A True Story

Overheard at a holiday party this week....

Her: (warmly) Hi!

Him: (somewhat hesitantly) Er, how do I know you?

Her: (a trifle irritated) You're my gynecologist.

Me: (complete silence - too many punchlines for words!)

What I Needed to Know I Learned In My Child’s Kindergarten

You know those quintessential kindergarten teachers you meet in picture books? They are always ready with a hug and a song, an endless supply of delightfully messy projects and deliciously nutritious snacks. They have a block area, a dress-up area, a big bucket of junk, and a welcoming lap. They have a reading corner crammed with colorful overstuffed pillows. They understand the importance of play. Mary Jo is one of those teachers, and then some. Her reading corner is a refinished antique claw foot bathtub which overflows with the comfiest pillows anyone’s ever snuggled into. That tub is where my daughters learned to love reading.

Because my girls attend a school with multi-age classrooms, their kindergarten teacher stayed with them for first and second grade as well. My daughters were born just over three years apart. Three years, three weeks, and two days to be exact. There isn’t any correct period of time between having children. Every age has its advantages and disadvantages, but the particular gap separating my daughters came with one unforeseen bonus. It allowed each of them to have the incomparable Mary Jo for three years straight. It presented me with six consecutive years to count my children’s blessings.

The result was six years of essential development in which my daughters built dynamic structures out of blocks, painted sensational pictures, created mysterious potions involving borax (mysterious because I am still not clear what borax is ever used for outside of potion-making), learned how to cooperate with others, and went on nature walks to discover the greatest joys in the simplest things. The ultimate result is that my girls love learning and, even in their relative advanced ages of twelve and nine, can’t wait to get to school every day.

Shortly after my youngest said her tearful goodbyes to Mary Jo at the end of second grade, she received a sweet letter from her teacher conveying beautiful wishes written personally for my daughter’s future, wishes which expressed knowledge of who my child is as no one else could have articulated. Truly touching sentiments which brought tears to my eyes that I will treasure forever.

Accompanying the letter was a newspaper article Mary Jo had found. It was about kids and summer time, how middle-class children today are formally scheduled for such a giant portion of their summer vacations – swim team, camps, classes on every subject under the sun. When they are home, they spend an inordinate amount of time on the internet and with video games instead of playing baseball in the sandlot. The author mourned the carefree days of her youth, playing in the street until nightfall and being allowed to get bored. This is a tricky issue.

I live in a large city but it is not just urban dwelling parents who worry about our children if we let them out of our sight. We know instinctively that they need to have the freedom to run and make their own mistakes and figure out the pecking order in the neighborhood. We also know that very real dangers may be lurking around the corner. I have a hard time allowing my children to walk the dog for more than a couple of blocks without taking a cellphone with them. That is not the world I grew up in, nor the one I want to live in.

I have rarely seen my children more happy than on a family vacation to Siesta Key, on Florida’s west coast. The beach was wide and mostly empty, of people and obstacles. We all loved time on the sands before sunset. My wife and I strolled and enjoyed the time to connect that only vacations can bring. Our girls ran wild for what seemed like miles. Naturally, or perhaps environmentally cautious, they would turn to check in once in a while, but essentially they had the freedom of the whole beach. It was a magical time and one we find hard to duplicate at home. The story serves as a good reminder to take more vacations, but also brings up an important question. How can we find a balance between protecting our kids and giving them space to grow up to become independent thinkers and adventurers?

A wise friend once told me that she thought it was important that children learn an essential lesson in life: how to be bored. The last time we moved house, while my wife and I were packing and organizing in the weeks leading up to the move, the kids got into the habit of watching more television than they were used to. From our point of view, it kept them quiet and out of the way. For them, it gave them some respite from the chaos.

After we moved to the new house, we didn’t get around to plugging in the TV for a few weeks. We were all busy creating our new spaces. Something else unexpected happened. My daughters re-discovered the joys of finding their way out of boredom without a television. They made a city out of moving boxes, they played cards together, they painted, they got to know the new kids in the neighborhood, they read books, they spent their time doing all the wholesome things we imagine kids did before the dawn of TV. When we eventually did connect the television, they were already in the habit of finding other things to do. They still don’t watch too often. They have discovered some child-friendly websites which keep their attention on the computer screen more than I would like, however they continue to create, to play, to read, and to run in the sprinklers.

