The Mail Train’s Gift: A Life-Changing Message

My mother told me this story from World War I many years ago. Christmas 1917 was coming, but because her brother Archie Clikeman was missing in action and presumed dead, the family was not going to celebrate.

The townspeople of Parker, South Dakota, always joked that the small-town postmaster read all the postcards whenever the mail train came into town. On that Christmas Eve, he lived up to his reputation.

The family was always grateful that the postmaster, instead of waiting for the rural mail to go out the day after Christmas, called my grandmother and told her that Archie was being held as a prisoner of war. Archie even wrote on the postcard that he was well.

Of course, my mother said, that turned out to be the best Christmas ever. Archie came home after the war and lived to a ripe old age. —Kay Johnson, Parker, South Dakota

Our Pennies Made All the Difference

Many years ago, when I was making 75 cents an hour, my three children asked for bicycles for Christmas, but I couldn’t afford them.

So that January, I put three bikes on layaway. I paid all through the year, but a week before Christmas, I still owed $14.50. The Saturday before Christmas, my son Ricky asked how much I needed. When I told him, he asked if he could pour the pennies out of the penny jug we kept.

I said, “Son, I don’t care, but I know there’s not $14.50 worth of pennies in there.”

Ricky poured them out, counted them, and said, “Mom, there’s $15.50 worth of pennies.” Ecstatic, I told him to count out $1 for gas so I could go get the bikes.

I’ve always thought of this as our little miracle. It was as blessed a Christmas as anyone could ever have. —Dot Williams, Canton, Georgia

Santa Found Us on the Road

At Christmastime, in 1961, our family was on the way from Seattle to a new assignment on the East Coast, and we checked into a motel in Watertown, South Dakota. It was not the best time to travel with young children, who were concerned about Santa finding us on the road.

We headed into town to find a store, and as our car approached an intersection, there was a Santa right in the crosswalk! He held up his hand for us to stop, and we rolled down our windows.

Santa poked his head through a window and said to our kids, “Oh, there you are! I was wondering where I’d find you tonight.”

Naturally, the kids were thrilled to pieces. They made sure we told Santa which motel we were staying at so he could find them. My wife and I had tucked away gifts for the trip, as we knew we wouldn’t have time to shop along the way.

The cartop carrier and out-of-state license plate might have been a giveaway, but whatever it was, that Santa really made Christmas 1961 a memorable one for our kids. —Dave Grinstead, Bellingham, Washington

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Fate Threw a Tree at Us

During the hustle and bustle of Christmastime 1958, we told our children, ages 3 and 4, about the beautiful Christmas tree we would have in a few days. On Christmas Eve, at the bakery we had recently purchased, we counted the receipts, cleaned the shop and headed for home with our two sleepy children.

Suddenly, we remembered we had not gotten a tree. We looked for a vendor who might have a tree left, to no avail.

About a mile from home, we stopped for a red light. Suddenly, a gust of wind blew, and something hit the front of our truck. My husband went out to investigate.

The next thing I knew, my husband was throwing a good-sized evergreen into the back of the truck. He went into the mom-and-pop store at the corner where we were and asked the proprietor how much he wanted for the tree. He said he wasn’t selling Christmas trees that year.

We never did find out how the tree got in the middle of the road, but somehow we feel we know. Incidentally, it was the most beautiful tree we have ever had. —Gertrude Albert, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Our Carols Hit the Right Ears

I was with a small group of young guys and gals caroling on Christmas Eve, in 1942 San Diego, California. We wandered downtown to Broadway, the main street, and stopped at a block of green grass with a fountain on the plaza.

The streets were streaming with aimless servicemen, all missing the joy and solace of being home for Christmas.

We began singing familiar Christmas songs, and in a short time, the volume increased markedly. I climbed up onto the rim of the fountain to an astonishing sight—a sea of servicemen on the plaza singing with all their hearts. When a song ended, I started another, just beginning the words, and it was immediately picked up.

We sang every traditional song I could think of and didn’t leave the servicemen until near midnight, carrying a beautiful memory with us. —Winnie Phillips Stark, Modesto, California

For more heartwarming memories and incredible true stories from the past, check out our sister publication, Reminisce magazine.

The post 5 True, Old-Fashioned Christmas Miracles That Will Restore Your Hope for The Holidays appeared first on Reader's Digest.

The Postman Lifted Us From Depression

My parents, at the height of the Depression, were forced to go on home relief, which is known as welfare today. It was 1935, when I was 10 years old, and we lived on the first floor of a walk-up apartment on 43rd Street, in Brooklyn, New York.

A few days before Christmas, I looked out a kitchen window to see my father sitting on the stoop, dejected and depressed, with tears in his eyes. The mailman was approaching our building and asked my father what was wrong.

I heard my father say that he had used up his food vouchers and that the rent was past due. He had tried to work as a laborer through the Works Progress Administration, but he wasn’t a very strong man, and the work had been too hard for him. I was scared, having seen newspaper pictures of people being put out on the street with all their belongings.

“Ike, how much do you need?” the mailman asked. My dad said he needed $33 for the rent, and without hesitation, the mailman took $50 from his wallet and handed it to my father.

My dad said, “I don’t know when I’ll be able to pay you back.” The mailman put an arm around my father and said it would be okay if he paid him back or he didn’t pay him back.

The mailman noticed me looking through the window and said, “Isaac, things will not be this way forever. If you or your son will remember this day, there will be times in the future when someone needs your help. Help them within your means and tell them what happened this day. This will be my payback. Merry Christmas and Happy Chanukah.”

As long as he lived, my father helped others when he could, and I’ve done my best to do my part in paying his generosity back. —Martin Klapper, Longmont, Colorado

He Fixed My Car, and My Christmas

In 1958, I was a first-year high school teacher in Beatty, Nevada. On Dec. 22, I headed home to Idaho in my 1951 Hudson to spend Christmas with my parents.

Just south of Fillmore, Utah, a radiator hose broke and the car started to overheat. I hitchhiked into Fillmore and got a ride to a Chevron station. I explained my plight to the owner, Dan Brinkerhoff, who sent a tow truck to bring in my car.

Dan discovered that the engine had become so hot it had warped the head, so he called a nearby wrecking yard and found the needed part. I boarded a Greyhound bus, bought the part and then caught a return bus to Fillmore.

By that time it was dark, and Dan had closed the station. He immediately went to work on my car, laboring for several hours while I slept curled up in the backseat. Finally, he woke me and announced I was ready to go. When I went to settle up, he would not take a dime for anything he had done.

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I got to spend the holidays with my parents, and I shall forever remember Dan for the wonderful thing he did for me. —Glen Gillette, Las Vegas, Nevada

Strangers Carried Us Home

I joined the Army on Dec. 15, 1959, when I was 17. Five days later, I had the choice of going home for Christmas or staying at Fort Carson, Colorado, and pulling KP duty for 15 days.

A fellow recruit and I wanted to go home, but we didn’t have enough money for bus fare. So we decided to hitchhike some 1,100 miles to San Antonio, Texas. From there, we could get bus tickets home. He was going to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and I was going to Aransas Pass, Texas.

That first day, we got as far as Trinidad, Colorado, where we spent the night drinking coffee in a small cafe. The next day and night, we went all the way to Amarillo, Texas, in a semi-tractor rig. From there, we had to walk across town to where we could hitchhike.

It was late afternoon, and we were getting hungrier and colder. On top of that, it had started to snow. Our chances of getting a ride out of town were getting mighty slim.

Then our saving angel came by in a VW Bug, offering us a ride all the way to San Antonio.

In the Bug were the young driver, his wife, an infant, a toddler and a big shaggy dog. The backseat had been removed to accommodate a sort of bed. With the dad and two tired, cold, hungry young soldiers in the front seat, we were going home for Christmas.

This family went out of its way to help us, buying us dinner and breakfast. They not only took us to the bus station, they even paid for our tickets. I will forever remember these people and their kindness. May God still bless them. —Rafael Villalobos, Fulton, Mississippi

Our Community Came Through

In December 1963, my father gathered my two younger sisters and me together and told us he couldn’t afford to give us any presents that year, not even our traditional treats of nuts, apples, oranges, tangerines, and chocolates. My mother had had a stroke the year before and was constantly going to the hospital, so there was no money for Christmas.

On Christmas Eve, we heard a knock on the door. Two ladies came in and gave us new coats, along with some holiday treats. Our neighbor across the street had told her church about our situation, and the people of the congregation wanted to help.

I will never forget our kind neighbor. —Sheila Deane, Chattanooga, Tennessee

For more holiday spirit, enjoy these 5 old-fashioned holiday miracles guaranteed to warm your heart.

These stories were originally published in our sister publication Reminisce magazine. Visit reminisce.com for more inspiring true tales from the past.

The post 4 Heartwarming True Tales of Vintage Christmas Kindness appeared first on Reader's Digest.

My dad loved pennies, especially those with the elegant stalk of wheat curving around each side of the ONE CENT on the back. Those were the pennies he grew up with in Iowa during the Depression, and Lord knows he didn’t have many.

When I was a kid, Dad and I would go for long walks together. He was an athletic six-foot-four, and I had to trot to keep up with him. Sometimes we’d spy coins along the way—a penny here, a dime there. Whenever I picked up a penny, he’d ask, “Is it a wheat?” It always thrilled him when we found one of those special coins produced from 1909 to 1958, the year of my birth. On one of these walks, he told me he often dreamed of finding coins. I was amazed. “I always have that dream too!” I told him. It was our secret connection.

Dad died in 2002. By then, I was living in New York City, which can be exciting, or cold and heartless. One gray winter day, not long after his death, I was walking down Fifth Avenue, feeling bereft, and I glanced up and found myself in front of the First Presbyterian Church, one of the oldest churches in Manhattan. When I was a child, Dad had been a Presbyterian deacon, but I hadn’t attended in a long time. I decided to go.

Sunday morning, I was greeted warmly and ushered to a seat in the soaring old sanctuary. I opened the program and saw that the first hymn was “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” Dad’s favorite, one we’d sung at his funeral. When the organ and choir began, I burst into tears.

After the service, I walked out the front doors, shook the pastor’s hand, stepped onto the sidewalk—and there was a penny. I stooped to pick it up and turned it over, and sure enough, it was a wheat. A 1944, a year my father was serving on a ship in the South Pacific.

That started it. Suddenly wheat pennies began turning up on the sidewalks of New York everywhere. I got most of the important years: his birth year, my mom’s birth year, the year his mother died, the year he graduated from college, the war years, the year he met my mom, the year they got married, the year my sister was born. But alas, no 1958 wheat penny—my year, the last year they were made.

Meanwhile I attended church pretty regularly, and along toward Christmas a year later, I decided I ought to join. The next Sunday, after the service, I was walking up Fifth Avenue and spotted a penny in the middle of an intersection. Oh, no way, I thought. It was a busy street; cabs were speeding by—should I risk it? I just had to get it.

A wheat! But the penny was worn, and I couldn’t read the date. When I got home, I took out my magnifying glass and tilted the copper surface to the light. There was my birthday.

As a journalist, I’m in a profession where skepticism is a necessary and honest virtue. But I found 21 wheat pennies on the streets of Manhattan in the year after my father died, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Originally published in Reader’s Digest in 2007

More Miraculous Classic Christmas Tales

How the Gift I Wanted Least Became the One I Needed Most >>
The Year My Mother Saved Christmas With a Sad, Threadbare Tree >>
‘Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus’ >>
A Grieving Soldier Is Visited By the Divine >>

The post Why a Simple Penny Was My Christmas Miracle appeared first on Reader's Digest.

As a five-year-old, I didn’t know how poor we were. We had just moved to Manhattan and knew no one in that city. My father would not be home that Christmas Eve; he was in the Army serving overseas. My mother, in her 20s, and I worked all afternoon making tree decorations. The kitchen table was crowded with stars, globes, and animals made of shiny paper.

There was at least a dozen feet of a chain made of colored paper loops. We were going to get the Christmas tree later in the evening, when the prices for them usually dropped.

Just after sunset, we bundled up against the chilly Manhattan night and walked four blocks to a parking lot where they sold Christmas trees.

“How much is your cheapest tree?” my mother asked the man standing at the lot entrance.

He held his gloved hands over the fire in a steel barrel. His brown skin glowed in the flickering. “Thirty dollars, miss.”

Her smile disappeared. “Nothing for less?”

The man picked up a small tree branch and dropped it into the fire. “I just work here, miss. I can’t change the price.”

The sudden melancholy in my mother’s face made me sad.

The man looked down at me for what felt like a long time; it probably was only moments. He pointed at a mound of branches, the size of a car, in the corner of the lot. “See that pile of cuttings? Behind it is a tree that we can’t sell. You can have it for free.”

“Thank you,” my mother said. She nudged my shoulder.

