Nat

Today I did some work cleaning up my grandmother’s apartment. She passed away in January. She had an amazing life, living almost to 100 and remaining in her own apartment to the very end. It was a good life for her, I think.

Cleaning up the apartment was bittersweet. Because she kept such an orderly home and because she kept to a tight routine in her later years, her apartment looked as if she had just stepped out to run an errand, except only for the plants, which hadn’t been watered in three weeks. I tried my best to revive the seven African violets, which lined the window in her study.

Mainly I looked for keys, threw away dead plants and food from the freezer, and visited with my memories as I dusted and opened drawers. As hard as it is to visit a loved one’s home after the owner is gone, there is a ready barrage of reminders of what we shared.

What really struck me, though, were the conversations I had with the manager and superintendent of my grandmother’s apartment building. When I thanked them for all they had done to help my grandmother continue to live in their building at the end of her life, they both told me how much they loved her and how difficult it was to have her gone.

That is the great lesson from today, and the abiding joy: there are kind people in this world, and they will go out of their way to help you do what you couldn’t do on your own. Love is quite a legacy.

For the last two days, my family and I have played tennis on vacation with several strangers, and the experience has been great. Players of all ages and skill levels have been polite, encouraging, and friendly to all of us. It has made the games great fun, while still providing a competitive outlet.

I’ve been saying friends whom I’ve called on the phone, that it is easy to be happy and friendly on vacation, but the point is that meeting friendly people always makes me feel good about my life and about humanity in general.

One lesson my parents taught me over and over when I was young was that it’s always smart to make it easy for people to be nice to you. They reminded me that good manners, helpfulness, and sociability combine to make a likable person, and they demonstrated by their own behavior that making an effort to be friendly all of the time made our home and their workplaces better.

Our family vacation this week is teaching the same lesson to my stepdaughter, but she has known it for years. I was proud yesterday when an older gentleman complimented my stepdaughter on how pleasant she was to play with.

In 2007, I visited Memphis, Tennessee, for the first time. I loved the city, and I loved my visit. People went out of their way to be friendly, the food was great, and you can sense a city whose citizens are working to make it prosperous. An African-American colleague drove me around one afternoon. She took me into a bar outside of town where she had to make a sales call, a bar with a large Confederate flag and an all-white clientele who seemed surprised to see a black woman come inside. Later that afternoon, she drove me past the museum that has been erected inside and around the motel where Dr. King was shot and killed in 1968.

It is good to be reminded that the effort to create a friendly, tolerant society happens every day, in the way we treat strangers and in the attitudes we convey to our children. My friend shared her day with me, and she talked openly about the times and places where she still feels uneasy being an African-American woman walking by herself. Happily, she said, there are fewer and fewer places where she thinks about it.

Dr. King spoke out about the injustice he saw in parts of America in the 1960s, but he also spoke with conviction and eloquence about his hope for a better future. Hope and determination together can change the world. They have changed the world. In his famous speech, Dr. King said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

I wish the same today, that my child and all other children will be judged by the content of their character. I expect to be judged by my character as well.

Michael and I have been working on a book for a few months now, and we took this weekend to get away and make a major dent in it. It shouldn’t surprise me that the work would be so much fun, I guess, but I have spent much of my adult life afraid of long writing projects.

So, today we compiled the notes that we have been writing in 15-minute bursts since November, and we turned them into an outline. Michael did the typing, which I love because it lets me pace while we talk and think. Writing for me is easier when I’m not actually writing. It is typical of Michael to make things fun for me.

The best part of the day is finding work that doesn’t feel like work. To have any activity unravel from oneself effortlessly and focus the mind so that it requires no strain can be the best kind of inspiration. That was true for me over and over today. I have been wanting to remember what a joy it is to be working, and it’s easier for me when the work is entirely my invention. The collaboration makes it even better. It occurred to me in a cafe before dinner that writing a book with another person cuts the number of words in half for each of us. Huh.

Where am I going with this? Just that spending two days thinking about how to cultivate happiness automatically puts me in mind of how to appreciate being happy. My grandmother, who passed away this week, taught me about the state of happiness years ago when I was 18. I had broken up with a girl I adored. I had been moping around for days or weeks when my grandmother came to visit with my parents. She was always glad to see me, but she became very angry with me after dinner.

“You’ve got to snap out of this,” she told me after dinner in her hotel room. “Nobody wants to be around somebody as sour and withdrawn as you are. We will put up with you because we love you, but the people who don’t love you won’t stay with you for a minute if they don’t have to.” I was shocked to be called out by her like that, but she said it in a way that really shook up my thinking.

Naturally she was right. Unhappiness itself doesn’t drive people away, but the way you wear it does. Like it or not, that’s just a cold, hard fact. Better to adopt as friendly and hopeful a demeanor as you can. With any luck, it will draw toward you people whose company will console and reassure you. Maybe they will make you laugh, or at least forget yourself for a minute.

Friendship and love can be our salvation, even when it is friendship and love we have lost. This is what I have been feeling since last night, when Michael and I arrived at the hotel and started to work. I have felt it today. I feel my grandmother near as I write, and I am grateful to her.

My stepdaughter had a group of her friends over to the house today to watch movies and eat pizza. There is nothing like spending a few hours in the company of teenagers who like one another to make you feel hopeful about the future. Of course it helps if they also like adults and are polite, which her friends are.

They know how to laugh and how to be kids together. What is remarkable about them is that they don’t try to impress one another by being sophisticated, or worldly, or cynical. Teenagers like this are a reminder that adults could also choose to retain the best parts of their youth. The group likes to take pictures of one another laughing and smiling. They are easy to be with, and they are good to one another.