In the summertime, my family tries to find a balance for the girls between camps, classes, and pure unadulterated downtime. Even I wouldn’t expect my children to entertain themselves for three whole months, time that was once set aside for them to help me bring in the harvest. However I do think they need to learn how to pull themselves up out of the well of boredom.

In the article that Mary Jo sent me, the author made a great point about how unstructured downtime allows the creative spirit to flow. Neale Donald Walsch makes the same point in his popular book Conversations with God. If we’re always busy, or spending our free time in front of a screen, how can we let the underlying seeds of our creativity begin to poke their heads into the light? Are we raising a generation devoid of poets, writers, actors and songwriters if we deny our children the space to find their way out of boredom?

As a part-time writer who has a full-time teaching job and a family, both of which require great chunks of my time, I struggle with these very questions. It’s not that I cannot make the time to write, but I find myself with very little downtime in which to simply cogitate, to let the ideas flow. If I structure my life so that I am continually busy, constantly keeping occupied by the list of things I have to do, I will never learn to find my way out of boredom. I will minimize the development of my creative abilities. The artist in me yearns for that kind of time. The responsible adult hates to give it up.

There is infinite wisdom in Robert Fulghum’s famous essay All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. One of his recommendations goes like this: “Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.” I know Mary Jo agrees with this sentiment.

As teachers, she and I have talked about the difference between the work we are paid to do and the work done by our friends and relatives in the so-called ‘rat race’. My work was once dismissed by someone close to me who claimed that “those who can do, and those who can’t teach.” Baloney. Not only have I worked alongside incredibly talented teachers who could be outstanding artists, managers, engineers, and stockbrokers, I have personally trained former architects, lawyers, soldiers, and salespeople to become teachers. They wanted to contribute to the common good. The way Mary Jo describes it, those of us who teach may not be turning a profit, but we are affecting the future by molding young minds.

I know that Mary Jo has been instrumental in teaching my girls to live what Fulghum calls a balanced life. Under her guidance and tutelage, they learned some and thought some and drew some and painted some and sang some and danced some and played some and worked some every single day. They continue to do so. With the tragic cultural shift towards standardized testing and away from arts programs in our public schools, much of what Mary Jo teaches every day has been tossed by the wayside. It shouldn’t be. It is through the kind of learning that goes on in Mary Jo’s kindergarten, first, and second grade class that our collective future lies.

I want my children to know facts. I want them to know how to balance a checkbook, read the smallprint, speak a foreign language, and learn the lessons of history. I also want them to exist in the world as artists. I want them to create their way out of boredom, out of a problem, and out of the box. I want them to be independent thinkers and adventurers. I want them to work well with others, to find the joy in learning, and to love life.

I know that they have received an outstanding start at the hands of an unbelievably talented educator and friend. I am filled with awe and gratitude.

Science Fair

My sixth grader is beginning her first science fair project. It’s a vast undertaking, a mammoth enterprise incorporating multiple pieces and parts. There are forms to fill out and permissions to procure. Her teacher has given her a substantial heap of instructions. Rubrics abound. She feels excited and ready for the job. Not me. It brings up all my insecurities.

Science teachers scare me. At our school, we have wonderful science teachers. All women. Delightful people. They are talented and engaging teachers; they behave in public; you could even invite them out to dinner and they wouldn’t embarrass you. But there is something that sets me on edge.

It may be that they are just way smarter than I. They know the periodic table by heart, they can discuss the intricate details of oxidation and photosynthesis, they are immune to disgusting smells, they know the difference between Newton’s law of universal gravitation and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and they are comfortable handling creepy animals.

One of the science teachers at my school keeps two tree pythons in a large glass tank in her classroom. She actually lets her students touch these insidious creatures. The kids encourage the snakes to crawl around their waists and necks and they even bring them outside at recess. There is nothing worse than minding my own business, supervising kids at play, nursing my steaming cup of coffee, and thinking about how much more fun it would be to be lying on a beach in Mexico, when some irksome middle schooler ambushes me with a deadly reptile, forked tongue inquisitively probing my outer ear. I think the science teacher puts them up to it.

I was never very successful at science at school. I think it was an early sign of my unwillingness to follow rules. I was taught that science required me to stay within the lines. It bade me adhere to strict principles, abide by specific guidelines. It forced me to acknowledge that certain laws were not negotiable. The liberal artist in me couldn’t deal. I wanted to create, to experiment without a hypothesis, to throw a whole bunch of hydrochloric acid into the beaker and see what would happen. My English and history teachers loved me. I always failed science tests.