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

We hurried to the back of the mound. There it was, a scrawny thing just a little taller than me, leaning against the wire fence. It had few branches—almost a ghost of a tree.

My mother shouted to the man, “Can we take some of these branches, also?”

He waved his arm. “Take it all if you want to, miss.”

I hauled the tree, and she carried a bundle of branches. We set the tree in the corner of the living room, away from the radiator. I couldn’t imagine how we could hang many decorations on a sparse tree.

She was smiling again. “Go to sleep now. Santa will decorate the tree for us.”

I woke at dawn and rushed into the living room. To my amazement, the tree had filled out. I couldn’t even see the trunk anymore. And it had a beautiful natural shape. The decorations glistened in the morning light. The chain of blue, red, white, and green paper draped gracefully around the tree. I almost didn’t notice the presents wrapped in shiny paper under it.

Days later, curiosity made me examine the tree closely. Christmas evening, my mother had used wire from clothes hangers to somehow fix discarded branches to the almost nude tree trunk. She had carefully trimmed it with scissors to get its perfect shape.

A few weeks later, my father returned from overseas. When I told him about the tree, something happened that I didn’t understand at the time. Tears filled the eyes of that burly soldier.

Since then, I have seen many wonderful holidays. That Christmas remains as my favorite.

Bill Butler is a Reader’s Digest reader.

More Miraculous Classic Christmas Tales

How the Gift I Wanted Least Became the One I Needed Most >>
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‘Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus’ >>
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The post The Year My Mother Saved Christmas With a Sad, Threadbare Tree appeared first on Reader's Digest.

When I was a boy of nine in the little town of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, I used to mow the lawn of Mrs. Long, an elderly lady who lived across from the Presbyterian Church. She paid me very little for the chore, for she had not much money. But she did promise me, “When Christmas comes, I shall have a present for you.” I spent much time wondering what it would be. The boys I played with had baseball gloves and bicycles and ice skates, and I was so eager to acquire any one of these that I convinced myself that my benefactor intended choosing from among them.

“It would hardly be a baseball glove,” I reasoned with myself. “A woman like Mrs. Long wouldn’t know much about baseball.” Since she was a frail little person, I also ruled out the bicycle, for how could she handle such a contraption?

On my last Saturday at work, Mrs. Long said, “Now remember, because you’ve been a good boy all summer, at Christmas I’ll have a present waiting. You come to the door and collect it.” These words clinched it. Since she was going to have the present in her house, and since she herself would be handling it, unquestionably she was giving me a pair of ice skates.

I became so convinced of this that I could imagine myself upon the skates. As the cold days of November arrived and ice began to form on the ponds, I began to try my luck on the ice that would be sustaining me and my skates through the winter.

“Get away from that ice!” a man shouted. “It’s not strong enough yet.” But soon it would be.

As Christmas approached, it was with difficulty that I restrained myself from reporting to Mrs. Long and demanding my present. Our family agreed that the first of December was too early for me to do this. “She may not have it wrapped yet,” someone argued, and this made sense.

On the 21st of December, a serious cold snap froze all the ponds so that boys who already had ice skates were able to use them, and my longing to possess mine, even though I could not open the package for a few days, became overpowering. On December 22 I could restrain myself no longer. I marched down the street, presented myself at the door of the house whose lawn I had tended all summer, and said, “I’ve come for my present, Mrs. Long.”

“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said, leading me into her parlor, its windows heavy with purple velvet. She sat me in a chair, disappeared to another room, and in a moment stood before me holding a package which under no conceivable circumstances could hold a baseball glove or a bicycle or even a pair of skates. I was painfully disappointed but so far as I can recall did not show it, because during the week, my advisers at home had warned repeatedly, “Whatever she has for you, take it graciously and say thank you.”

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What she had was an ordinary parcel about nine inches wide, a foot long, and no more than a quarter of an inch thick. As Mrs. Long held it in her frail hands, curiosity replaced my initial disappointment, and when I lifted it from her, the extreme lightness of the gift quite captivated me. It weighed almost nothing.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You’ll see on Christmas Day.”

I shook it. Nothing rattled, but I thought I did catch a sound of some sort—a quiet, muffled sound that was somehow familiar but unidentifiable. “What is it?” I asked again.

“A kind of magic,” Mrs. Long said, and that was all.

Her words were enough to set my mind dancing with new possibilities, so that by the time I reached home, I had convinced myself that I held some great wonder. “She gave me a magician’s set. I’ll turn pitchers of milk into rabbits.”

How long the passage to Christmas was! There were other presents of normal dimension and weight. But Mrs. Long’s box dominated all, for it had to do with magic.

On Christmas morning, before the sun was up, I had this box on my knees, tearing at the reused colored string that bound it. Soon the wrapping paper was off and in my lap lay a flat box with its top hinged about halfway down.

With great excitement I opened the hinged lid to find inside a shimmering pile of ten flimsy sheets of black paper, each labeled in iridescent letters, Carbon Paper Regal Premium. Of the four words I knew only the second, and what it signified in this context I could not guess.

“Is it magic?” I asked.

Aunt Laura, who taught school, had the presence of mind to say, “It really is!” And she took two pieces of white paper, placed between them one of the black sheets from the box, and, with a hard pencil, wrote my name on the upper sheet. Then, removing it and the Carbon Paper Regal Premium, she handed me the second sheet, which her pencil had in no way touched.

There was my name! It was clean, and very dark, and well formed and as beautiful as Christmas Day itself.

I was enthralled! This was indeed magic of the greatest dimension. That a pencil could write on one piece of paper and mysteriously record on another was a miracle which was so gratifying to my childish mind that I can honestly say that in that one moment, in the dark of Christmas morning, I understood as much about printing and the duplication of words and the fundamental mystery of disseminating ideas as I have learned in the remaining half-century of my life.

I wrote and wrote, using up whole tablets until I had ground off the last shred of blackness from the ten sheets of carbon paper. It was the most enchanting Christmas present a boy like me could have had, infinitely more significant than a baseball glove or a pair of skates. It was exactly the present I needed, and it reached me at precisely that Christmas when I was best able to comprehend it.

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I have received some pretty thundering Christmas presents since then but none that ever came close to the magnificence of this one. The average present merely gratifies a temporary yearning, as the ice skates would have done; the great present illuminates all the years of life that remain.

It was not until some years later that I realized that the ten sheets of Carbon Paper Regal Premium which Mrs. Long gave me had cost her nothing. She had used them for her purposes and would normally have thrown them away, except that she had had the ingenuity to guess that a boy might profit from a present totally outside the realm of his ordinary experience.

I hope this year some boys and girls will receive, from thoughtful adults who really love them, gifts that will jolt them out of all they have known till now. It is such gifts and such experiences—usually costing little or nothing—that transform a life and lend it an impetus that may continue for decades.

Originally published in Reader’s Digest in 1967

More Miraculous Classic Christmas Tales

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Why a Simple Penny Was My Christmas Miracle >>
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The post My Most Unforgettable Christmas Present: How the Gift I Wanted Least Became the One I Needed Most appeared first on Reader's Digest.

It was late when I got off duty. I didn’t even stop at the nurses’ barracks to change my uniform, but went directly out into the woods that surrounded the neuropsychiatric wing of the big Army hospital. The leaves under my feet were thick and dry, and as I waded through them I was aware of the tangy smell of autumn. The keys to Ward 8, worn on a long rope around my waist, jingled as I walked.

Anthony D. Nardo* was a young GI, a victim of combat fatigue. Diagnosis: agitated depression, manic-depressive type. I was a cadet nurse, sound of mind, on loan from a civilian hospital. And yet, that very afternoon, standing together on the sun porch of Ward 8, Tony and I had shared an incredible vision. The thing we had seen was somewhere in these woods. I had to find out what it really was, to prove to him that it was only an illusion and thereby end its threat to his recovery.

I thought about the day that Tony had been admitted, three months before. I saw him as he was then, bound to a canvas stretcher, his tousled hair ebony-black. I had watched as a medical corpsman removed his straps and led him into a room where he was to be confined for seven weeks. Beneath gray pajama sleeves, white bandages encircled both his wrists.

His face was angular and elongated, and in it I saw a quality of tenderness. Something within me had stirred with an answering tenderness, so that during the days that followed, I favored him over all the others.

Tony had been evacuated from his post in the South Pacific, where on a certain morning he had removed the double-edged blade from a razor and slashed the arteries in both his wrists. All through the early days of his stay on Ward 8, the pale hands tore at their restraints in a desperate effort to rip apart the sutures. For seven weeks he did not speak or even lift his eyes.

In time, the wounds began to heal, and the tortured hands relaxed. Slowly the spirit found its way out of the darkness. I watched him as he moved about the ward, straight and sure. I saw him ministering to the needs of his fellow patients with the wisdom of one who knew the demons that possessed them.

Tony was almost well. Even our skeptical chief nurse, Lt. Barbara Rankin, was forced to concede it. But then, without warning, on this day in late October, a phantom thing had threatened to destroy him.

The day had begun like any other. I reported for duty at 7 a.m. At noon, I went to lunch. Lieutenant Rankin was waiting for me in her office when I got back. “You’d better go and have a look at your protégé,” she said.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing much.” Her voice was granite. “He just got a little excited when he saw the Virgin Mary standing in the woods, that’s all!”

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I turned and ran to Ward 8. I found him kneeling, his forehead pressed against the wire screen which surrounded the sun porch. His eyes were fixed on a spot somewhere out in the woods. He was praying softly.

My voice came out harsh and shaky. “What are you doing, Tony?” I said. “Get up!”

“But you don’t understand,” Tony said. “I can see the Virgin standing there!” Then he looked up at me. “Is there a statue out there?” he asked.

“No, Tony. I know those woods. There’s nothing out there. Now, please get up!”

He turned from me and looked out again into the woods. For a long time I stood above him, wishing that I could take the dark head in my hands and soothe away the dreadful danger. But one does not do such a thing, especially when one is a student nurse.

Instead, my eyes wandered absently out over the woods, while a dreaded word rose up and pushed against my throat: hallucination. Now he must indeed be judged insane.

But as I gazed, my eyes were drawn to something white—and there in the distance among the trees I saw the figure of the Virgin!

I must have cried aloud because Tony turned his head and looked at me. “Ah, you see her too!”

“Yes, I see her too …”

The rest of the afternoon passed slowly, but at last I was off duty and free to search for the strange Madonna. I felt relief in the knowledge that I had only to find the logical source of the illusion to prove that Tony was not hallucinating.

It was getting dark and cold. I folded my arms against my body underneath my cape, shivering. And then I saw it, just ahead of me.

A white birch stump, tall and slender, had been carved by the hand of time and weather into an abstract image of the Madonna. Even at this close range, the delicate curve of head and shoulder, the graceful draping of the mantle, were clearly visible in the polished bark.

I rushed back to the ward. Tony was sitting on a wooden bench, staring out into the woods. He spoke without looking up.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

Suddenly I was afraid. Tony seemed prepared for a simple answer, logical and conclusive. But I knew that I had stumbled upon something inscrutable, a thing that transcended reason, and I was afraid that Tony was not well enough to cope with such a mystery. “It was nothing—just a white birch stump,” I whispered.

I should have known that it would not end there.

Late in November, Tony was transferred to a ward where he was free to come and go about the hospital grounds. Seeing him grow stronger day by day, I began to believe that I had been wise in keeping silent about what I had really seen. So I held the lovely secret in my heart, hoarding it—I’m sure the other nurses wondered why I walked alone in the barren woods so often.

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It was a week before Christmas. My training period was over, and I was being reassigned. I said goodbye to Tony and learned that he had been given leave to go home for the holidays. Then I went to my room and began to pack. Suddenly I saw that a light snow was falling, just beginning to adhere to the branches of the trees. I got my coat and went outside.

The wind was cold on my face, and I blinked my eyes against it. My heart was beating very fast, and I began to run. And then, within a few yards of my destination, I stopped.

There, on a glistening blanket of snow, clad in a heavy coat of olive drab, a solitary figure knelt, the white flakes falling like weightless feathers on his bare head. He knelt at the feet of the woodland Madonna, which was clothed in a new whiteness.

When he finished his prayer, I did a thing that one does not do when one is a student nurse. I moved to the place where he knelt and stood behind him, taking the dark head in my hands. I brushed away the snow that had collected in his hair.

“You’ll catch your death of cold,” I said.

He looked up at me, and I could see that he had been expecting me.

“Miracles come in many sizes,” he said.

Then he stood and turned to face me, smiling. And in his smile were all wisdom and all tenderness—and I knew that he was well.

*Names have been changed.

