high enough to peek over the window sill and get his first look at the park. What he was startled to see was a blank wall.
That afternoon he learned from the nurse that the man who had described such wonderful things outside was blind and could not see even the wall. She suggested: “Perhaps he was just trying to help you not get too discouraged.”55
Logic without imagination can be cold and sterile. Take it from a genius named Einstein: “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
February 25
“Humans are born soft and supple. When dead, they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant. When dead, they are brittle and dry”—Lao Tzu
The great Chinese philosopher urges us to take a critical look now and then at our routines. As familiar and comfortable as they are, they can become deadly, as someone suggested by calling habits “graves with the ends knocked out.”
That is certainly true in marriage. Many years ago my wife and I enjoyed a play in which the wife blindsided her husband on their twenty-first anniversary with the confession that two things about him had over the years come to irritate her to no end.
First irritation: “You seem so much smaller.” She meant by that how he had fallen off her pedestal. Early on he had been her hero who could do no wrong, but after twenty-one years together she had come to see him as ordinary, hardly bigger than life, and with no surprises left in him.
Second: “I don’t like your nose.” She meant the never-varying way he blew his nose; specifically, one blast followed by three short puffs, followed by folding his handkerchief the same way every time. The wife was chaffing in a marriage that had become a victim of stagnation, monotony, and humdrum.
When my favorite uncle came for a visit, as he rode in my car several times he commented on what an extraordinarily smooth ride it was. I was a bit mystified as to what was going on. Come to find out, his car had gradually drifted out of alignment, but he didn’t notice it until he rode in someone else’s “aligned” car.
To avoid becoming brittle and dry, it might be good sometimes to take a different route home, answer the phone with a different greeting or inflection, or vary the way we blow our nose.
February 26
I’m incapable of watching the conclusion of Mr. Holland’s Opus without choking. Maybe principals should make it required viewing for everyone on the faculty at the beginning of the school year.
In the movie Richard Dreyfus plays Glenn Holland, a gifted musician and composer who believes his destiny in life is to compose one great symphony. He takes a high school teaching job only to pay the bills.
Over the next thirty years, he fails to become famous as a composer. But he does endear himself, through great caring and competence, to hundreds of students.
At the end of the film, an auditorium of adoring former students surprise Mr. Holland with a “This Is Your Life” kind of tribute. One former student who went on to become the state governor delivered this living eulogy:
Mr. Holland isn’t rich and he isn’t famous, at least not outside of our little town. So it might be easy for him to think himself a failure. But he would be wrong, because I think that he’s achieved a success far beyond riches and fame. Look around you. There is not a life in this room that you have not touched, and each of us is a better person because of you. We are your symphony, Mr. Holland. We are the melodies and the notes of your opus. We are the music of your life.
In Camelot, every good teacher at career’s end would get fifteen minutes of fame. Grateful former students would return home, fill the auditorium, use some ruse to lure the teacher there, rise when she enters the room, and give her a standing ovation.
Back in our real world, an “I’m a better person because of you” letter will have to do.
February 27
My first brush with celebrity was Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, who twice sought and twice failed to win the Democrat Party’s nomination for president. When I was fourteen, he and his entourage came into the drug store where I worked as a soda jerk. I remember how tall he was and how long the holder for his cigarette was. He ordered a small coke. His bodyguard gave me a nickel. I rang it up, and that was that. After he left, the pharmacist came over and told me the identity of the distinguished-looking gentleman.
The second celebrity I saw and heard up close was Pat Boone. His little sister Judy and I were freshmen in the same college when, the first week we were there, Pat, at the height of his popularity, came and gave the school a free concert in her honor.
In 1965, Harvey Lavan “Van” Cliburn came to Abilene, Texas, to give a concert. My girlfriend, far more cultured than her hayseed boyfriend from Tennessee, persuaded me to go. Taking with me no appreciation for classical music, I was mesmerized. For the first time in my life, I was aware of being in the presence of true greatness.
In 1958, Cliburn, twenty-three years old, had won the first International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow. Six months earlier the Soviets had launched Sputnik, scaring Americans into believing Russia could destroy us with intercontinental missiles loaded with atomic bombs.
Cliburn captivated the Russians with his performance. Premier Nikita Khrushchev personally approved the judges awarding the prize to an American, saying, “Is Cliburn the best? Then give him first prize.” Time magazine proclaimed Cliburn, “The Texan Who Conquered Russia.”56 Cliburn helped bridge the gap between two mortal enemies. Immaculately expressed music did what fifty thousand nuclear-tipped missiles did not and could not do.
Van Cliburn died February 27, 2013. He taught me the difference between celebrity and greatness.
February 28
Matthew Henry, famous Presbyterian minister in the British Isles three centuries ago, got mugged and robbed. That very night he recorded this prayer of thanksgiving in his journal: “I thank Thee first because I was never robbed before; second, because although they took my purse they did not take my life; third, because although they took my all, it was not much; and fourth because it was I who was robbed, and not I who robbed.”
Hope does not deny facts. Hope construes facts. It puts the facts in perspective.
Patricia Neal, Academy Award-winning actress, finally in her eighties got her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Her life had some great setbacks—the death of her oldest child at an early age, three massive strokes, a car accident that almost killed her, a philandering husband, and a divorce. When she got her star, she said: “In the past year I received two very good parts: a new shoulder and a new knee. They both are working beautifully. I am an actress, and I will take any good part as long as I can stand up. And when I can no longer do that, I will take them lying down.”57
Neal illustrates how hope has a pinch of defiance, a Snoopy-like “curse you Red Baron!” pluck and swagger in it. Hope, she also illustrates, employs humor to laugh in spite of and at the facts.
Some of the facts, like economic ones and natural disasters and human cruelty, are grim. But what Matthew Henry and Patricia Neal demonstrate is that facts do not have the last word. Spiritual realities like hope and gratitude do. They trump facts.
Dorothy L. Sayers wrote: “Facts are like cows: if you look them in the face hard enough, they generally run away.”
February 29
I accompanied my wife, in April, 2009, to Denver, Colorado, where “Great Teachers for Urban Schools”