My science teacher’s name in elementary boarding school was Mr. Parsons. He had one of those bushy mustaches which were so fetching back in the seventies. Mr. Parsons was a former policeman, a fact which clearly made him uniquely qualified to teach fourth grade chemistry. He used to hurl blackboard erasers at my head if I talked in class. The wooden kind. He was a sadistic son of a gun. Maybe this is why I didn’t learn very much science. I think Mr. Parsons was hired because the headmaster had a thing for his wife’s alabaster skin and winsome smile.

In high school, my chemistry teacher was Mr. Packard, he of the throbbingly large nose and the insipidly monotonous voice. Chemistry under his guidance only existed in formulas, never in action. I copied down pages upon pages of molecular formulas, but don’t recall touching any equipment with my hands.

Mr. Hinge taught physics. After one year, he gave it all up to become a priest. I never got the chance to ask him where he stood on evolution.

My biology teacher was Dr. Upshaw. While not a medical professional, he took it upon himself to perform exploratory examinations on all incoming freshmen. Why I am not quite sure, but one was trained not to ask such questions in English boarding schools. Dr. Upshaw was a prober and pronounced the letter “s” as “sh”. “Looshen your troushersh” is a phrase I will not readily forget.

But that is all in the past. Thirty years later, I am learning to become open-minded about science. My daughter and her lab partner are encouraged to think outside the box, to design their own experiments based on what they find interesting. They are conducting a study of whether exercise affects short-term memory. This is cool stuff. I’m hoping it will shed light on the fact that the longer I go between visits to the gym, the harder it is to find my car keys. I have been assuming that it was just age, but there may be method behind my madness.

The budding scientists are developing an excellent understanding of the scientific process which will set them in good stead as they discover the wider world. They are holding themselves accountable and having to keep excellent records, traits from which I could learn as tax day rolls around each year. They have to discuss their results and be open to the possibility that they might be wrong. Dr. Upshaw needed a strong dose of that. They also get to design a really eye-catching poster – with colorful accents, intriguing vocabulary, appealing pictures, and attractive graphs.

My daughter’s science teachers are doing amazing work. Science is teaching her to think for herself, to use her resources wisely, and to be inquisitive about her world. Where was that when I was in school?

Over The Moon - part 2

On Tuesday November 25, the Denver Post published my essay 'Painting Pottery' under several headlines - all of which are more fun than my own! - "A dad fires up his inner artist", "Inner artist wins out over party pooper", and "Dad's feet of clay lead to pottery bliss". I have learned that there are people whose job it is just to write headlines. Thanks, guys! In addition, the folks at Ceramics in the City, the pottery studio where I had my breakthrough moment, were happy to be mentioned in the paper. They have linked both the Post essay and this blog on their website. I am pleased to be able to return the favor here.

It feels good to be getting out there. I am very grateful for my two families, Laura, Emma and Leah, and my Stanley BPS family, for being so excited for the publication and for all the amazing support.

The links to my Denver Post essay and Ceramics in the City appear at the bottom of this blog. Scroll down...

Enjoy!

What Would The Dog Think?

My friend Craig and I are different in many ways. I’m a dog owner. He doesn’t even have a hamster. He’s Jewish. I’m an intermittent agnostic. I’ve got a vehicle that can carry large items. He has a Volkswagen sedan. He’s got an unfortunate sense of timing. I’m more cautious. Random and fairly extraneous pieces of information, I am aware, but they all coalesced quite memorably this week.

Craig called me one day to ask if I could help him with an event he was hosting at his synagogue. His neighbor was lending him some long tables. Could he borrow my van and my time to help him haul the tables? “Absolutely,” I said, “I’ll be over after dinner tonight.” Even though I was feeling a little under the weather and my nose was congested, I was happy to help and glad for the opportunity to meet. I had some news about my writing career that I wanted to share with him.

After work, I drove home. While my daughters wrestled with homework and my wife concocted something delicious in the kitchen, I took the dog for our daily constitutional around the block. My dog’s name is Polo. He’s small, white, fluffy and very friendly. When you meet my dog, you understand that I have girls. My boss told me that I must be extremely comfortable in my manhood to be seen with a dog like this. Indubitably.