Originally published in Reader’s Digest in 1960

More Miraculous Classic Christmas Tales

How the Gift I Wanted Least Became the One I Needed Most >>
The Year My Mother Saved Christmas With a Sad, Threadbare Tree >>
Why a Simple Penny Was My Christmas Miracle >>
‘Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus’ >>

The post A Grieving Soldier Is Visited By the Divine In This Unforgettable Christmas Classic appeared first on Reader's Digest.

I grew up in a troubled home in the 1970s, on the outskirts of downtown Orlando, Florida. Our subdivision was one of many that backed up to a dwindling orange grove. One remnant farm, an island of pastureland with horses, a few cattle, and an enormous garden, remained among the sea of tract houses. The home was an early-1900s Arts and Crafts three-story with a great porch, complete with a swing. I loved that storybook house.

It was nothing like the one I lived in with my mother, a dark place with strict rules about befriending others. As in: Don’t. Never, ever talk to anyone, my mother said. She suffered from profound depression and paranoid delusions. Just getting through the day was a war for my mother.

Who lives on that utopian plot of land next door? I wondered. Sometimes I glimpsed the father on a horse with a lasso. Sometimes I saw the two boys—dark curly hair—running around the land, chased by two border collies. I never saw the mother, but the whole operation looked like heaven, and I yearned to join that family.

One day, in sixth grade, a petite, raven-haired woman wearing ruby-red lipstick, gold eye shadow, and thick mascara was introduced to our class: Mrs. Reese. Mrs. Reese explained that she was starting Spanish Club. She invited anyone interested in learning Spanish language and culture to stay after school.

I could not take my eyes off her tortoiseshell bracelets, her sparkling aquamarine rings.

The bell rang, and to my shock, no one went up to Mrs. Reese. I was under a strict order to go straight home. But that day, I lingered. I finally asked Mrs. Reese when the club started.

“We could begin right now if you like,” she said. She smiled with her eyes, as though we were in on a secret. I felt beautiful. I felt fluent in Spanish, fluent in everything. We met right there in the hallway, and that day she taught me this question: ¿Dónde está su casa? That’s when I learned that Mrs. Reese lived in the mansion with the kids and the collies. The house of my dreams was her house. That day, I learned how to answer questions about my age, my favorite food (¡helado!), and the names of every perro I had known. And I learned, Do you want to come over tomorrow after school for cooking lessons?

Sí, sí, sí. What is another word for yes?

But my mother had been definitive. Never. We could not mix with the neighbors.

I harangued my mother all summer and into fall, well after Spanish Club had dissolved. I have been invited to that house. You have to let me go. I spoke as though my life depended on it. It did. I wept at night sometimes, so worried that Mrs. Reese and her cowboy husband and those two beautiful boys with the black curly hair would move away before I could get my cooking lesson. Before I could get inside.

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At some point, I managed to wear my mother down, and one Saturday afternoon, I got on my bike and rode out to the little farm. Fuchsia bougainvillea ran rampant around the porch. There was a great bronze hand, a door knocker. Mrs. Reese opened the door grandly and ushered me in.

We had tea on her red velvet sofa. She painted my toenails crimson. She showed me how to water the African violets that lived in clusters in nearly every room. The details of that afternoon are etched in my mind: We made guacamole and then a garlicky picadillo. I carefully wrote out the recipes on white paper, making notes as she explained the steps. You can’t have too much garlic. We spoke in Spanish. In Spanish, my voice was loud, romantic, assertive. This is the real me! I remember thinking.

Mr. Reese pulled onto the property in a gigantic blue Ford truck and went straight to the barn. Ty, who was in my class at school, came in from playing outside. Mrs. Reese put one hand on top of his head—those gorgeous black curls, those wild blue eyes. She put her other hand, all those sparkling rings—on my back. She pressed us toward each other. Mi novia, mi novio. It was alarming. And thrilling.

Ty ran up to the attic—three flights. Mrs. Reese encouraged me to follow. She nodded, serious, vibrant, as though saying, Step into your life. But it wasn’t quite right. I did not want to kiss a boy; I wanted to bake dulces.

When I got home, I announced to my mother that we had to get the ingredients for picadillo immediately. “You smell different,” she said, eyeing me suspiciously. I am different. I am completely different.

She said no. “You know I can’t have garlic in the house.” She hated the smell. I felt hurt, proud, disloyal, and brilliant, all at once, when I told my mother, “Mrs. Reese doubles the garlic.” My toenails, secret jewels, sparkled in my sneakers.

I knew I’d always have garlic in my house. I knew I’d paint my nails the deepest, bloodiest red, first chance I got. I knew I’d learn to dance, become fluent in Spanish.

For Christmas, Ty gave me a silver necklace from their family trip to Colombia, slipping it to me at school.

My mother never permitted me another visit to Mrs. Reese’s house, and I saw her only occasionally from a distance, hanging laundry on the line or sweeping their cavernous front porch. But four decades and countless moves later, I still have the necklace: a little silver man, carved with strange symbols, a talisman from the life she showed me, proof of a possible future.

The post A Depressed Mother, A Lonely Daughter, and Mrs. Reese, the Neighbor Who Changed Their Lives appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Frostbite can become a serious issue quickly. Tissues can be permanently damaged if treatment is not given quickly. Look for these frostbite symptoms:

•    Patient may have pins and needles in affected areas; later he may have no feeling
•    Skin may be waxy and pale and feel cold and hard
•    Skin may turn from white to mottled blue/gray

Here’s How to Handle a Patient With Frostbite

1. Stop and find shelter

Get the patient into a shelter. Do not warm the affected area unless there is no risk of refreezing. Do not remove her gloves or shoes if she is likely to have to walk any further.

2. Warm up gradually
Tell the patient to put her hands in her armpits to warm them up gently using her own body warmth. She can put her feet in your armpits to warm them up.

3. Place affected parts in warm water
Once you are inside, remove the patient’s gloves or shoes and place her hands or feet in warm water. Try to remove rings and jewelry (do not force this, though). Dry the affected area and wrap it in a loose, dry, non-fluffy bandage.

4. Get medical help
The patient should be taken to the hospital. If she is in pain, she can take the recommended dose of her normal pain relief tablet, such as acetaminophen or ibuprofen.

As the skin is warmed up, it may become bright red, feel hot, and be very painful. If the tissues are damaged, the affected area may turn black because of a lack of blood supply to the area.

Get more information about handling health emergencies and natural disasters in the new book Reader’s Digest Quintessential Guide to Handling Emergencies. You’ll get must-know tips and tactics for preparing your home, stocking the right supplies, preventing and handling accidents, coping with medical situations, and keeping your family safe. Learn more and buy the book here.

The post How to Treat Frostbite: 4 First Aid Steps to Take Right Away appeared first on Reader's Digest.

When the core body temperature falls below 95 degrees Fahrenheit, the body shuts down the blood supply to the surface blood vessels to keep vital organs such as the heart supplied with blood. This leads to a condition known as hypothermia. Signs and symptoms of hypothermia are the same whatever the cause or age of the patient. You may also see signs of frostbite on the patient’s fingers and toes.

• Skin feels cold and dry; looks pale
• Lacks energy
• Shivering in the early stages (this is the body’s way of creating heat)

As hypothermia deepens:

• Patient becomes disoriented and starts to behave irrationally; she will become more lethargic and may no longer be fully conscious and alert.
• Eventually the patient will lose consciousness.
• Breaths become very slow and shallow.
• Pulse slows down and gets gradually weaker and irregular; if patient is not warmed up, the heart stops.

How to Handle Someone with Hypothermia

1. Warm up gradually
Only start to warm someone up if there is no risk of her becoming cold again. If you are inside, start to warm the room, or move to a warmer room. Remove any wet clothes. Wrap her in several layers of blankets to trap heat. Put a hat on her head.

2. Don’t give give alcohol
This dilates the blood vessels, decreasing the body’s ability to retain heat. Also: Do not warm a patient with direct heat, such as a hot-water bottle, or put her beside an electric fire. Don’t rub or massage a person; in severe hypothermia, there is a risk of heart attack. If a patient becomes unconscious, open the airway and check breathing. Be prepared to begin CPR.

3. Give warm drink and food
If the patient is fully conscious, give her a warm (not hot) drink and a high-energy food such as chocolate for fast energy. You may need to help her eat and drink.

4. Try a warm bath
A healthy adult or older child can be warmed up in a bath if he can climb in and out unaided and there is no risk of him becoming cold again. Note: Do not warm up an elderly person in a bath, as this may send cold blood to the heart or brain too suddenly, and may cause a stroke or heart attack.

5. Get emergency help
Call emergency services as soon as possible. Check and make a note of her level of consciousness, breathing, and pulse regularly until help arrives.

Get more information about handling health emergencies and natural disasters in the new book Reader’s Digest Quintessential Guide to Handling Emergencies. You’ll get must-know tips and tactics for preparing your home, stocking the right supplies, preventing and handling accidents, coping with medical situations, and keeping your family safe. Learn more and buy the book here.

The post First Aid for Hypothermia: 5 Crucial Steps to Follow appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Strolling down a street near his Brooklyn, New York, apartment, wearing a polo shirt and jeans, his close-cropped hair masking a slight bald patch, 41-year-old Kerry Albright appears unassuming, almost ordinary. When he speaks, his sweet drawl pegs him as a Southerner, but he’s without any small-town reserve. Instead, Kerry speaks with dramatic flair that shows off his 19 years in musical theater, performing on international stages. He’s an avid Facebook user with 1,000 “friends” and regularly posts stories about his travels and other pastimes. “I’m one of those people who just want to hang out with friends and laugh,” he says.

Until prompted, though, he says nothing about his childhood in the poverty-strangled coal-mining town of Lorado, West Virginia, and he owns but one photo of the golden-haired, angel-faced little boy he once was. Always at the back of his mind, however, is the catastrophe that claimed half his family and that he barely survived. He was too little to remember the event that earned him the nickname Miracle Baby.

Friday, February 25, 1972, dawned clear and beautiful, a blue-skied reprieve from the rain and snow that had been pelting the Buffalo Creek valley, a 17-mile-long basin nestled in the West Virginia foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, for weeks. Inside their white clapboard house in Lorado, 39-year-old Sylvia Albright hustled her son Steven, 17, out the door to the school bus, then turned her attention to baby Kerry Lee. At nine months old, he was just beginning to outgrow a nasty stretch of colic. Now that the sun was shining, maybe Sylvia could take the baby outside for a bit. With the clouds lifted, at least for now, some of the anxiety about the Buffalo Creek dam seemed to lift too.

The dam was built eight years earlier to contain and filter water used to wash mined coal. It was actually three dams, all of them made of slate, rock particles, and leftover coal, built in tiers on the hill overlooking Buffalo Creek. By 1972, the top dam held back a 31-foot-deep lake of 132 million gallons of slurry—enough to fill more than 200 Olympic swimming pools. By February all three dams had filled to near-overflow levels. And folks were worried.

Sylvia, a cook at the elementary school, and her husband, Robert, a miner, had other things on their minds. Their 21-year-old son, Terry, had been killed by a fellow soldier 16 months earlier in Vietnam. In the aftermath, Sylvia had been briefly hospitalized for depression. To try to recover, the couple had turned their focus toward bringing up Steven, who had earned a music scholarship to a nearby college.

A few months after Terry died, early in 1971, a young relative phoned to tell them she was pregnant and would not be able to raise the child. She offered the baby to the couple, and when he was born in May, the Albrights brought home a cherubic blond newborn boy, whom they named Kerry Lee. The couple had always wanted another child; the new baby was a bright spot in the otherwise dark time after Terry’s death.

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But that February evening in 1972, clouds were gathering again. Thunder rattled the house. Close to midnight, lightning illuminating the wet asphalt road in front of him, Robert drove his Gremlin to a nearby mine to work the hoot owl shift.

In previous days, conditions at the dam had been deteriorating. In 24 hours, between Thursday and Friday afternoons, the level of the slurry lake behind the dam had risen 18 inches. By Friday, the water was rising an inch an hour, then faster as the hard rain started up again—two inches an hour, then three.

Pittston Coal Company mine officials hadn’t ordered an evacuation for the valley, but most of the 18 homes and two trailers in Saunders, the town upstream from Lorado, had emptied out. Three miles south, in Lorado, porch lights burned all night as folks waited for word about the dam. Sylvia and Robert, on the other hand, figured this time would be like the rest—a lot of fretting for nothing.

Early the next morning, a crack ten feet wide and 30 feet long formed along the top of the uppermost dam. The front retaining wall bulged like soaked cardboard. Officials ordered workers to repair the dam, but it was too late. Before the work could begin, the dam’s right side began to crumble like a sand castle. Water poured through, ripping the hole wider and wider.

It took mere minutes for the dam to collapse completely. The lake of black coal slurry surged toward the lower two dams, sparking a series of explosions as the water hit pockets of burning coal. In seconds, the two lower dams were obliterated.

