Treasury of Joy & Inspiration (7 page)

Life in These United States

The topic
of our seventh-grade science class was the first cloned animal—Dolly, the sheep. We discussed how scientists removed the nucleus from the sheep egg cell and replaced it with the nucleus from the parent cell. The students were fascinated, one in particular.

“This is amazing,” she said. “I had no idea sheep laid eggs.”
Aimee Caruso

• • •

On Halloween,
I've been known to hand out games, pens, pads of paper or gift certificates instead of candy. Last year, noticing a runny nose on one of my trick-or-treaters, I offered a tissue to the child. Just as she was reaching for it and thanking me, another group appeared on the scene. One of the newcomers exclaimed, “Oh, no, she's giving out Kleenex this year!”
Pat Arata

• • •

It was
fall harvest, so my brother and sister-in-law took their grandsons, Brandon and Connor, to visit their first farm. Brandon had never had a candy apple, so Nancy bought one for him.

“Connor, would you like one?” she asked.

“Say no,” Brandon whispered to his brother after taking a bite. “There's a real apple in there!”
Ann Whittle

The Dream Horse and the Dining-Room Table

By Billy Porterfield

December 1994

condensed From
Diddy Waw Diddy

S
ince he
was a kid on the Oklahoma prairie, Daddy loved the sweet, nutty smell of horses and mules. He had grown up working them in the fields. On Saturday afternoons, he had raced horses in country fairs. He liked being in the saddle so much that he used his for a pillow in bed. It took some doing for Mother to get used to that.

If horses were Daddy's passion, working on oil rigs was his job. He was an experienced roughneck on a drilling crew. The money was good while the rig was running. But when a well was finished, the drilling crew had to move on. So our family drifted from job to job through the oil fields of Oklahoma and East Texas.

Daddy staggered drilling work with roustabouting: looking after existing wells and tank farms. The hourly wage was lower than on a rig, but the work was steady, the check came every week, and the company provided a house. These were never fancy, but our family made them home, however short our stay.

It was at one of these lease houses in Texas that Daddy bought War Cloud—a white-eyed, dapple-gray stallion. War Cloud was Daddy's dream horse. Every dawn before work, he spent an hour in the stable, feeding the stallion crimped oats and brushing his coat. Evenings, he road until sunset.

He outfitted War Cloud's stall with every amenity: running water, a salt block, a tack box, blankets for every kind of weather, and a cabinet with all the ointments and pills an ailing horse could need. There was even a fan to keep the flies off.

Mother claimed the stable was furnished better than our company house. She tried to pretty things up for us, making oval throw rugs for the living room and bedrooms. Our floors were so clean you could eat off them. But she still wasn't satisfied. We ate at a table a neighbor gave us. It was rough and unpainted and she kept it hidden under oilcloth. Mother wanted a
real
dining-room suite.

One day she spotted a varnished walnut table and six chairs in the nearby town of Benavides. She could see it at home, covered with a lacy white tablecloth. But the set cost $100. At that price Daddy wouldn't even look at it.
Had the woman lost her mind?

So our tiny mother put her dream aside and went on with her days—kneeling down, scrubbing the linoleum, standing out back at the roller washing machine, or bending over the ironing board, pressing jeans with a heavy steam iron. She smelled of soap and scorched cotton. We used to say Daddy wore the only starched, ironed underwear in the oil patch.

Mother had such a passion for spit and polish and the rightness of work that she was in perpetual motion. But all along, we sensed she was strangely fragile. In the fall of the year Daddy bought War Cloud, she finally pushed her body beyond endurance and came down sick. She ran a fever, had chills and vomited all over the place.

An old Mexican doctor came out from Benavides, bent over the bed and realized that Mother, already run-down and anemic, had eaten something spoiled. “She has ptomaine poisoning,” he said. “It'll be touch and go because her fever is so high and she's terribly dehydrated.”

Mother lapsed into a coma. We thought she was going to die. She came out of it, but then she kissed us all and settled into a strange calm.

Fay Talbot, a neighbor, moved in to keep Mother full of aspirin and liquids. Every morning she bathed her in bed and changed her gown and sheets. Each day, the doc drove the 15 miles from Benavides. He said there was nothing to do but wait and pray.