I live in an urban area. Both the city ordinance and the morality of being a responsible dog owner dictate that my jacket pocket is loaded with orange bags, the ones in which my newspaper is tossed upon my porch each morning. Polo and I walk. He pauses to deliver the unmentionables. I scoop, tie a knot in the bag. We walk on. There is an unwritten code of silence between us. I don’t question his choice of locale. He doesn’t ask why I am so eager to collect his contributions. Once or twice I have been caught unarmed, bagless. Fearful that I would be seen and reported by the neighborhood watchdogs, Polo and I scurry home, seize a bag, and return to the scene of the crime to remove the evidence, to eliminate his eliminations, so to speak.

I share this because, as Craig and I drove away from his neighbor’s garage with the tables, he started telling me how amused he was by an incident that he had witnessed a few minutes before. A dog was doing his business, smack dab in the middle of Craig’s front lawn when he pulled up to park. It was after nightfall. His headlights were on. Both dog and owner were caught in the glare. The owner quickly performed the scoop-and-tie maneuver and the pair went on their slightly shamefaced way.

Craig naturally got to wondering if the owner would have disposed of the goods if she hadn’t been surprised in the spotlight. Fancying himself somewhat of a post-enlightenment philosopher, Craig reflected on the further ramifications of the situation. If the owner was an inconsistent scooper, if she sometimes picked up and sometimes didn’t, what would the dog think? Would he feel rejection? Would he worry that some of his offerings might not pass muster? Might some of them not meet his owner’s exacting standards? Would it be possible for him to somehow fail or succeed, based on the scooping actions of his owner? As his listener and friend, I worried, truly agonized, about the kinds of things that Craig thought about in his spare time.

As one might expect, this line of conversation soon exhausted itself and I began to share my news with my friend. Craig is an excellent listener and a wonderful fan of my work. As I was relaying my good fortune, he seemed uncharacteristically distracted and inattentive. Something in the darkness was bothering him. “Excuse me just a minute, Steve,” he interrupted. He’s also very polite. “Do you mind if I turn on the light?”

“Of course,” I replied. Craig flipped the switch to reveal the biggest wad of dog excrement that could possibly cling to the underside of a shoe.

“Oh, shit!” he yelled out. And I couldn’t help but wonder, what would the dog think?

A Black Man in the White House

Whether you voted for him or not, the election of Barack Obama is without question a watershed moment in the country’s history. Throughout the long months of the campaign, the so-called race factor was consistently downplayed. While African Americans registered and turned out to vote in record numbers, both the Obama campaign and prominent leaders in the black community were quick to stress that the candidate’s race was not and should not be a major issue.

Fast forward to the hours immediately following Obama’s victory. The mood among all his supporters was euphoric. The celebration in the black community in particular was ecstatic. African Americans danced in rapture in the streets. Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, such as Jesse Jackson and Congressman John Lewis, wept openly. Oprah became, in her words, unleashed. Whoopi whooped and Maya Angelou expressed graceful thanks. There was an outpouring of emotion and grand proclamations of the immense significance of the election. A black man was coming to the White House.

On the weekend following the election, my local newspaper carried a story by Wil Haygood of the Washington Post. It touched on the history of blacks in the White House. In 1901, “President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington, head of the Tuskegee Institute, to meet with him at the White House. Roosevelt was careful not to announce the invitation, fearing a backlash, especially from Southerners.” Certain southerners found out and the response was swift and filled with hate.

According to Haygood, the first African American to work in the executive branch was E Frederick Morrow who was an administrative officer for special projects in the Eisenhower White House, appointed in 1955.

But someone had beaten him to it. Many blacks worked in non-political jobs in the White House. One of them was Eugene Allen who was hired as a butler in 1952. For $2,400 a year, Gene Allen polished silver and washed dishes. In the bowels of the President’s official residence, he plugged away at his menial job for thirty-four years. He felt proud to serve his country’s leaders.

Rewards came. Not only did Gene and his wife Helene shake the hand of every President he served, there was the special occasion in the mid-eighties when they were invited as guests to a state dinner. Nancy Reagan called Gene about the dinner, asked him how preparations were going, and then surprised him by inviting him and his wife, not to work, but to sit as their guests alongside world leaders. It was an honor they would never forget. Helene fondly remembered drinking champagne that night, champagne no doubt that her husband had stored.

Gene’s birthday was on the same day as Gerald Ford’s. When the Fords celebrated the President’s birthday, Betty always made sure Gene’s was mentioned as well. The Allens have fond memories of the Carters and the Kennedys. Through some of the darkest times in US history and through some of the best, Gene Allen was at work for his President. From the early fifties until the mid-eighties, there were some tough times being a black man carrying trays down the halls of power. Segregation, violence, protest marches and assassinations. Gene and Helene Allen saw it all.