There was no longer anything to hold the water back. The wave washed into Saunders, sweeping away the Free Will Baptist Church, which the Albrights attended. The valley there was only 200 feet wide in places, rimmed by mountains that funneled the 20-foot wall of slurry at a rate of seven feet per second. Buildings, homes, cars, telephone poles, power lines, and massive trees were plucked from the ground and hurled down a river of dark muck. Within a few minutes, Saunders was leveled.

Meanwhile, Saturday morning had started sleepily at the Albright home. Sylvia, who had planned to go with Steven to Charleston for a concert, learned that the event had been rained out. She played with Kerry Lee and started the coffee. Robert would get home around 8:15, and the family would eat breakfast together.

A few minutes past eight, the lights flickered, then went out. Power outages happened sometimes, but then Sylvia and Steven heard cars honking their horns, people shouting. Steven went outside to investigate and looked up to see a 20-foot black mountain of water and debris coming toward the house. It rolled in like ocean waves, and on its crest, homes that had been torn off their foundations were thrown around like toy boats. People were still inside some of them. They grabbed at the windows, their faces masks of terror. In the roaring of the water, Steven could hear the buildings popping and snapping as they broke up.

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He raced back inside. “The dam broke!” he shouted. Sylvia grabbed baby Kerry Lee, who was wearing only a diaper. Steven took his mother’s arm, and together all three of them tumbled through the back door and into the yard, where the water was rising fast. Their only possible escape route was up a steep, densely wooded hill about 50 feet behind their home. Some of their neighbors—including Timmy Bailey, a classmate of Steven’s—were already up there.

Sylvia held tightly to Kerry Lee and let Steven shepherd her through the water. The crest of the hill didn’t seem very far, but each step through the viscous black liquid seemed to suck them down. By the time they made it to the limestone hill, they were up to their waists in black slurry. Their neighbors stretched out their hands, but Steven and Sylvia couldn’t reach them.

Frantic to save Kerry Lee, Sylvia began swinging him back and forth to heave him up the hillside. But the water was too high and she was losing strength. She let the baby go. He hit the water and was instantly swept downstream. The flood dragged Sylvia and Steven after him.

Deep inside the Buffalo Creek mine, Robert Albright had spent the night fixing a broken coal loader. It wasn’t until the drive home, when he saw the water spread across the valley, that he understood what had happened.

He drove the Gremlin as far as he could until water blocked the roadway. Then he abandoned the car, intending to walk the remaining half mile to Lorado. When he finally reached town around 9 a.m., it looked “like a bomb had gone off,” as one neighbor put it. Houses had been thrown against other buildings or splintered into pieces. Lengths of railroad track were pretzeled around bridge pilings. Cars lay in mangled heaps. A layer of tarry coal sludge, as thick as pudding, covered everything. Amid the debris were the bodies of children and adults, broken, sludge-covered, and unrecognizable.

He yelled to a neighbor, “Where’s my family?”

“They didn’t get out,” the neighbor replied.

Robert crumpled. His family was dead.

Elsewhere amid the chaos, Ernest Vanover, a preacher, and his son Frank were searching for Frank’s wife and little girl. The men picked their way toward Lundale, two miles away, where Frank’s family had last been seen. As they crossed a culvert about a half mile from the Albrights’ home, Frank heard a high-pitched mewling sound coming from the pile of debris below.

“Dad, I hear a baby crying,” he said.

“It was probably just a dog or a cat,” Ernest responded.

Still, he peered down and saw a tiny leg poking from the mud. It appeared to be a doll, but something impelled the men to dig into the muck with their hands. They pulled out a naked baby. The top of one thigh was cut to the bone. The boy’s head was bloodied, and his mouth was packed with mud and sludge. He’d been buried facedown for possibly 20 to 30 minutes, but when the Vanovers cleaned the sticky black stuff from his mouth with a pocket handkerchief, he gasped for breath.

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The men wrapped the boy in a coat, then carried him to a nearby home, where they found Sylvia’s first cousin Katheryn Ghent. She was a nurse. “Here, Katheryn,” Ernest Vanover said, handing her the wrapped bundle. “We found this baby.” The child was so caked in coal oil that not even Katheryn recognized him as Kerry Lee Albright.

Katheryn wrapped the boy in a neighbor’s bedspread and washed his mouth with fresh water until the nine-month-old spewed up black slurry and began to breathe more easily. Sylvia’s sister, Patty Wright, recognized the baby instantly. “That’s my sister’s baby, Kerry Lee,” she said. Katheryn passed the bundle off to her.

When it was clear that Kerry Lee was without his mother, Patty knew Sylvia was dead. Where were Robert and Steven?

Kerry Lee’s silence worried her the most. “He never made one sound the whole time,” she remembers. “He never even cried.”

Robert climbed up the hill behind where his house once stood, searching for his family. He lost track of time. Then a neighbor approached him. “Your boy Kerry Lee might be alive.” Robert felt a glimmer of hope spring up in him. He was directed down the mountain to his sister-in-law’s house. When he walked in, Patty was on the floor, cradling a silent Kerry Lee. “Robert, I can’t get him to cry,” she said. “I’m still trying to get this black stuff out of his mouth.” Robert leaned over and tenderly kissed Kerry Lee on the cheek, then picked him up. At last, the gravely injured nine-month-old started wailing. He knew his father.

It took Robert and Patty the rest of the day to get Kerry Lee across the devastated valley and to the hospital in Man, 11 miles away. “When they unfolded the blanket, [his leg] looked like a meat cleaver had been taken to it,” says Patty. Doctors rushed to repair his leg and other wounds. Robert stayed at Kerry Lee’s side, not changing out of his filthy work clothes for three days, until someone brought him something clean to wear.

On the fifth day after the flood, Robert filed into the temporary morgue set up at South Man Grade School to identify the bodies of Steven and Sylvia, who had been found 800 yards from their home. They were among 118 people, ranging in age from three months to 82 years old, who were killed along Buffalo Creek. The flood ravaged the town in minutes, injuring 1,100 people and destroying more than 500 homes. Officials from Pittston Coal Company called the disaster “an act of God.”

Later, Robert moaned to Patty, “Why in the world would God take my [wife] and my boy and leave this baby like this? Why couldn’t he have taken me?”

Robert Albright never returned to his job in the coal mines. Living on disability payments and, later, on a small payout from the company that had designed the dams, he devoted himself to Kerry Lee, learning to bathe the baby, mend his clothes, and cook pots of beef stew to last a week. “Holding me and learning to rock me to sleep was a big thing for him,” says Kerry, his preferred name as an adult. “But he did it.” After spending a few years in a trailer, Robert built a new home in Lorado on the same lot as the first one. He filled the yard with go-karts, bows and arrows, a motorcycle. When Kerry Lee showed a talent for performing, Robert signed him up for private dance and voice lessons. Over and over again, he told his son, “You can do whatever you want to do and be whatever you want to be, but you will not work in that coal mine.” With Kerry at his bedside, Robert Albright died of throat cancer, at age 70, in 2000.

Though he never knew his mother, Kerry thinks often of her sacrifice for him. “It must have been such an overwhelming moment when she knew that the only way to save me was to throw me,” he says. But, he explains, he never felt like he was without a mother. “I had a lot of people who acted as mother figures,” he says. “I felt like I had about 20 mothers.”

Kerry understands why he was known as a miracle baby but insists his father’s survival was just as extraordinary.

“There’s really no logical explanation for why I survived,” he continues. “But my father had been through the deaths of his wife and two sons,” Kerry says. “All he had left was this baby he’d adopted. I think I gave him something to live for.”

The post “I Was the Miracle Baby”: How Kerry Albright Survived a Deadly Flood at 9 Months Old appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Shelly Henry, 45, chief revenue officer for a medical-device company in Oklahoma City, still chokes up when she recalls the day nearly 12 years ago when her daughter, Kara, almost died.

Kara, then 15, took a ride with a few classmates to high school that morning. Her friend ran a stop sign, and a truck struck the car’s passenger side, where Kara was sitting, singing along to the radio.

When Shelly, a premed student and single mother, arrived at the scene, she saw a knot of flashing emergency vehicle lights. Then she saw her daughter lying motionless on the side of the road. “At that point, I was just hoping to be able to say goodbye to her,” Shelly remembers.

A witness to the accident had pulled Kara from the car. Shelly ran to her daughter, and Kara whispered, “I’m not dead.”

Two of the girls escaped the accident with minor injuries. Another girl had a broken neck and rode alongside Kara in an ambulance to Baptist Medical Center a few miles away. Shelly followed in her own car, thinking, Can we get there already? I just want her out of pain.

The crash had damaged three of Kara’s vertebrae, dislocated six disks in her spine, and nearly crushed several organs in her abdomen. Doctors feared a two- inch shard of bone pushing into her lower spinal cord could paralyze her. With Shelly’s permission, surgeons repaired the bone using a risky new technique. Because the treatment hadn’t been used on many patients, the surgeons warned that Kara might not walk again. She was also advised to avoid pregnancy, as it might further damage her back.

Just a few days after surgery, though, Kara took her first step. In 2001, wearing a back brace, she moved to her grandparents’ home to continue her recovery. She’d be able to navigate their house with a wheelchair, though she was in chronic pain.

That year, Shelly resumed classes at the University of Central Oklahoma and soon took a job as a technician in a local pain clinic. Shelly tried the clinic’s regimen of treatments to ease Kara’s pain, but none worked. She was devastated. “To see your child suffering takes everything that you have inside and rips it out,” she says.

One day at work, short on time, Shelly made a serendipitous discovery: When she applied laser and electrical stimulation—two pain-management treatments traditionally used one at a time—to a patient’s upper spine and arms at the same time, the patient said, “I don’t know what you just did, but it worked!”

Kara, who had begun taking history classes at the University of Central Oklahoma in 2004, was still in full-body pain. Shelly took Kara to the clinic and tried the unique treatment on her lower back. It immediately alleviated her pain. “I had been in agony for nearly four years,” says Kara. “But after the treatment, the relief was more than I could have imagined.”

Shelly partnered with doctors to test the new device. The results showed Kara’s pain relief had scientific basis. With the hard evidence in hand, Shelly patented Neurolumen, a portable device—made up of six Velcro straps embedded with LEDs, lasers, and electrical stimulators—that wraps around painful body parts to reduce swelling and increase circulation. By 2010, she had finally raised enough money to fund a company to sell the device. The FDA-approved Neurolumen is now available, with a doctor’s prescription, for purchase for $1,995, or for rent for $50 per month through neurolumen.com, or for treatments at many hospitals and clinics for $25 per session.

For Shelly, though, Kara’s recovery is the ultimate success. Defying all odds, Kara even became pregnant. She and her husband, Kyle, welcomed baby Lillian to the family in 2010.

Kara manages Neurolumen sales and marketing and hasn’t taken pain medication in nearly ten years. Says Shelly, “Watching Kara get better has kept me going. I want to help other mothers get their children out of pain without narcotics.”

The post This Single Mom Invented a Medical Device to Cure Her Daughter’s Chronic Pain appeared first on Reader's Digest.

The city of New Orleans does not sit at the mouth of the Mississippi River, as is often thought. The river continues southeast past the Big Easy for about 100 miles through a series of bends, where bayous and marshes crowd the wooded lowlands, before it finally empties into the Gulf of Mexico. The community of Braithwaite lies there among the myriad bays and lakes, part of Plaquemines Parish. The area, an 18-mile strip of land roughly two miles wide, straddles the Mississippi’s eastern bank. Because of its precarious location and soggy topography, the parish’s East Bank is surrounded by levees, meaning Braithwaite is essentially a huge tub—if the levees were breached, the town would fill up with water.

On the evening of August 28, 2012, that’s exactly what happened.

7:00 P.M. Category 1 Hurricane Isaac smashed into Louisiana and settled directly over Plaquemines, refusing to budge. The tidal surge from the nearby gulf pushed relentlessly through the marshlands, streaming over the eastern levees and submerging homes, cars, and streets. During Hurricane Katrina, seven years earlier, parts of the East Bank were inundated with about seven feet of water. With Isaac, at one point, in the space of just two hours, most of the East Bank went 12 to 18 feet under water.

The storm came so fast and furiously that most of the East Bank’s fire and police rescue equipment was now useless. All along the 18-mile stretch, dramatic scenes were unfolding during that awful night—people of all ages desperately scrambling for elevation in attics, on rooftops, in trees. The 2,000 citizens of Braithwaite and neighboring towns were on their own: The Coast Guard had deemed conditions too unsafe for rescue.

MIDNIGHT: “Big” Jesse Shaffer and his son, “Little” Jesse, were driving as fast as they could on the only open road out of town. It ran across the top of an earthen levee and led to neighboring St. Bernard Parish, which remained relatively dry. Big Jesse, 54, a semiretired cabinetmaker and commercial fisherman, and Little Jesse, 25, a nurse and volunteer firefighter, were now refugees, along with hundreds of other citizens of Braithwaite who had already fled.