Daddy slept on the living-room divan. One morning, he went out to the stable, where he thought we couldn't see him, and bawled. This rough man babbled to God, promising anything if his wife would get well. “I'll sell War Cloud, I'll buy that new dining-room suite, if only you'll bring her around.”

We were never quite sure if it was Daddy's prayer, the old doctor's medicine, Fay Talbot's nursing, or her own drive, but Mother did recover. The day she thought she'd get out of bed and try her legs, Daddy slipped out and hauled War Cloud to the stock auctioneer in Benavides. He sold his pride to the highest bidder for $150.

Why he then went out and got drunk has always been a matter of family debate. I lean to the side that has him drowning in self-pity for losing his head and making such a promise to God. When it came down to death's door, he chose his wife over his horse. But now death had been set back, and his wife was on the mend. He might have figured he could have got by without losing either.

Anyway, after stupefying himself, my father staggered to the furniture store and bought the dining-room suite and a lacy white tablecloth. When he got back to the house, we kids—laughing and whispering—helped him set it up. Then we helped Mother out of bed and walked her to the dining room for the surprise.

“Well,” Daddy asked, “what do you think?”

Mother's heart rose. Daddy had done a wonderful thing.

Then her heart fell:
It was the wrong suite.
This tacky furniture was not walnut, it was plain oak, painted blond.

She looked at her husband. She looked at her children. Tears came into her eyes.

“Why, Daddy—my darlings,” she said, leaning onto her husband, “it's perfectly beautiful. I love it.”

Mother used that suite for 37 years, moving it wherever we went. One day, she stripped the painted finish and discovered a lovely natural grain in the wood. Then she stained it the deep walnut she'd always wanted. After Mother died, my sister took the table for her dining room.

We knew Mother was right. Painted or not, Daddy's table was perfectly beautiful.

Quotable Quote

The miracle
is this—the more we share, the more we have.
Leonard Nimoy

His Gift of the Future

By Marc Lerner

June 1995

T
he envelope
bore the return address of a social-welfare center in Seoul. Inside was a thick autobiography written by a Korean War refugee named Yang-chin Chi. He wondered if his story might interest my editors.

I had my doubts, but as I began scanning the pages, I found myself intrigued. Then I came to the lines that hooked me: “I felt incredible frustration, and my determination seemed to fade. It was at this desperate time in my life that I met Dr. Roy L. Thomas.” What followed was a description of an extraordinary friendship that blossomed between a black U.S. Army surgeon and a destitute Korean boy.

I wanted to know more, and that is how I found myself, on a breezy afternoon last summer, sitting with Yang-chin Chi on the patio outside his home in Seoul. “It goes back a long time,” the lanky 57-year-old professor told me, “and some of it is very sad. . . .”

For 13
generations, the Chi family had tilled the hillsides of Gwi-nae, a tiny village on Korea's Yellow Sea coast. It was there, on October 13, 1936, that Yang-chin Chi was born. As a child, Chi sat spellbound while his grandfather, a teacher, entertained him with tales of Asian history.

Chi longed to pursue formal schooling himself. But disease and war conspired against his dream. Chi's father died of tuberculosis in 1945, and by then all the family savings had been used up in his treatment.

Realizing Chi's passion for learning, his mother let him board with another family and attend the nearest school, 20 miles away. But on weekends he trekked home to hitch a yoke to the family cow and help his two brothers and two sisters cultivate the rice paddies.

On one of these trips home, Chi's life fell out from under him. A few hours after midnight on June 25, 1950, Communist North Korean troops swarmed across the border 20 miles away. A full-scale attack on U.S.-backed South Korea was under way.

The Chi
family fled to desolate Soonwee Island, 2½ miles off the coast. They cut a cave into a hillside and scavenged for food and firewood.

By January 1952, North Korean troops had begun forays near Soonwee, and the time had come to flee again. The Chi family joined a throng on the beach and tried to find room aboard one of the boats escaping south.

One afternoon Chi and his older brother, Moon-ok, managed to wedge themselves aboard a packed 20-foot boat, but they couldn't squeeze any more room. Moon-ok stuffed a tiny wad of Korean money into his brother's pocket. “You must go,” he shouted above crashing breakers. “If you survive, at least one member of the family can carry on.” Then he jumped off.

The ramshackle vessel pulled away. Chi could only look back on the beach and wail in sorrow. It was the last glimpse he ever had of his family.