Slowly, over the decades, they saw a few more African Americans creep into the influential inner circles, culminating in Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice’s consecutive appointments as Secretary of State. In Haygood’s words, “the butler remembers seeing both Powell and Rice in the Oval Office. He was serving refreshments. He couldn't help notice that blacks were moving closer to the center of power, closer than he could ever have dreamed. He'd tell Helene how proud it made him feel.”

And now this man. Obama. More than twenty years after Gene Allen stacked away his last wine glass, he and Helene were on the verge of seeing an African American man ascend to the highest office in the land. Some said he’d be the most powerful man on earth. Interviewed for the Washington Post, their excitement was palpable. Now in their late eighties, Gene and Helene prepared to get dressed up on Election Day and cast their vote for one of their own. How proud that would make them feel.

The day before that momentous day, Helene had a morning doctor’s appointment. Gene rolled over in bed to wake up his wife. She did not respond. He walked over to her side, but still she would not wake. After sixty-five years, the marriage had come to an end. On Election Day, Gene voted alone.

Helene never made it. But I know that, somewhere up there, this woman, who had shaken the hand of eight Presidents, knows who won. She knows that the baton has been passed to a new man, an African American man. There is a black man in the White House. For Gene and Helene Allen and for me, how proud it makes us feel.

Thanks to Wil Haygood. His article A Butler Well Served by This Election appeared in the Washington Post on 11/07/08 and is the inspiration for this story. Post photographer Kevin Clark’s photo of Gene and Helene appears here.

Handshake

Heroes come in all shapes and sizes. Family members, celebrities, teachers, historical figures, community leaders.

For me, growing up in southern England in the 1970s, my heroes were the stars of the Arsenal football team as they made their historic title runs – Brady, Macdonald, and others. Action shot posters covered my bedroom walls. In my early twenties, as college opened my eyes politically, I read voraciously the works of those fighting apartheid: Gordimer, Woods, Coetzee, Malan, Mphahlele, Paton. I met a couple of them – Donald Woods when he came to speak at my university and Es’kia Mphahlele when I taught his grandsons in Denver. I remember celebrating the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 as I had celebrated a few months before the last-minute goal for Arsenal which brought home the English championship. As we grow and change, so do our heroes.

I recently had the great honor of meeting my latest hero. A gentle and wise man in his seventies, he looks a lot like the Father Christmas of my childhood. He is blessed with a full head of white hair, a downy beard, a portly profile, a warm smile, and a bountiful heart. A storyteller, a gifted writer who describes the world as I wish to see it. For him it is a place of goodness and laughter, and generosity of spirit. He is quite possibly the single most influential voice in my own writing.

Robert Fulghum may still be best known for the essay that propelled him into the public eye - All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. It remains a wonderful philosophy by which to live. He has since written eight best-selling books. A former cowboy, minister, and teacher, Fulghum now divides his time between Moab, Utah, Seattle, Washington, and the Greek island of Crete. Lucky fellow.

He also travels for speaking engagements where, last month in Lakewood, Colorado, I was fortunate to hear him reflect on his latest musings, share some wonderful new stories, and re-tell some old favorites. I especially enjoyed the one about Norman, the little boy who single-mindedly decided he was going to be the pig in the play of Cinderella. His wise and experienced teacher allowed him free reign and Norman stole the show. During the course of the evening, Fulghum had his listeners laughing and crying; he snapped a photograph of the audience – to inspire him during the lonely moments of the writing life; he even had us singing the words to Itsy Bitsy Spider to the tune of Beethoven’s Ninth. A delightful couple of hours.

Most memorable and inspiring was the opportunity to meet the author following his talk. The usual line of book buyers and autograph seekers formed in the back of the hall. I too joined the line. I had no clue what to say to the man who was expecting to sign a copy of his latest book. What could I say to someone I knew so well, through his reflective writing, yet not at all?

As the line in front of me got progressively shorter, I had a brief moment of star-struck panic. I am a sensible, even-keeled schoolteacher in my early forties. Fulghum is a self-described old geezer, a moderately well-known author who writes about the everyday. This was not the latest pop sensation confronted by hordes of adoring fans. I wondered about buying one of his books to give myself a prop, something to talk with him about, but I owned all the titles for sale that night. Now second in line, I worried that I would be speechless, or worse, mumble something inane.