Once across the parish line, the Shaffers got off the narrow levee road and parked in a cluster with their neighbors. Then Big Jesse noticed that one couple was missing and remembered that, as he and Jesse had peeled out, he’d seen their car in their driveway. They were probably still at home.

Borrowing his friend Lonnie Serpas’s 16-foot boat, which was docked nearby, Big Jesse and his brother-in-law Lanny Lafrance, 51, a commercial fisherman, left the levee wall and backtracked to save Shaffer’s neighbors.

2:00–3:00 A.M. Natasha Morgan, 32, and Domingo De Los Reyes, 33, had decided to ride out the hurricane at home. In the wee hours of the morning, Morgan awoke suddenly and hurried downstairs. Water was seeping in under the front door. She ran back up and woke De Los Reyes. By the time he got downstairs, the refrigerator had been toppled in waist-deep water. Then Morgan’s cell phone rang. It was Big Jesse: “We’re on our way.”

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With the aid of a spotlight, Big Jesse and Lafrance steered their way cautiously through the screaming storm. Neither had ever seen conditions like these. Eighty-mile-per-hour winds whipped the deep floodwaters into six-foot waves, which threatened to flip their boat. The surrounding darkness was a labyrinth of dangers: tree limbs, electrical wires, poles, rooftops. Beneath them lay a thousand other perils: submerged trucks, street signs, drifting debris. With the horizontal rain pelting their faces and eyes, the men maneuvered their way into Braithwaite.

When the boat came into view, Morgan and De Los Reyes squeezed through a tiny window onto the roof of their house. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Morgan repeated. The water was so high that they could simply step off the roof into the boat.

Meanwhile, Little Jesse, sitting in his truck to avoid the extreme weather, posted a note on his Facebook page via his cell phone: “We have a boat. Text me names and addresses.” Within minutes, the messages began pouring in: “223 Oak. Man, girlfriend, and new baby!” “410 Oak.” “7965 Highway 39. Haven’t heard from him since he went in attic.” Little Jesse relayed the disheartening news when his father returned with Morgan and De Los Reyes.

“Five people with a baby stranded on their roof on the backstreet,” shouted Little Jesse, reading from his phone. His father and Lafrance set out again into the maelstrom. A short time later, they returned with a family. A shaken young mother, Laurielle Authement, stepped from the boat onto the levee with her four-month-old baby in her arms.

Martin Johnson, Jr., and Everett Cook were living out their own private nightmare in Braithwaite. The two parish workers had been operating a pumping station until 2 a.m., when the marsh levee began overtopping.

Johnson jumped into his truck, with Cook driving right behind him. But they were trapped by the rising waters. The only piece of unflooded ground was atop the levee itself. They made an uphill charge. When their wheels began spinning in the mud, they jumped out of their trucks, grabbed a spare tire to use as an emergency flotation device, and carried it to the highest point of the levee. Johnson called their supervisor and pleaded for rescue. He and Cook waited, standing across from each other, clinging to the tire in the thrashing rain, watching as the water swallowed their vehicles and rose up to their thighs. One step in any direction, and they would be swept away—and Cook couldn’t swim.

Then Cook felt something. “Martin, a snake!”

Johnson shone his light down into the water. Wrapped around Cook’s left leg was a white-banded black king snake. Johnson seized it and flung it as hard as he could.

A minute later, Johnson’s phone rang. It was his supervisor. “I’m doing what I can, Martin,” he said.

“It’s not your fault,” Johnson said. “You know what you’ve got to tell my children.”

5:30 A.M. Lonnie Serpas, who’d given Big Jesse his boat, was in radio contact with the parish’s emergency operations center and learned of the two men’s situation. When Big Jesse and Lafrance returned with the Authement family, Serpas sent them back out to get Johnson and Cook.

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6:00 A.M. After balancing on the levee in the stinging rain for some four hours, Johnson and Cook saw the lights of a boat approaching. Big Jesse piloted over the submerged trucks and pulled the exhausted men aboard. Mustering his strength, Johnson looked Big Jesse in the eye and whispered, “Thank you.”

6:30 A.M. The storm still raged; the rain still slashed. But daylight brought help: The Shaffers’ friends Keith Billiot, an off-duty DEA agent; Jimmy Kamm, an assistant fire chief; and Tracy Arcement, owner of a boat-rental business.

Billiot and Lafrance commandeered a boat that had washed up against the levee with the key still in the ignition. Kamm had brought his own boat, so Little Jesse climbed in with him. And Big Jesse kept working Serpas’s boat, now with Arcement.

Bizarre scenes greeted the rescuers: horses treading water, railroad cars overturned, cattle on the second floor of a house, homes pulled off their foundations and deposited in the street, a rooftop with two deer, a wild hog, and a man awaiting rescue. On Little Jesse’s first mission, he and Kamm saved a family of five screaming on the very peak of their mobile home, with the water only a foot away from fully submerging them. It was a mystery how the parents had gotten the three little ones—all still in diapers—onto the roof, along with the family dog.

On and on they worked all through that day. A family here. A group of ten there. Kamm and Little Jesse rescued a 70-year-old man trapped in his attic, using a fire ax to smash their way in past a ventilation fan. Big Jesse and Arcement rescued ten migrant workers afloat on canoes inside a metal storage shed, with two feet between themselves and the ceiling. Billiot and Lafrance released a family from their attic using a chain saw, and rescued, among others, a woman in her 80s and some rabbits and chickens.

7:30 P.M. By sundown on the 29th, everyone who needed to be rescued had been. Two people had died along the East Bank, presumably caught by the waters while they slept. But without outside help, the Shaffers and their friends had made an otherwise clean sweep of the 18-mile stretch, rescuing 120 people and dozens of animals, including a parakeet in a cage.

Hurricane Isaac took every structure on that stretch of the East Bank, including 500 homes and businesses. Many who, like the Shaffers, had already lost their homes in Katrina chose not to rebuild in Plaquemines. But the feeling of community held strong. Nearby parishes donated bottled water, food, and clothing, and Little Jesse and his friends distributed the goods to anyone with a Plaquemines Parish ID.

Big Jesse, too, continued to serve his neighbors. In the days following the storm, he arose every morning and waited at the levee with a boat to bring people into Braithwaite for their belongings. “You’d be surprised how thrilled somebody is to salvage just one little trinket,” he says.

He did this all day, every day—his face and lips peeling from the sun—for two weeks. At night when he closed his eyes, he was haunted by the traumatized stares of those he had saved. “I rescued 60 people, and I can see each and every one of their faces, how scared they were,” he says, his voice breaking.

But each dream ended the same, the way it ended in real life. “They were happy,” he says. “They were happy to see me.”

The post A Devastating Hurricane Couldn’t Stop This Father and Son From Rescuing Their Entire Community appeared first on Reader's Digest.

I was two years shy of becoming a mother when I learned my greatest lesson about parenting. This information was not gleaned from a New York Times bestseller, a renowned pediatrician, or an experienced parent. It came from a ten-year-old boy born to a drug-addicted mother, with an Individualized Education Plan thicker than an encyclopedia—a boy with permanent scars along the side of his left arm from a beating with an extension cord when he was three. Kyle* taught me the one and only thing I really needed to know about loving a child through the challenges of life: Be present. 

It had been a difficult move. I’d left my family and friends in Indiana, the beloved state where I’d lived most of my life. My new home in Florida was thousands of miles away from anything I knew. It was hot—all the time. Jobs were hard to come by, but I was up for almost any challenge.

I accepted a position teaching students ages 6 to 12 with severe learning and behavioral difficulties who’d been shuffled from school to school. So far, no program in the district was able to meet their needs.

Another teacher and I had spent weeks teaching the children appropriate behavior for public outings; on this particular day, we would be going to play miniature golf and to eat lunch in a restaurant. Miraculously, only a few students, including Kyle, had not earned the privilege of going. He was determined to make his disappointment known.

In the corridor between classrooms, he began screaming, cursing, spitting, and swinging at anything within striking distance. Once his outburst subsided, he did what he’d done when he was angry at all his other schools, at home, even once at a juvenile detention center. He ran.

The crowd of onlookers that congregated during the spectacle watched in disbelief as Kyle dashed straight into the heavy morning traffic in front of the school.

I heard someone shout, “Call the police!”

But I couldn’t just stand there. So I ran after him.

Kyle was at least a foot taller than me. And he was fast. His older brothers were track stars at the nearby high school. But I had worn running shoes for the field trip, and I could run long distances without tiring. I would at least be able to keep him in my sight and know he was alive.

After several blocks of running directly into oncoming traffic, Kyle slowed his pace. Although it was still early, the tropical sun was beating down on the black Tarmac.

He took a sharp left and began walking through a dilapidated strip mall. Standing next to a trash compactor, Kyle bent over with his hands on his knees. He was heaving to catch his breath when he saw me. I must have looked ridiculous—the front of my lightweight blouse soaked with sweat, my once-styled hair now plastered to the side of my beet-red face. He stood up abruptly like a frightened animal.

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But his was not a look of fear. I saw his body relax. He did not attempt to run again. Kyle stood still and watched me approach. I had no idea what I was going to say or do, but I kept walking closer.

We locked eyes, and I willed every ounce of compassion and understanding in my heart toward his. He opened his mouth to speak when a police car pulled up, abruptly filling the space between Kyle and me. The school principal and an officer got out. They spoke calmly to Kyle, who willingly climbed into the back of the vehicle. I couldn’t hear what was said, but I didn’t take my eyes off Kyle’s face, even as they drove away.

I couldn’t help but feel that I had failed him, that I should have done or said more, that I should have fixed the situation.

I shared my feelings with a speech therapist who was familiar with Kyle’s history. “No one ever ran after him before, Rachel,” she said. “No one. They just let him go.”

When Kyle eventually came back to school, I quickly noticed that when he had a choice of which teacher to work with or accompany him to special classes, he chose me. As weeks passed, he was glued to my side, complying with instructions,
attempting to do his work, and—once in a while—even smiling. For a child with severe attachment issues, it was amazing that he was developing a bond with me.

One day, Kyle unexpectedly grasped my hand. It was unusual for a boy his age and size to hold his teacher’s hand, but I knew I must act like it was the most normal thing in the world. He leaned in and quietly said something I will never forget. “I love you, Miss Stafford,” he whispered. “I never told anyone that before.”

Part of me wanted to ask, “Why me?” But instead, I simply relished the moment, an unimaginable breakthrough from a child whose file bore the words: “Unable to express love or maintain a loving relationship with another human being.”

Things changed the day he ran and I ran after him, even though I didn’t have the right words, even though I wasn’t able to save him from the mess he was in. It was the day I didn’t throw my hands in the air and decide he was too fast, a waste of time and effort, a lost cause. It was the day my mere presence was enough to make a profound difference.

Writer and speaker Rachel Macy Stafford lives in Alabama with her husband and two daughters. Read more of her work at handsfreemama.com.

*Name changed to protect privacy

The post A Teacher Remembers: The Student Who Taught Me My Greatest Lesson About Being a Mom appeared first on Reader's Digest.

On a cold afternoon in January 2015, Yesenia Diosdado, 11, got off a school bus in Lenexa, Kansas, near the apartment building where she lives with her family. When the bus pulled away, Yesenia saw police and emergency workers attending to victims of a three-car accident that had occurred at a busy intersection nearby. Yesenia joined a small crowd of onlookers across the street.

She noticed that an injured woman was trying to communicate with an EMS worker using sign language, but he couldn’t understand her. “I heard him ask for an interpreter,” Yesenia says.

She ran over to the paramedic to help—her mother, a former sign language interpreter, had taught her and her siblings how to sign (no one in the family is hearing impaired).

“She said, ‘I sign. Can I help?’” says EMS captain Chris Winger. “I was floored.”

Yesenia was able to relay to the emergency personnel that the woman’s neck was injured and tell them the name of the local hospital she preferred. “She looked really hurt,” says Yesenia. “I’m proud that I got to do something to help.”

When her mother, Susan Milidore, 36, heard about Yesenia’s heroics, she wasn’t surprised. “It’s in her nature to help,” says Susan. “I was impressed that she recognized the seriousness of the situation and took charge. Most adults wouldn’t have done that.”

A few weeks later, paramedics presented Yesenia with a gold coin and a certificate of appreciation at her elementary school.

“My mom always says that you never know when sign language might come in handy,” says Yesenia. “That day, it did.”

The post When Paramedics Needed a Sign Language Interpreter, This 11-Year-Old Stepped Up to Help appeared first on Reader's Digest.