A U.S. Navy
ship took the boat refugees to Korea's southwestern coast. Chi hitched a ride to the city of Pusan, where he found work feeding wounded soldiers. He also took English and math classes at the YMCA.

Alone and afraid, Chi calmed his mind by focusing on his dream.
I have to get a better education,
he told himself.
That will be my goal
.

Chi found further solace in assuring himself that he would one day see his family again. But when the war ended with an uneasy truce on July 27, 1953, the new demarcation line between North and South Korea placed Chi's native village squarely in Communist territory. A journey home was now impossible.

Chi moved to Seoul, where he hoped for more opportunities. He earned his high-school diploma and resolved to somehow get a university degree.
I have nothing left except what I can build with my mind,
he thought. But having little money, he harbored a smothering fear that fate had snatched away his dream.

Chi found work as a houseboy at a U.S.-Korean military base in Il-dong, north of Seoul. There, in April 1955, he watched as a stocky black man with a thin mustache stepped from a jeep and dusted off his captain's uniform. Chi scooped up the officer's duffel bags.

“I'm Dr. Roy Thomas,” the man said in a quiet, soothing voice.

Along the way to the VIP quarters, Dr. Thomas chatted with Chi, asking him about his duties.
I am just a lowly houseboy, and yet he wants to know about me,
Chi thought.

As chief medical officer at Il-dong, the 33-year-old surgeon was burdened with work, yet he always spared time for Chi. When the young man struggled to express himself in English, the doctor encouraged him to write down the words.

Eventually Dr. Thomas became Chi's language coach. He listened while Chi recited English aphorisms: “Poverty saves one thousand times more men than it ruins,” “Every cloud has a silver lining,” “Time and tide wait for no man.” Dr. Thomas used these simple sayings to reinforce the idea that nothing was impossible if Chi worked hard enough.

During lesson breaks, Dr. Thomas asked Chi about his life and was clearly moved. In turn, Chi learned about the doctor's past.

Roy Thomas was born in Youngstown, Ohio, to a struggling family that had migrated from Greenwood, Mississippi. His parents had had little schooling and placed the highest premium on education. Young Roy followed their counsel, completing medical school on the Army's tab. When called to Korea, Thomas left behind a wife and two children—an eight-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl.

A few months after they met, Chi sought out his new friend. “Captain Thomas, I'll never make it to university if I continue to live in this remote area,” he said. “I must find work in Seoul.”

The doctor agreed, putting a hand on the young man's shoulder. “If you work hard, Mr. Chi, I'm sure all will turn out well.” He made Chi promise to send his address in Seoul.

Back in the capital, Chi worked as a waiter in an Army officers club. But the pay was poor, and he soon found his spirits slumping.
How can I ever save up enough to enter college?
he wondered.

One October morning Chi was stunned to see Dr. Thomas striding into the club. The surgeon went over to Chi's supervisor to get permission for the young man to take the rest of the day off.

“Are you still serious about attending university?” Dr. Thomas asked. Chi nodded. “Come with me, then,” the doctor said. “There's a place we should visit.”

They hopped into a jeep and drove to the rolling campus of Seoul National University. “You belong at a school like this, Mr. Chi,” Dr. Thomas said.

As they walked around the grounds, Dr. Thomas told Chi more about his own education. “After high school I wanted to work in the steel mills.” But a family friend who had graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta convinced Thomas of the value of a degree from the renowned black college. In September 1940 he entered Morehouse and was soon in its premed program.

Becoming a doctor was no easy thing for a young black man in the 1940s, Thomas added. Few hospitals in the country were open to black interns and residents. But he wouldn't let prejudice defeat him and earned his degree from Meharry Medical College, a black school in Nashville.

His challenges as a black man gave him empathy for Chi and his struggles. “Believe in yourself,” he told Chi. “And don't give up until you've achieved your goals.”

When Dr. Thomas dropped him off that night, Chi learned that his friend's tour in Korea would soon be up. The two would likely never meet again. “Good luck to you, Mr. Chi,” the doctor said quietly. Overcome, the young Korean clasped his friend's hand. Long after Dr. Thomas had driven off, Chi stood at his doorway, staring into the darkness.

Letters soon
started arriving from America, all carefully printed in large block letters for Chi to easily decipher, and all filled with the gentle prodding one might expect from a loving parent. Chi read and reread them until they were nearly worn through.