My turn came. The author reached out to sign the book I hadn’t bought. He looked up at me. “I’m Steve,” I said, as calmly as I could. “Nice to meet you, Mr Fulghum.”

“Nice to meet you too, Steve,” the baritone voice of wisdom responded. Well, that didn’t buy me a lot of thinking time. A pause, enough time to tell my hero the only thing that really mattered. “Thank you.” I briefly told him that I was a teacher and a director of children’s theater, that I too had encouraged my own Normans to find their place in the limelight. And I thanked him for his incredible body of work and for being the writer with the most influence over my recent commitment to write and my decision to publish my work online.

Fulghum’s response? He reached his hand over the desk to shake my hand, to thank me for doing what I do, for inspiring children, and for pursuing my art. I was honored and touched by his gesture and his words. The renowned author, who had just spoken to hundreds, whose books have sold in the millions, wanted to shake my hand? It was the response of a humble and gracious man.

Mr Fulghum, I hope you have an opportunity to read this one day. You made my day and gave me further encouragement to follow my passion. For that, you are my hero.

Painting of Robert Fulghum by Dimitris Katsigiannis from www.robertfulghum.com

Over the moon and out to the universe

I am coming to understand something that wise people have known for eons. It is our responsibility to make our intentions clear to ourselves and to put them out to the universe. In turn, the universe moves to help us reach our goals. In mysterious ways, it brings the right people to us at the right time. With no perceived effort, the path is revealed and answers become clear.

I have been writing with intention for only a few months. With a couple of exceptions, my essays have been a closely guarded secret. However I am beginning to consider myself a writer and I now know that I want my writing to reach a wider audience.

It is Monday. Last Friday I took a leap. Without knowing how it would be received I created this blog. On Saturday I let my friends in on the secret. On Sunday, I received many positive comments and one suggestion from a friend that I send my work to a features editor at the Denver Post. On Monday, today, I was asked to submit a piece of writing to the paper. There are no promises to publish, and I have to cut my work to size, but I am over the moon.

I have faith that the things that are meant to be will happen. To my readers, thank you for your support and encouragement.

Good Sportswomanship Carries The Day

I’m what you call a part-time sports fan. I don’t subscribe to cable TV. My weekends are not given over to endless football games. My entertainment dollars are more often spent at the bookstore or the theater, than at an arena. The wretched excess and ridiculous salaries of professional sports appall me. Yet I do spend time watching the Olympic Games every couple of years and I do enjoy the occasional baseball game.

I moved to America, to Denver, just before the Colorado Rockies were born. The baseball team, not the mountain range. As I was immersing myself in my new home and a new culture, the city of Denver was being introduced to professional baseball. And I was swept along in the excitement. Everybody was a fan. The stadium was sold out for every game for years. The team broke every attendance record in the books. It was a fun time to be a casual fan. Go to a game, sit in the sunshine, eat hotdogs, and cheer, surrounded by 50,000 of your closest friends.

However, like all new toys, the luster wore off, the results never quite lived up to the promise, and the city turned its attention to other matters. Not me however. I still went to my handful of games a year, listened on the radio every night while washing the dishes, and checked in with the box scores in the morning paper.

It was on one of these forays into the sports pages in the spring of 2008, that a short paragraph, parked in a corner of an interior page, caught my eye. There was a small picture and the following headline accompanied by a few words: “Good sportsmanship carries the day” (Denver Post 5/1/2008)

I like headlines like that. Such a refreshing change from the usual doom and gloom. I read on. In a women’s college softball game between the universities of Western Oregon and Central Washington, senior right-fielder Sara Tucholsky, hit a home run. As she made her turn at first base, she failed to touch the base. Turning to make a second attempt at touching it, she twisted her knee, fell to the ground, and was clearly unable to complete a tour of all the bases, a requirement to score the home run.
How could an experienced college player fail to complete such a basic task, I asked myself. After a little research, I discovered that Sara Tucholsky was not one of the stars on her team. Over her entire college career, she was a .153 hitter. Most players would get kicked off their team for such ineptitude. Over the last four years, Sara had a hit every six and a half times she came to the plate. That’s like you or me showing up to work for half the days we are supposed to. She had never hit a home run, not once, not in a game, not even in practice.