As injured Army veteran Jerral Hancock maneuvered his electric wheelchair into a classroom at Lancaster High School, Jamie Goodreau’s students fell into a rapt silence. It was May 29, 2013, Jerral’s 27th birthday and the sixth anniversary of the balmy day in Iraq when the tank he was driving rolled over a bomb and burst into flames. Jerral was paralyzed from the chest down and lost his left arm in the blast.

When he returned home from war to a cramped mobile home on the gritty east side of Lancaster, California, Jerral struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder, a traumatic brain injury, and limited use of his right arm, he told the students. His mother and stepfather, his primary caretakers, lived across the street from him and stepped up to help—especially after his wife left him and their two small children.

“Life has to go on,” Jerral said. “Whether I choose to sit and pout or go with the flow is up to me.”

After Jerral left the classroom, Jamie and her students talked about his situation. The kids had a great idea: They would raise money to build the veteran a handicapped- accessible house. With their teacher’s help, the students launched Operation All the Way Home, or OATH, the next month. To raise money, they ran fund-raisers, hosted bake sales, and conducted yard sales.

As word spread about OATH, donations poured in from other military veterans and the public. “The community played such a major part in supporting the project,” says Martin John Gonzales, 19, one of OATH’s 23 founding members. “They could see how hard we were working.”

By September, the students had raised more than $70,000, and with Jerral’s blessing, they bought a lot in the Los Angeles valley large enough for two homes—a single-level structure for Jerral and his kids and a smaller one for his mother and stepfather. The real estate agent waived her commission, stores supplied building materials, and a local architectural firm provided free blueprints.

In March 2014, OATH got a surprise call from actor Gary Sinise, who is well known for his efforts on behalf of vets, offering to donate $60,000.

When the framing for Jerral’s house went up in early 2015, the students wrote messages of love and good wishes for the soldier on the beams with markers.

Jerral’s new 2,600-square-foot home has four bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, and automated doors, lights, and blinds that he can control with an iPad. The students unveiled the finished homes in a 300-person ceremony on May 29, 2015, Jerral’s 29th birthday. Escorted by the motorcycle group Patriot Guard Riders, Jerral wheeled past a long line of OATH student members welcoming him to his new house. A choir sang the national anthem, and students spoke emotionally about the experience.

“I was so happy that we met our goal,” says Kimberly Castano, 19, a former OATH member. “But more excited that Jerral could move in.”

On the eighth anniversary of his injuries, Jerral was finally home.

“I am honored that so many people came together to make it possible,” he says.

The post What These Teens Did For a Paralyzed War Veteran Will Bring Tears to Your Eyes appeared first on Reader's Digest.

In 1975, Englishman Tom Michell was living in South America, where he taught at an English-language boarding school in Argentina. On winter break, he went to Uruguay and on the beach came across an oil-soaked penguin, the lone survivor of a spill. Moved by the bird’s distress, Michell brought him back to the apartment where he was staying, cleaned him, and fed him. The penguin quickly became attached to the young teacher, so he brought the bird—whom he’d named Juan Salvado—back with him to school. He installed him on a terrace adjoining his rooms in one of the dormitories; there the gregarious penguin enjoyed abundant sun and shade and entertained his many visitors. In Michell’s new memoir, The Penguin Lessons, he writes about the joy that Juan Salvado brought to everyone he met.

From the very first day that I brought a penguin to live at St. George’s, one student in particular wanted to help with his care, and that boy’s name was Diego Gonzales. Diego arrived at school a shy 13-year-old lad who gave the impression of being frightened by his own shadow. He was not an academically gifted student and struggled with his work.

None of St. George’s extracurricular activities seemed to suit him either; he was a slightly built boy who couldn’t catch a ball to save his life.

In addition, Diego’s knowledge of English was limited, and even his Spanish was heavily laced with the patois of his native Bolivia, so he tended to avoid conversation. But the saddest part of all was the homesickness he suffered. He hadn’t been ready to leave his family, and he missed them dreadfully. It came as no surprise that the boy spent as much time with Juan Salvado as he could. Diego was not entirely without friends, but they were students like him who had similar problems fitting in.

The possibility of letting Juan Salvado swim free in the school’s outdoor pool had occurred to me—our pool was unusual because it was completely devoid of any filtration or chlorination system—but when he first came to live at St. George’s in the winter months, the water was foul. The pool sat stagnant during the chilly winter, but once the temperature rose, it was drained, scrubbed, and filled. Following the pool’s commissioning, this cycle continued every two weeks throughout the season.

By the end of the pool’s first fortnight in use, the weather was still cool, and only a few students wanted to swim. I had waited for this particular evening when the pool was scheduled for its routine cleaning—no one would object if Juan Salvado fouled the water before it was drained. As soon as the swimmers departed, I signaled Diego and two of his friends who were exercising Juan Salvado on the fields nearby to bring him. Diego placed the bird next to me, and as I walked to the pool, Juan Salvado followed. He surveyed the water without apparently comprehending its nature.

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“Go on!” I said, miming a dive and gesticulating with a paddling action. He looked at me, then at the pool. “It’s all right. You can swim!” I said, splashing water on him. Juan Salvado looked me in the eyes as if to ask, “Ah! Is this where the fish come from?” Without further encouragement, he plunged in.

With a single flip of his wings, he flew like an arrow across the water and collided with the wall on the opposite side, face-first, at considerable speed. The impact was palpable. There was a groan and a sharp intake of breath from Diego and his friends. Juan Salvado rose to the surface spluttering and dazed. He paddled about, giving little jerks of his head, but after a moment, he gave a vigorous shake and ducked below the surface again.

I was thoroughly familiar with Juan Salvado’s clumsy and amusing progress on land, but now I watched in awe. I had never had the chance to study a penguin in the water at such close range. Using only a stroke or two, he flew from one end of the pool to the other, executing dramatic turns and passing within a hair’s breadth of the sides without brushing against them.

Using the full volume of the 25-meter swimming pool, he looped the loop and leaped out of the water. Falling in again, he dived to the bottom and raced from one end to the other before corkscrewing back. He flew through the water many times faster than the swiftest human—a length took him a couple of seconds—and he alternated his subsurface demonstrations with intervals of paddling on the surface and splashing about.

The only comparison that could be drawn with this exhibition would be a bird in flight or an expert ice-skater on a rink. It was clear to me now how badly he needed to use his wing muscles that had been idle too long. Juan Salvado had finally found the freedom to express his true nature, savor his independence, and show us all just what it meant to be a penguin.

“Look at him go!” Diego and the boys shouted. “Ooooh!” and “Ahhh!” they cooed, as though they were watching a fireworks display.

After a while, Diego asked me quietly, “Can I swim with him too?”

“What? And it’s ‘May I swim,’” I corrected him.

“Sí. May I swim? Oh, please! Five minute only.”

I was astonished. I had never known Diego to want to do anything, apart from seek out Juan Salvado and avoid the rest of the school. He was showing an interest in something at long last.

“But the water is cold, and it’s getting late now! Are you sure you want to go in?” I asked.

“Please!” Diego implored.

“All right,” I said, “but be quick!”

Diego’s eyes were sparkling, and he seemed truly alive for the first time since I had known him. He ran to the dorm to get changed and reappeared in no time. Without hesitating, he dived into the water. Part of me suspected he’d sink like a stone, and I was prepared to jump in and rescue him.

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But for the second time that evening, I was astonished. Not only could Diego swim, but he swam magnificently! He chased after Juan Salvado, and though with anyone else it would have looked absurd, he swam so elegantly that their pairing wasn’t ridiculous at all. As Diego swam, the penguin spiraled around the boy. I had never before seen such interaction between two species, and it gave all the appearance of having been choreographed to highlight each of their skills. Sometimes Juan Salvado took the lead and Diego swam as though chasing him; Juan Salvado allowed Diego to get close behind him, and then off he would fly. At other times, Diego led and the penguin swam around the boy, making figure eights as though spinning a cocoon. Occasionally, they swam so close that they almost touched. I was entranced.

After five minutes as promised, Diego swam to the edge. In one graceful movement, he sprang out of the pool and stood with water streaming from his hair, over his shoulders, and onto the floor. Next, skimming through the water, came Juan Salvado, like a homing torpedo. With a flick of his wings at the critical moment, he rocketed out of the water and came to a gliding halt on his tummy by my feet. We laughed out loud.

I was almost speechless. I had witnessed an acrobatic (or aquabatic?) display the likes of which I had never seen before. But that was not all. Standing quietly by the pool and chewing the corner of his towel was a lithe youth who, I was confident, could outswim almost anyone in the school. It was a revelation. Diego wasn’t the sad chap we had become used to but a very normal boy with a very special talent, and nobody had realized it until then.

“Diego! You can swim!”

“Sí, I can swim. Thank you.”

“No, I mean you are able to swim really well. Brilliantly, in fact!”

“You think?” he asked without looking directly at me, but I saw just the flicker of a smile on his face—the first, I believe, that had touched his lips since he’d arrived at school.

As we returned to the dorm, Diego told me that his father had taught him to swim in Bolivia. He also spoke freely about other things he enjoyed at home. I listened in silence, without correcting his English, as he talked nonstop back to the house. It was as though I were with a different boy. Shortly afterward, I called in on the housemaster and said Diego might be “rounding the corner.” I didn’t explain. That could wait.

I went back to my rooms, picked up a glass and a bottle of wine, and went out to sit on the terrace with Juan Salvado. Darkness was falling quickly, as it does in those latitudes, and the stars were coming out. I always kept some fish in reserve, and I gave them, one at a time, to the penguin, who ate them greedily and then settled to sleep by my feet. The cicadas were chirruping in the eucalyptus trees, masking all other sounds. I poured some wine into the glass. It was as though I were pouring a libation in thanks to the gods, and I drank to their health.

The Penguin Lessons by Tom Michell. Copyright © 2015 by Tom Michell. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Click here to buy the book.

The post The Incredible Story of a Rescued Penguin That Saved a Misfit Student From Loneliness appeared first on Reader's Digest.

When he was 12 years old, the boy did something he only later realized probably hurt his seventh-grade teacher. It was minor—he was, after all, a kid. But in time, when he was older and wiser, he wanted to find this teacher and apologize. But the teacher seemed to have vanished. Over the decades, the boy—Larry Israelson, now a man—occasionally turned to the Internet, typing the teacher’s name into search boxes. He never found anything. But he never quit looking. Last year—by now nearly 39 years after the event happened—he got a hit.

Stunned, he started reading a story I had written in the Oregonian about a program that helps at-risk kids. He studied an accompanying photograph and recognized his teacher, who was a volunteer. He then e-mailed me:

You published an item involving retired teacher James Atteberry. Mr. Atteberry was a teacher of mine in the early ’70s, and I wish to apologize to him for a regrettable incident that occurred when I was his student. Would you be willing to serve as an intermediary and deliver a message on my behalf?

I contacted Atteberry. Intrigued, he told me to respond to this former student and see what happened. Shortly thereafter, I received an overnight package containing a sealed envelope, which I then forwarded to Atteberry.

When I mentioned this letter to people, they all reacted in the same way: They each had someone they wished they could apologize to. And they told me that by the time they realized that truth, it was too late.

In my case, it was someone who has haunted me for decades.

My third-grade teacher had organized a Christmas gift exchange. On the big day, we sat in a circle, taking turns ripping open a fancy package containing a new toy. Then it was my turn. The teacher handed me something that had been wrapped in paper that was clearly reused. It was so wrinkled and re-taped that the colors had faded. With everyone watching, I peeled back the paper and pulled out a cheap paperback book with torn and dirty pages.

Tucked inside was a handwritten note identifying the girl who gave it to me. When I announced her name, my classmates started laughing. Her gift was yet another indication of just how different this girl was from the rest of us. She’d arrive late to class, her hair wet and unkempt. She didn’t have friends, and the popular students made fun of her because she was poor and wore old clothes.

Even though this incident happened nearly 50 years ago, I remember that afternoon as if it were yesterday. As the class laughed, this eight-year-old girl turned in her chair to hide her tears while the teacher unsuccessfully tried to restore order in a class that had turned on the weakest among us.

At that moment, I was worried that the popular kids would think that this girl and I were friends. So I didn’t thank her or even acknowledge the gift. Only decades later—like Larry Israelson—did I realize that what I did next was unforgivable: I tossed the book in the garbage.

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For years I wanted to apologize. So while waiting to see what became of Israelson and Atteberry, I typed her name into an Internet search field. I found nothing. I realized then why Israelson was so intent on finding Atteberry. It was all about getting a second chance.

As James Atteberry read the letter, he was brought back to 1973, when he was a middle school history and composition teacher in Huntington Beach, just south of Los Angeles. He was 37, got great reviews, and was well liked. He was also gay.