“Remember,” Dr. Thomas wrote in one note, “the hardships of your youth will turn out to be a valuable experience. The iron tempered in a forge is stronger than one that never faced the forge.”

Each letter ended with the same sentence, underlined in bold red ink: “Do you still plan to attend university next spring?”

Only at a friend's insistence, however, did Chi take the admission test for Seoul's Chung-Ang University.
It's a vain exercise,
he told himself. The tuition deadline was in eight weeks and, with his meager earnings, he had no chance of coming up with the $85 he needed.

His frustration soared when he learned that he'd passed with high grades. His university admission was guaranteed—if only he had the funds. Chi decided to let the doctor know of his admission to Chung-Ang and mentioned the difficulty of the high tuition costs.

Six weeks later, a letter arrived from the United States. Chi was flabbergasted to find four twenty-dollar bills and one five-dollar bill inside. The money was, Dr. Thomas wrote, “a congratulatory gift.” In April 1956 Yang-chin Chi, now 19, entered college.

For a
time, Chi kept his American friend apprised of his academic progress. But as their lives grew hectic, the correspondence began to trail off.

Chi earned his undergraduate degree in English language and literature, then went into social work, becoming an orphanage director.

In the late 1960s Chi won a Fulbright scholarship in America, receiving a master's degree in social work from the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. He had one short phone conversation with Dr. Thomas, but the surgeon moved soon thereafter and the two men lost touch. Eventually, Chi returned to his alma mater, Chung-Ang University, as a professor.

In November 1975 Chi founded South Korea's first private social-welfare center for the poor. And thanks to Chi's work, the Chung-Ang University Social Welfare Center has become a model for several other centers across Korea. Then he began working with the United Nations agency UNICEF in Korea and other countries. Within a few more years, he obtained a Ph.D. in social work from the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. The boy who had almost given up on his education had become a renowned scholar.

As the years passed and his professional successes mounted, Chi found himself thinking often of Dr. Thomas. In April 1992, when he and his wife and three children watched horrifying television coverage of the Los Angeles race riots, he felt an overwhelming sadness, hearing of the tensions between American blacks and Koreans.
How can this be when Dr. Thomas and I could so easily reach across the boundaries of race and culture?

“I hope
I can meet him again someday,” Chi told me when we met in Seoul. “Dr. Thomas brought me through a time in my life when all I had was his helping hand.”

I left Chi determined to assist him in his search for his old friend. I contacted the Ohio State Medical Association—no listing. There was nothing in the databanks of black-physician organizations. As a passing thought, I asked the American Medical Association if it kept separate data on retired doctors. It did. Before long, a St. Louis address turned up for a retired physician by that name. I telephoned.

A soft, hesitant voice answered: “Yes, I am Dr. Roy Thomas. Who's calling?” I explained.

“I remember Mr. Chi,” Dr. Thomas said. “But I did so little for him, and it was so many years ago. I'm surprised he even remembers me.”

A few weeks later, sitting with Dr. Thomas and his wife in their St. Louis apartment, I told him how his simple acts of kindness had opened up Chi's life and how he was now a leading voice on social welfare in his country. “He credits you for all of this,” I noted.

“I don't understand,” Dr. Thomas said. “I'm glad to know my assistance helped, but he succeeded because of who he was—not because of me.”

I knew Dr. Thomas was wrong. What had seemed like insignificant gestures to him had proved to be something quite different to a poor Korean boy alone in the world. They were the gift that gave Yang-chin Chi a future.

On an
evening last July Chi excitedly dialed the phone number I had passed along to him. In seconds, he was talking to Dr. Thomas, across nearly 7,000 miles, nine time zones and so many years.

“It is a miracle I have found you after such a long time,” Chi said, laughing. “I had almost given up.”

The two discussed the many turns their lives had taken since their time in Korea. Chi recounted his accomplishments for his old mentor.

“My friend,” Dr. Thomas said, “I'm so proud to see what you've made of yourself. I always knew it was there inside of you.”

Chi paused as he searched for just the right words.

“I want you to know something,” the Korean said in a voice that shook with emotion. “Meeting you was one of the most significant moments in my life. Our friendship was a turning point for me.”

Then, after waiting so many years for his chance, Chi finally spoke the words he had long held in his heart.

“Dr. Thomas—thank you.”