It is a relief when your child finds friends who are reliable, have good judgment, and know how to be good friends to one another. We would all be lucky to have such a group. The fact that many of them have been friends since kindergarten suggests that they know how lucky they are too. I’m very happy they opened up their circle to let my stepdaughter in during junior high.

Today’s Boston Globe carries an AP article about a program for inmates in Missouri prisons to cultivate vegetable gardens. The produce from these gardens is donated to food pantries for the elderly poor in the state. The activity is one of the elements of a program called “restorative justice.” Under this label, which was developed in the 1970s, prisons offer inmates the chance to study the impact of their crimes on crime victims and to find ways to make amends.

In Missouri, several participants grew up on farms, and they are now teaching skills to inner city prisoners while reviving their own interest in producing food. One of the prisoners, James Burton Jr., says of the restorative justice garden, “This is almost like being free here. I like knowing I’m giving to the elderly.” The article goes on to quote a cook at one of the food banks, who says that the produce donation has cut her food costs by a third.

I love projects like these, which encourage people to make amends by doing something good. This program is so practical in meeting two needs at once. It was very inspiring.

We had a death in the family last week, and the response from family and friends has been remarkable. People have outdone themselves to be kind and supportive. It is a marvelous human trait that so many people surprise you with their goodness in times when you need it most.

For example, we received a letter from the grown daughter of family friends. The letter writer didn’t know the deceased well at all, yet she managed to capture all of his qualities precisely and warmly. Also, I have been flooded with cards and notes from people at work whom I don’t even know well, and many have said the most naturally reassuring things. There is nothing more moving for me in this than to be floored again and again by people’s ability to find words to make you feel happy and proud. Maybe this amazes me because I always struggle to know what to say to people who have lost a loved one, and I think of myself as usually knowing what to say.

All in all, I have found throughout my life that most people will do everything in their power to do good to you if you give them half a chance. At no time in my life can I remember feeling this more strongly. It is a great gift and one that also suggests to me the presence of a comforting God, reaching out through many, many people.

I have found new things for which to be grateful every day, and they start and end with our friends’ fundamental decency and caring. I am so grateful.

I’ve written before about how much I admire my teenage stepdaughter. She does many things well because she has a fantastic work ethic, and she listens to coaches and teachers.

Tonight I attended her annual dance recital. They’re more fun than they used to be because she dances in many more numbers than the younger children do. There were six tonight, including a great big dance ensemble to the tune of “One” from A Chorus Line, and several others, mixing hip hop, tap, and modern.

Her kicks have gotten higher and better coordinated than they were last year. She’s been practicing, and her attention to sports has increased her conditioning and rhythm. She’s able to smile now when she dances, because she doesn’t have to concentrate impossibly hard on every second. It’s fun to watch her.

It really wasn’t long ago that dance recitals were entertaining primarily for costume changes and the music, but now our child is busy with the dance steps for which her group is responsible. The group focuses heavily dancing in character and in time. It came together well.

And it looks like a lot of fun.

The current issue of Sports Illustrated has a superb article on the Bluffton University baseball team, five of whose players were killed in a bus accident during their spring break trip to Florida. Bluffton is a Mennonite school in Ohio, and the article profiles the way the surviving team members, coaches, administration, and parents responded to what seems an utterly senseless tragedy.

The article identifies dozens of people, other schools, and companies that responded with generous help. A woman whose husband died in a plane crash of college athletes years ago, asked her employer, AirTran, to let her fly with the family members from Ohio to the hospital in Atlanta where the survivors were recuperating. Taylor University, which had lost athletes in a car crash the year before, sent counselors to the school to assist with grief counseling. Then they catered the cafeteria meals for the day of the school-wide memorial service so that all staff could attend. The baseball team of Bluffton’s arch-rival, Defiance College, collected money on the streets of their town to give to Bluffton. Ohio State’s baseball team donated gate receipts from their first home game. And on and on and on.

The team coach, James Grandey, said to Sports Illustrated, “Even as we were grieving we thought, Man there’s a lot of humanity in this world…I can tell ou this: for the rest of our lives, when something bad happens to someone else, we’re going to respond. How could we not, with the way we’ve been helped?”

It’s a very moving story, and one which celebrates community. First, there’s the community of the team, which banded together after the tragedy and are playing out their season. Then there’s the school supporting them, and then there’s the outside world. There are parallels to the Virginia Tech tragedy, and one of the inspiring takeaways from both is the number of people prepared to reach out and help strangers they’ve never met get through a very rough time.

Please read the story. I’m finding that Sports Illustrated is consistently one of the best sources of feature stories devoted to goodness in our society. It’s heartwarming and refreshing.

American Idol is using its tremendous popularity with television viewers to raise money for poor children in Africa and the United States. The celebrities who judge the singers on the show, along with Ryan Seacrest who hosts the program, visited desperately poor children in South Africa, Kenya, and several parts of the US, including Louisiana, Kentucky, and Los Angeles.

Then they approached corporations (News Corp, Coca-Cola, Ford, AT&T, Allstate, ConAgra Foods, myspace.com, and ExxonMobil) who agreed to sponsor the fundraising. These companies gave millions of dollars. Tonight, the show encouraged its audience to call in and raise more money.

The stories profile beautiful children, who need our help. They are hopeful and determined. Many are orphans raising themselves. Many are sad, and the celebrities who participate are stunned by the hideous circumstances in which so many children live.

So at one point tonight, Ellen DeGeneres, who co-hosted part of the show, looked into the camera and challenged her wealthy friends to donate. Then she personally pledged $100,000 on the spot, and I started to cry.

It is powerfully moving to witness such generosity. You can help make life better for a child. Please consider making a donation here. (Or do it anywhere else–UNICEF, Save the Children, or your own church, synagogue, or mosque.)

Please give. It will make you feel good, and it will help a child live and dream.