“If a teacher was found to be gay, his contract would not be renewed,” Atteberry said. “Gay teachers kept their mouths shut. People of this era might not understand it. But it was an intense time. An art teacher in the school made a stupid mistake, and that was the end of his career. I never talked about my life.”

And yes, he told me, he remembered Larry Israelson.

I am truly sorry for asking to be transferred out of your seventh grade social studies class during the 1972–73 school year. I don’t have many memories from school, but at the top of one of my assignments you wrote “You will go far in life. Your command of the English language is exceptional.” Looking back on my younger self, I am certain that I reveled in being one of the teacher’s pets. As comfortable as I was in a classroom, however, the boy’s locker room was something else entirely.

On the phone, Larry Israelson’s voice is low, strong, and confident. He stands, he says, six feet five inches and played water polo in high school and in college.

“But when I was 12,” he said, “I was a scrawny little kid who was into books. A lot of the athletic guys loved to tease those of us who were weak. You know what it is to feel powerless?”

Some students suspected Atteberry was gay. A boy in class asked Atteberry what he thought about a proposed law banning gay teachers. When Atteberry asked the boy why he’d posed the question, the student said his father had specifically told him to ask Atteberry. The teacher chose his words carefully.

Israelson was one of his best students. Bright and articulate, he submitted essays that Atteberry thought were remarkably good. “I would praise Larry in class,” Atteberry said. “That was his downfall.”

In the locker room, boys began picking on Israelson.

“They started saying ‘Larry’ and then ‘fairy’ and rhyming it with ‘Atteberry,’” Israelson recalled.

When he pleaded with them to stop, he was challenged to a fight.

“I took a couple of hard punches,” he said. “I gave up.”

The teasing intensified, with the taunts becoming more sexually explicit and graphic. Israelson told no one. One day, when he could no longer stand it, he showed up at the principal’s office and said he needed to leave Atteberry’s class. The principal couldn’t understand why, but he eventually signed a transfer slip and handed it to Israelson. The student walked into Atteberry’s classroom, interrupted the lesson, and handed Atteberry the slip. Without a word, Israelson gathered his books and walked out the door.

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“There was no goodbye, no explanation,” Israelson said. “I just disappeared. I never talked to Mr. Atteberry again.”

When it comes to apologies, no one gets a pass in this life. Everyone deserves one, and everyone needs to give one. When Israelson married, he was the first Anglo to marry into a Mexican-American family. More than a decade into the marriage—by this time, he and his wife, Conny, had two daughters—his brother-in-law invited him out for a beer. After some small talk, his brother-in-law took a deep breath and got to the point.

“He apologized,” Israelson said. “He said that he hadn’t wanted an Anglo in the family. He’d lobbied behind the scenes to try to get his sister to break up with me. He said he’d felt bad about it for all these years and decided it was time to make it right.”

That phrase made Israelson think of Atteberry. The man had inspired and encouraged Israelson at a time when a compliment or praise scrawled across the top of an essay so mattered in a boy’s young life. He thought about what it must have been like for Atteberry to hide who he was. Israelson intensified his search. A decade later, he found my story.

Israelson had been writing an imaginary letter to Atteberry for over 30 years. But now he struggled to find the right words. He was “truly sorry” for asking to be transferred, he wrote. “I know my age was a mitigating factor, but when I replayed this incident in my adult head, it shamed me.”

He sealed the envelope and sent it to me to be forwarded to Atteberry. He expected nothing more. He had done what he had set out to do, and now it was over.

When Atteberry read the letter, he, too, remembered what it had been like to be a boy. Like Israelson, he had been bullied. Two athletes had grabbed him when he was walking home, forced him to pull down his pants, and whipped him with a belt. Shamed, he told no one, the matter made worse when the athletes tormented him by demanding each day that he turn over his lunch money to them.

In a strange way, this letter allowed Atteberry to come to terms with his own past. He was not alone.

Atteberry had always wondered why Israelson had left his class. Was it something he did or said to this student? Now he knew.

He set the letter aside, went to his computer, and typed Israelson’s name into a search box. He found the address and a telephone number.

One thousand miles away, a phone rang. A man answered.

“Larry,” a voice on the other end said, “this is your teacher.”

Reader’s Digest arranged for James Atteberry and Larry Israelson to meet after 40 years. The former teacher arrived early at the hotel lounge. He sat peering at everyone to see if he could recognize his old student. Then he spotted a tall man ambling toward him. “What happened to that little guy?” he asked, smiling.

“He grew up,” said Larry Israelson.

After a long hug and some catching up, Atteberry jumped into the subject that had brought them together in July—that article published in the Oregonian. “I was puzzled why you left the class. I knew it wasn’t because you were rotten,” Atteberry said with a laugh. “It was survival. In junior high, it is survival of the fittest.”

Both men voiced surprise over the attention the article had received—the calls, letters, and e-mails sent their way from around the world.

“The takeaway is optimism,” reasoned Israelson. “There are universal themes of an apology sought and forgiveness granted.”

At the end of their reunion—which included lunch with Israelson’s wife, Conny—Israelson accepted an invitation to visit Atteberry and his partner next year.

“How wonderful it is that we can go back into our past,” said Atteberry later. “All of this has made me think about what a wonderful life I have lived.”

Tom Hallman, Jr., is the author of A Stranger’s Gift: True Stories of Faith in Unexpected Places and Sam: The Boy Behind the Mask.

The post He Waited 39 Years to Apologize to the Teacher He Wronged. Too Late to Say Sorry? appeared first on Reader's Digest.

My son Zach was born with brain damage that occurred during his birth. His brother Gerry—older by three minutes—is fine. Zach is now 24, but his comprehension skills are roughly that of an eight- or nine-year-old. He can read, but he doesn’t understand many of the sentences. He can’t add a hundred plus a hundred, although he does know the result is “a lot.” I took him to see the movie Spartacus when he was nine, and after a blood-flowing scene at a Roman villa where Kirk Douglas single-handedly killed two million buffed-up soldiers with a plastic knife, he turned to me and said, “Look, Dad! A pool!” He has always loved pools.

As Zach grew out of childhood, I never knew how much he would understand. While his vocabulary expanded rapidly, his knowledge of what words meant did not keep pace. When I tried to explain something abstract, I could sense him sifting through his hard drive with its millions of data points. But the hard drive did not help him with concepts like preventive health measures or racism. He knew who the president was but not Osama bin Laden. He knew something terrible had happened on 9/11, but when the anniversary came, he called to wish me a “happy 9/11!”

Instead, our relationship had been largely predicated on games. He loved goofy hypotheticals: What would happen if he did something I told him he could not do. When I kissed him good night, he invariably asked me if there was a certain word or name he could not say after I turned out the lights.

“What can’t I say?”

“You can’t say Rick Lyman.”

“What happens if I say Rick Lyman?”

“I will have to come back upstairs.”

Dressed in his usual T-shirt and gym shorts, anticipating the tickling war we referred to as cuddies, he began to giggle. I walked down the stairs and waited at the second-floor landing. He was plotting strategy.

“RICK!” he screamed. (I did nothing.)

“RICK LY!!!!” (I did nothing.)

“RICK LYMAN!!!!!!!!!!!”

I ran back upstairs and banged open the door. It was on. I threw pillows at him. He threw pillows at me. I got ahold of him and tickled. He kicked me in the head. I chased him around the room, became exhausted, and had to stop. He seemed exhausted as well. I rolled the top sheet over him, kissed him good night, and went back downstairs. From above I could hear a pulsating drum getting louder and louder.

“Rick Lyman … RICK LYMAN! … RICK LYMAN!!!”

He could have gone on forever. At any time. At any age. But when he turned 21, after nearly 15 straight years of doing it, I decided it had to stop. I was ambivalent about giving it up, but I could not stand it anymore. It only reaffirmed our frozenness.

“Zach, you’re 21 now. Not six. This is what six-year-olds do. I can’t do it anymore.”

“Sorry, Dad.”

“There is nothing to be sorry about. You’re just too old. You’re 21. What happens when you are 21?”

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“You’re not supposed to do things like that anymore.”

“That’s right. Do you understand why?”

“I’m 21; I’m kinda too old for this now.”

I closed the door to his room.

I stood right outside, then burst back in. “Just don’t say good night.”

It was on again. I knew it was one of the things he loved about being with me. I was scared of losing it.

It is strange to love someone so much who is still so fundamentally mysterious. Strange is a lousy word. It is the most terrible pain of my life. As much as I try to engage Zach, I also run from this challenge. I run out of guilt. I run because he was robbed, and I feel I was robbed. I run because of my shame.

But whatever happens with Zach, I know I cannot think in terms of my best interests, even if I think they are also in his best interests. Zach will be where and who he will be. Because he needs to be. Because he wants to be. Because as famed physician Oliver Sacks said, all children, whatever the impairment, are propelled by the need to make themselves whole. They may not get there, and they may need massive guidance, but they must forever try.

Buzz Bissinger is an author and a journalist. Zach lives with his father in Philadelphia and his mother in New Jersey.

Father’s Day: A Journey Into the Mind and Heart of My Extraordinary Son, by Buzz Bissinger, Copyright  © 2012 by H. G. Bissinger, is published at $26 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing CO., hmhbooks.com.

The post Buzz Bissinger: The Incredible Lessons I Learned From My Son With Brain Damage appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Dogtooth Peak, in Central California’s Sierra National Forest, towers 10,300 feet above sea level, jutting from the surrounding rock like a hand reaching for the sky. On a Thursday morning last July, three friends eyed the peak and began the ascent from the alpine lakeside where they’d spent the second night of a camping trip. The group, all experienced hikers, wasn’t daunted by the two-mile stretch up gradually rising switchbacks to the peak’s base. But the last 200- to 300-yard trudge toward the summit was a different story.

When the trio rounded a bend and saw the rocky ascent to the peaks, the eldest of the trio, 72-year-old Birde Newborn, turned back. She suffered from heart trouble and didn’t want to push her limits. Her companions, Larry Bishop and Cerena Childress, made it another hundred yards to the last dip before Dogtooth’s jutting apex. They paused beneath a wind-twisted cedar to contemplate the final 100-yard stretch, which required a scramble over massive boulders.

To Bishop, a retired hazardous-materials specialist for the Santa Barbara County Fire Department, the challenge seemed minor. At 64, he was lean and vigorous. He’d been hiking, on and off, since he was a Boy Scout; in recent years, after returning to the hobby, he’d bagged some of the highest peaks in the West. Compared with 14,000-footers like Mount Whitney or Mount Langley, he thought, this was nothing.

Childress, 67, was a passionate outdoorswoman, the most seasoned member of the informal backpacking club she’d cofounded with Newborn and Bishop at their church. Still, she wasn’t as limber as she used to be. “Those rocks look like leg breakers,” she said when Bishop asked if she was coming. “Anyway,” she added, nodding toward her Tibetan spaniel, which was snuffling through the chaparral, “Clover wouldn’t make it. I’ll wait here.”

Bishop removed his day pack so that it wouldn’t upset his balance on the uneven terrain. “I’ll run up and take a few pictures. Back in no time.”

“Give a yell if you find that easier trail we saw online,” Childress said. “Or if you break your leg.”

Bishop laughed and strode off, swinging his hiking poles. The website they’d consulted for the trip had mentioned an alternate route to the peak, but there was no sign of it as he clambered through the boulder field. It took him just 15 minutes to reach the jagged mountaintop, where a group of Outward Bound instructors and students were practicing rappelling. He joined them in admiring the gorgeous panorama of the High Sierras. He cupped his hands and shouted to Cerena to join him. He heard no response.

As he started down, Bishop noticed a cairn—a pile of stones often used to mark a trail. Was this the easy way? He headed in the direction the cairn seemed to indicate.

The path down from the summit quickly grew steeper. There were no more markers, but Bishop saw a flat, sandy patch about 30 feet below; perhaps it led to an outlet. Soon the slope was nearly vertical, and he had to face the rocks and use his hands to lower himself.

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Then his foot slipped, and he was sailing through the air.

The Long View

Dazed, he lay in the sand, trying to piece together what had happened. He’d fallen only ten feet, and no limbs were broken. But when he touched the back of his head, his hand came away bloody. Bishop pulled some paper towels from his cargo pocket and stuffed them inside his broad-brimmed hat to cover the wound. He considered calling to the Outward Bound group, but he wasn’t badly injured. And he was confident that he could find his way down.

This trail, he now realized, wasn’t so easy after all; in fact, it didn’t even seem to be a trail. Climbing back up would be too dangerous. But if he descended a bit farther, he figured, he could navigate around the base of the peak to where Childress was waiting. He began to follow a narrow drainage channel down the mountainside. Soon it led him to a vast expanse of granite, as steep and slick as a playground slide, which emptied onto a boulder field 600 feet below. Bishop tried using the edge of a slab for traction, but his boots shot out from under him, and he skidded a short yet terrifying distance on his backside. He tried again—and skidded again.