And here, in her last season, she finally muscled the ball over the outfield fence. Not only that, two of her Western Oregon teammates were on base in front of her, meaning this was a three-run homer, a dinger of monumental proportions which would give her team the lead in the game and ruin the last chance the Central Washington team had of winning the conference and making the playoffs. Sara Tucholsky was so surprised at herself, so ecstatic at watching the ball sail over the fence, that she failed to touch first base.

Realizing her mistake, she made a quick turn, felt something in her knee pop, and crumbled to the dirt. Her first base coach couldn’t help her because softball rules state that if her coach touched her she would be out. In pain and humiliation, she crawled back to first base.

Her head coach ran from the dugout to confer with the umpires. The rules were clear. Sara would not get the home run unless she touched all four bases. She could not be helped by her coaches or teammates, and if they substituted a runner for her, she would only be credited for a single, for the one base she had reached. Her coach did not know what to do. In one of her last games, Sara Tucholsky had hit a home run, was finally the star of the show, and she was sitting in agony in one corner of the diamond.

Into the picture comes Central Washington first basewoman Mallory Holtman. Mallory was everything that Sara wasn’t. The big star on her team, the all-time home run hitter in the Great Northwestern Athletic Conference, the player with the most to gain by her team winning the championship. Mallory knew exactly how to solve the situation successfully.

She checked in with the umpire and inquired whether they was anything in the rules about an opposing player helping an injured home run hitter around the bases. There wasn’t. Putting aside her team’s playoff aspirations, Mallory Holtman, along with shortstop Liz Wallace, picked up the Western Oregon hero and carried her to second base. By the time they got there, they were laughing. Mallory asked Sara which leg was injured; told it was the right one, she and Wallace gently lowered Sara down so she could touch the bag with her left leg.

Moving on to third, the whole crowd was roaring. Players and coaches from both teams were standing in support. Rounding third, and heading for home, the applause was immense. Players and spectators were in tears. The five foot two Sara Tucholsky, clad in red and white, being carried to her ultimate goal, the only time she was ever going to reach it in her life, by the kindness and compassion of her opponents. She touched home plate to a thunderous ovation, tears streaming down her cheeks. When asked later about missing the playoffs, Holtman, the star who already had all the home runs, said, “In the end, it is not about winning and losing so much. It was about this girl. She hit it over the fence and was in pain and she deserved a home run.” Amen to that.

Mallory Holtman deserves a place in the annals of sports history. Who won or lost this game may not be remembered. What will be remembered is the grace and willingness one person showed in helping another in need, a magnanimous heart reaching out in selfless concern for another. This act will keep Mallory Holtmans’ place in the sun.

****

A few months later, I was reminded again of this story. I was at home watching the Games of the XXIX Olympiad from Beijing. The Olympics Games are the epitome of good sportsmanship. Or at least they used to be, before big money got involved. In 1908, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic movement, wrote the creed of the Olympic Games: “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well."

In the first part of the twentieth century, true amateurs matched strength, skill and wits against each other in good-natured competition and retired to the bar afterwards to share stories and a beer. Try telling that to the athletes of today, where a gold medal can lead to seven figure endorsements and the multi-millionaires of the professional leagues around the world are in it to win, and to pad their pockets. Corporate sponsorship and network ratings are king. Winning is paramount, along with getting one’s face on a box of cereal.

Enter Dara Torres, an American swimmer from Beverly Hills, California. Dara is no ordinary member of the U.S. swim team. This is her fifth Olympics. She has medaled in her previous four. The mother of a two year-old, at age 41, AGE FORTY ONE!, she is warming up for her last day of racing.

Now I know all about 41; I am uniquely qualified to tell you what 41 looks like and feels like. I can even tell you what it means to be a 41 year old swimmer. I turned 41 about twelve weeks ago, a couple of months after Dara Torres. I eat a respectable diet and exercise in the pool fairly regularly. But my back hurts, my hair is abandoning me at an ever-increasing rate, chopping wood for the fire does a number on my shoulder, I snore, I have occasionally been known to drool on my pillow, and my doctor checks things in places he never did before. When I do swim, and I try to get in a decent number of laps of the pool a few times a week, it is taking me longer, with greater need for breaks. Bottom line, I am fatalistically resigned to the fact that I am no longer twenty and my body wants me to slow down.