Just below him was a shallow depression in the rock. He scuttled gingerly down to it, wedged his butt into the crevice, and planted his hiking poles in two small cracks to hold himself in place.

Clinging to the side of the mountain, he began to fully understand his predicament. He’d left his cell phone in his tent, but there was no reception out here anyway. He had an emergency whistle, but it was in his day pack, along with his water bottle, granola, and jacket. The sun beat down through the thin mountain air, and he was already thirsty. He shouted for help, but the only response was the echo of his own voice.

Fishing in his pockets, Bishop found a few mints, his camera, his datebook, and a pen. He popped a mint into his mouth to fight the dryness, then took a photo of the landscape and another of his own face. It was 2 p.m. In the datebook, he wrote to his wife and their 30-year-old daughter, beginning, “Kal and Sarah, I love you. Sorry I can’t make it.”

Then he explained how he’d gotten into this mess. If someone found  him at the bottom of the cliff, he wanted his family to know what had happened.

At the base of Dogtooth Peak, Cerena Childress was recovering from a nosebleed, probably brought on by the altitude. More than an hour had passed since she thought she heard Bishop calling her name from somewhere above, and there was still no sign of him. She didn’t dare try to reach the summit to look for him, and there was no one else to ask for help—she hadn’t seen another hiker in ages.

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Around 1 p.m., she noticed that Clover’s paw was bleeding. She would have to carry him back to camp, and the going would be slow. Maybe Larry is lying out there hurt, Childress thought; if so, my sitting here won’t do him any good. Or maybe he decided to go have an adventure. In any case, she needed to get back to camp before dark.

When she reached the campsite two hours later, she learned that Birde Newborn hadn’t seen Bishop either. It was too late to hike out and alert the authorities.

Parting Words

Larry Bishop felt relieved as shadows covered the rock face and the heat grew less brutal, but as the temperature dropped into the 50s, he began to shiver. Periodically, he shouted for help, mostly to hear the sound of someone’s voice. Each time an airplane passed, he experienced a surge of hope—could they be searching already?—then a rush of disappointment. In his datebook, he scribbled observations (“Facing death, the world sure looks beautiful”), regrets (“If only I’d brought my jacket”), resolutions (“I will cherish water”). To minimize his own suffering, he remembered that of others: his older sister, who struggled with emphysema; the migrant workers he’d met 40 years before, as a Peace Corps volunteer in Borneo, who faced hunger daily and carried all their possessions on their backs.

Sleep, he knew, would be fatal—if he let his limbs go slack, he would slide 600 feet down the mountain. So as darkness fell, he began to sing every song he knew: Beatles songs, folk songs, lullabies he’d sung to his daughter when she was a baby. The lyrics to “Help Me Make It Through the Night” took on a special urgency. He watched the constellations wheel overhead and tried to remember all their names. To keep warm and ward off muscle cramps, he did Tai Chi exercises, moving his arms and legs as much as his awkward position permitted.

Still, by the time the eastern sky grew pink, he was sore in every part of his body. At 5:30 Friday morning, he wrote the day’s first journal entry: “Survived until sunrise.”

Around the same time, Cerena Childress and Birde Newborn were watching the first rays filter through the fabric of their tents. Neither had slept much. The evening before, they’d learned from a fellow camper that the closest place to make a phone call was at Courtright Reservoir, a nine-mile march eastward through rugged backcountry. As the faster hiker, Childress volunteered to make the journey. She set out at 7:30 a.m.

Newborn—leading Clover—headed for the trailhead they’d started from, five miles to the west, where Bishop’s car was waiting in the parking lot. (Fortunately, he’d left behind a set of keys.)

At 12:30 p.m., after taking a wrong turn that led to a six-mile detour, Childress stumbled up to the caretaker at Courtright Reservoir and gasped out her story. The woman called the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department on the nearby power station’s satellite phone. By late Friday afternoon, Childress and Newborn were sitting by the trailhead, watching searchers assemble to hunt for their friend.

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A Mind’s Tricks

Around 10:30 a.m., Bishop decided to move to another dimple in the rock, 30 feet below, whose dimensions appeared more comfortable. He calculated that he could reach it by rolling onto his belly, then using his hiking poles to make a controlled slide. But the instant he rolled over, gravity took hold. He sped past the hole, accelerating for 300 feet, until his feet rammed into a small ridge.

Heart pounding, he lay there for several minutes, then checked himself for damage. Incredibly, his limbs were still intact, though the skin was rubbed raw over much of the front of his body and face, and his elbows were painfully bruised. His pants were shredded, too, and he’d lost his wallet and his hiking poles. Slowly, Bishop edged down another 50 feet, stopping at a small hole where  purple-flowered plants were growing. He chewed on a stem, hoping for some moisture, but it only made him thirstier.

Bishop continued on to the lowest possible resting place, a dent in the granite that was just deep enough  to cradle his hip, with a foothold below it and a handhold above. From there, the slope ran its last unobstructed 300 feet into the boulder field.

Around 3 p.m., he saw a helicopter buzz by and was gripped with despair when it didn’t slow down. Then, to his astonishment, he spied something beyond the boulders that he hadn’t noticed before: an abandoned ski lift. There were tents scattered among the pylons, a man painting at an easel, an SUV. Elated, Bishop waved and yelled, but when he looked again, it had all vanished—there were only pine trees.

He realized he’d been hallucinating, his senses deranged by dehydration and sleeplessness. Two hours later, though, he saw three beige helicopters circling, with men in sunglasses gazing down at him. He gestured frantically and shouted himself hoarse. They disappeared, and again he realized his grasp on reality had lapsed.

Finally, at 7:15, Bishop saw a Fresno Sheriff’s Department chopper cruise slowly past. He was absolutely certain this one was real—and this time, he was right. But in his drab clothes, against the expanse of gray rock, he was an invisible speck. The pilot never saw him.

On Friday night, three Sheriff’s deputies hiked into the wilderness with Fresno County Search and Rescue Mountaineering Team volunteers. They scoured the mountains until well past midnight, by the light of headlamps and lanterns. Then, just after dawn on Saturday, they went searching again. Childress, who’d slept in the car with Newborn, joined the effort that morning, breaking her hand in a fall along the way.

In the afternoon, one party ran into the Outward Bound group that had met Bishop on Dogtooth Peak. After learning that he’d headed down the eastern side of the summit, the searchers concentrated their efforts there. Around  4 p.m., Deputy David Rippe—a 30-year-old detective with the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force—was combing the base of the peak when he heard what sounded like a moan.

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“Did you hear that?” he asked the deputy beside him.

The deputy, Greg Villanueva, nodded. Then he pointed to the cliff face and exclaimed, “Hey, I see him!”

A tiny figure was dangling from the rock, clearly struggling to hold on.

Bishop had managed to stay alert through his second night on the rock, but as the day wore on, he couldn’t stop himself from dozing. Each time he awoke, he found he’d slipped down to a spot where only one foot and one hand could grip the wall. He kept dragging himself back up to his precarious refuge, but the effort was growing increasingly difficult.

Finally, he slipped into a dream: He saw a giant clock with a single hand, which was ticking backward toward zero. He understood that zero was death, and the only way to stop the hand from getting there was to resist the urge to relax.

A new thought occurred to him: Maybe if I let go, I can survive the fall. But before he could give it more thought, he saw men in orange vests running toward the bottom of the cliff.

The Rescue

Plotting a safe route up 300 near-vertical feet of slippery granite takes careful consideration. Deputy Rippe didn’t have time for that. Instead, he yelled for everyone to stay away from the area directly beneath Bishop. Rippe shouted for one volunteer to come with him, then scrambled upward. Behind him, ambulance-company manager Russ Richardson—leader of the search-and-rescue volunteers—rocketed up a different route. Rippe’s trajectory was more accurate, and within minutes, he was crouching on a ledge directly above Bishop. The hiker’s leg was shaking with strain, and he was covered in scrapes and bruises.

“I’m here,” Rippe said. “I’ve got you. You’re safe.”

That wasn’t entirely true. First, Rippe had to move Bishop to the ledge where Rippe was perched, a task that put both men at risk of tumbling off the cliff. To lessen that possibility, Rippe improvised a sling, threading a length of webbing between Bishop’s legs and looping it around a knob in the rock. Pinning the loose end with his knee, Rippe grabbed Bishop under the arms, hoped for the best, and pulled.

An instant later, they were sitting side by side. His throat so parched he could barely speak, Bishop croaked out thanks as profusely as he could.

“Have you been in that position all this time?” the deputy asked. Bishop tried to answer, but he’d used up the last of his strength.

A helicopter flew Bishop to a Fresno hospital, where he was treated for abrasions and dehydration; he was discharged that evening. He spent the night with Childress and Newborn in a nearby motel. The next morning, his wife, Kal, drove four hours from Buellton to bring him home. She did some lecturing, but she knew that the same determination that had helped lead her husband into danger had kept him clinging to the cliff. Bishop himself is thankful for many things—beginning with the searchers who found him as his clock was running out. He has learned a few lessons too: “Don’t be so impulsive. Realize I have limits.”

Deputy Rippe came away with a different kind of insight. This was the first time he’d found a missing hiker alive who was in a predicament like Bishop’s. “Usually, by the time we get there, it’s a body recovery,” he explains. “This shows you to never give up hope. Anything is possible.”

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I am most grateful for two things: that I was born in North Korea and that I escaped from North Korea. Both of these events shaped me, and I would not trade them for an ordinary and peaceful life. But there is more to the story of how I became who I am today.

There’s a quote I once read from Joan Didion: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Sometimes, the only way we can survive our own memories is to shape them into a story that makes sense out of events that seem inexplicable. I’ve seen the horrors that humans can inflict, but I’ve also witnessed acts of kindness and sacrifice in the worst circumstances. I know that it is possible to lose part of your humanity in order to survive. But I also know that the spark of human dignity is never completely extinguished and that given the oxygen of freedom and the power of love, it can grow again.

I grew up in Hyesan, a city of 200,000 on the Yalu River, which runs between China and North Korea. It is the coldest part of North Korea, with temperatures plunging to minus-40 degrees Fahrenheit.

My mother and father encouraged me from the start to be proud of who I am. My father sometimes held me in his lap and read me children’s books. The only ones available were published by the government and had political themes. Instead of fairy tales, they were stories set in a place called South Korea, where homeless children went barefoot and begged in the streets. It never occurred to me that they were really describing life in my country.

Children were taught to hate the enemies of the state with a passion.

We also read about our Leaders and how they worked so hard and sacrificed so much for us. Our Dear Leader Kim Jong Il had mystical powers. His biography said he could control the weather with his thoughts and that he wrote 1,500 books during his three years at Kim Il Sung University, named after his father. This worship of the Kims was reinforced in documentaries, movies, and TV shows broadcast by the single, state-run station. Whenever the Leaders’ pictures appeared on the screen, stirring sentimental music would play. It made me so emotional. North Koreans are raised to venerate our fathers and our elders, and in our collective minds, Kim Il Sung was our beloved grandfather, and Kim Jong Il was our father.

Children were taught to hate the enemies of the state with a passion. Our schools and textbooks were full of images of grotesque American GIs with blue eyes and huge noses executing civilians. Sometimes at recess we lined up to beat or stab dummies dressed like American soldiers. Every subject in school came with a dose of propaganda. A math problem would go like this: “If you kill one American bastard and your comrade kills two, how many dead American bastards do you have?”

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There were so many things we were forbidden to do, buy, or sell, and public executions were used to teach lessons in loyalty and the consequences of disobedience. When I was little, a young man was arrested for killing and eating a cow. Cows were the property of the state, and they were too valuable to eat because they were used for plowing fields and dragging carts. Anybody who butchered one would be stealing government property.

This man suffered from tuberculosis and had nothing to eat, but that didn’t matter to the police. They took him behind the market and tied him to a piece of wood. Three men with rifles began firing at him until his body flopped to the ground. My mother watched in shock—she couldn’t believe that in her own country, a human’s life had less value than an animal’s.

Families could watch only state-generated propaganda films, which were boring. So there was a huge demand for smuggled foreign movies and TV shows, even though you never knew when the police might raid your house. They’d first shut off the electricity so that the videocassette or DVD would be trapped in your machine for them to find. People got around this by owning two players and switching them if they heard a police team coming.

My uncle had a VCR, and I went to his house to watch Hollywood movies. My aunt covered the windows and told us not to say anything. I loved Cinderella, Snow White, and the James Bond movies. But the film that changed my life was Titanic. I couldn’t believe that someone had made a movie out of a shameful love story—in North Korea, the filmmakers would have been executed. I was also amazed that the characters were willing to die for love, not just for the regime, as we were. The idea that people could choose their destinies fascinated me. Titanic gave me my first small taste of freedom.

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