Dara, she is competing on the world’s brightest stage with women less than half her age, in the flower of their youth, with girls who were not born when she first dived into Olympic waters. In fact, she was competing in her third Olympic Games in the year that one of her present-day opponents, an Australian, was born. And, in truth, this could have been her seventh summer games. She began her Olympic career in Los Angeles in 1984 with a gold medal. She continued in Seoul in 1988 (a silver and a bronze), Barcelona in 1992 (gold), missed Atlanta in 1996, was a five-time medalist in Sydney in 2000, and then did not participate in Athens in 2004. At the ripe old age of 33 in Sydney, she could have been forgiven for hanging up her goggles. But now here she is, eight years later, in China’s capital city, going for her eleventh and twelfth Olympic medals – in the span of less than an hour.

With one silver medal from a team relay race already under her belt in these Beijing Olympics, she is now emerging poolside to go for individual gold in the 50 meter freestyle race.

50 meter freestyle. That’s the shortest race there is, the one which requires the most power. The winner has to explode off the blocks and hurtle herself down the pool with no regard to those in the next lanes. Pure energy and speed. The eight contestants emerge knowing that Dara Torres qualified with the fastest time. They are intensely focused. They are silent, determined, one objective in mind: winning. They are concerned about no one but themselves and the goal they have worked a lifetime to achieve. They take their places by the starting blocks when Torres leaves her station and walks to the side of the pool. What is going on? This is peculiar to say the least, and certainly unprecedented. Approaching one of the race officials, Dara is requesting a delay of the race.

One of the swimmers, Therese Alshammar from Sweden, has not come out to the pool deck with the other competitors. Dara is informing the judge that the racer’s super-thin, new-age swimsuit ripped while she was warming up. She is back in the changing room desperately trying to change into a new suit and take her place in the race. Would it be possible to hold off the race for a couple of minutes to allow the Swede to participate? With a worldwide TV audience and a tight schedule, the answer is unclear. But the experienced American, one of the most decorated athletes in Olympic history, persists. She does not take her position on the starting block until all eight finalists are present and ready.

It is one thing at my daughter’s school field day, to make sure everyone is ready to take their marks and get set. Usually the teachers are the ones who notice and hold up the race. But this was a top contestant at the highest peak of international competition, in the gold medal final of the Olympic Games, making sure that everyone was included. It is not the winning that counts, but the taking part. And Dara Torres was going to make darned sure that everyone took part.

As for the race, Torres did not win gold. She took silver, beaten by the smallest of margins: one one-hundredth of a second. Upon seeing the results, her face broke into the most beautiful smile. She had done her best, beaten her personal fastest time and the Olympic record to boot. Her comment following the race? “I’m totally thrilled. I realized I shouldn’t have filed my nails last night. But it’s my best time ever. As much as I wanted to win, I’m very happy I got the silver”.

Alshammar was thrilled too. Thrilled to participate, thrilled that a 41 year-old mother, a medal favorite, an experienced competitor who was supposed to be focusing on herself and her own race, was looking out for others.

The other American swimmer in the final, nineteen years Torres’ junior, was quoted as saying: “To put things in perspective, she (Dara) was talking about childbirth in the ready room. She thought swimming was tough, but childbirth was harder.” Twenty minutes after collecting her silver medal on the podium, Dara Torres was back in the pool helping her teammates to another silver medal in the 4 x 100m medley relay, her third silver medal in the Beijing games. After the closing ceremony, she noted that some of the other swimmers were going to Bali or backpacking to Paris. They asked her what she was doing. “Well, I leave here at 10:30 Tuesday night and Wednesday I’m taking my daughter to school and I have a list of school supplies to buy.”

My guess is that that is one lucky little girl. She has a mother she can look up to. Not for all her accolades and medals, but because she is teaching her to share, to be empathetic and compassionate to others, and to enjoy and value participation over winning. Just like Mallory Holtman, she has been taught the lesson that being a good sport counts for more than being good at sports. We can all learn from this spirit.

I wonder if it’s not a coincidence that these stories are about women. If male athletes at the college or Olympic level had been present under the same circumstances, would the results have been the same? The caring male in me wants to think that they would be, but somehow I just doubt it. Would Sara Tucholsky, playing in a men’s baseball game, have been left at first base? Would Dara Torres, in a men’s event, have ignored the missing swimmer and kept her focus on herself? Probably. Women are competitive athletes, just like men, but they are also more likely to keep one eye out for their fellow athletes and to keep compassion in their hearts.

“The most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle.” Which is more valuable – winning or caring? In the game of life, that’s an easy one.