Dale and Rhonda spent eight days in the hospital, and each had three operations. In addition to wounds on his back and buttocks, the elbow of Dale’s left arm was fractured, and the bear had broken off an inch-long knob of bone. Doctors performed a fourth operation later to repair the elbow damage. Rhonda’s left biceps muscle was completely severed—and bear-tooth fragments were lodged in the bone of the upper arm. The claw that cut into her neck missed the jugular by a quarter-inch.
On their third night in the hospital, Rhonda sat at Dale’s bedside and told him how she had attempted to drive off the grizzly with her backpack. “I thought you were being killed, and I had to do something.”
“I didn’t know that’s why the bear left me,” Dale said, his voice growing husky. “You saved my life.”
As part of the healing, Rhonda went home to her two-room cabin. She put on a video documentary about life in the north country that she loved so much and let her cat curl up on her lap.
Before the grizzly attack, Rhonda had not really comprehended how dangerous such an attack could be. But the event had confronted her with her own vulnerability, and impressed upon her how much we need the closeness of family and friends—and to be there for them when they need us.
With her left arm in a cast, Rhonda found even the easiest chores difficult. One day she was trying to braid her long hair with fumbling fingers when the telephone rang. It was Dale. There was a new dimension to their relationship now. If love was built on respect, they knew they had a solid foundation.
“I can’t even braid my own hair,” she said brusquely. “I think I’ll cut it all off.”
There was a pause, then he said, “Come on over. I’ll make you dinner.”
When Rhonda arrived, Dale sat her down gently and began braiding her hair. It was, she thought, the sweetest gesture she had ever known.
Originally published in the June 1992 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.
Dale Johnson and Rhonda Anderson remained friends for many years but have since lost touch. Dale still lives in Whitefish, Montana, where he enjoys foraging for wild mushrooms, hiking, hunting and river-rafting in the area’s vast outdoors. He tends to avoid the area of Glacier National Park where he and Rhonda were attacked and he always carries bear repellent.
A Five-Year-Old Teaches a Lesson in Grace
by Leslie Kendall Dye, from the New York Times
On the night the author loses patience with her mother and her dementia, a granddaughter’s love unites them all.
It’s eight o’clock on a cold spring night. Our apartment has been hit by a cyclone—the handiwork of a young, energetic child. Every bit of furniture is draped with paper chains, scissors and Scotch tape, modeling clay, piles of acorns, and party favors.
I’m so tired tonight. I’ve been on crutches for seven weeks, recovering from hip surgery, and I’m trying fruitlessly to clean up.
The phone rings—for the sixth time in less than an hour. We know who it is.
When my mother was 68, a hemorrhagic stroke claimed her brain, but not her life. She awoke from a coma severely damaged; the bleed instantly razed the landscape of her mind. Dementia soon built a Gothic fun house of distortions where coherent architecture had once stood. She has been manacled inside for a decade, with little to do but experience psychic distress.
She is dogged by paranoia—she thinks she has been kicked out of her assisted living facility (not true), she thinks her daughters have not visited in months (it has been a few days), she thinks that her friend Jimmy never wants to see her again (he calls and visits weekly).
Each time she calls, I play a game with myself called “How Good a Person Can I Be?” I’ve won five rounds of the game tonight; I am due for a fall.
She has no idea that she has repeated the things she is about to say a million times today and a million times yesterday. She has no idea that I had surgery, nor can she recall her own granddaughter’s name. She is unaware of most of the past, and she drifts in the present. She is lonely.
I hurl my anger at the easiest target: my mother, the very victim of this chance horror.
“MOM!” I yell. “YOU ARE NOT BEING REMOVED FROM YOUR HOME! AND WE VISITED TWO DAYS AGO!” (Maybe it was four days, but she won’t remember anyway.) “Mom, you have to believe me, and if you don’t, I cannot talk anymore! Everything is fine!”
Silence. Then:
“I was only calling to say hi.”
I feel the dagger of passive aggression, which is the only working weapon in her mental arsenal. My mother continues, having already forgotten that I yelled. (Sometimes she does remember; tonight I luck out.)
“But I’m also frantic about something; do you have a minute?”
“No, Mom, I don’t. I can’t again with this!”
“Why are you yelling?”
I’m yelling because you aren’t my mother; you are a poorly rendered stand-in who cannot help me care for my child, or be a grandmother, or even remember to ask me about my day. I’m yelling because I have talked you off this ledge five times tonight, and I’m yelling because you remind me of everything I fear: aging, sickness, fragility, bad luck, loss, impermanence… You name it—if it’s scary, you remind me of it!
I flop on the couch, aware of all my daughter is witnessing. She hears me reprimand my mother, lose my patience, announce that someone I love is an imposition. I have not only failed at being a Good Person; I have failed at being a Good Example to My Daughter.
I stew on the couch, defeated.
“Can I talk to Grandma Ellie?”
My five-year-old reaches for the phone.
Wordlessly, I hand it over.
“Hi, Grandma!”
I hear my mother exclaim through the receiver.
“Sweetheart! How are you? Did you go to school today?”
What witchcraft is this? All she said was “Hi, Grandma,” and my mother sounds like a person fully alert to the heartbeat of a normal day.
“Yes, Grandma, and today was share day, and I brought my Wonder Woman bracelets.”
“Can you put it on speaker?” I whisper to my daughter.
She obliges, and out of the phone comes a waterfall of good cheer.
My mother tells her how much she loves her and how lovely her voice sounds.
Then: “I hope I’ll see you soon?” My mother makes her plea for a promise of companionship. I hear her voice differently now. I am not tired or angry; I am soft inside, watching my kindergartner handle her fragile grandmother with such deftness.
“Grandma, we are taking you to the carousel this weekend. I’m going on the frog, and you can go on the horse next to me.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful, darling!”
I’m mesmerized by their exchange.
“Tell me, did you go to school today?” She already asked that.
“Yes, Grandma, I went to school, and we had share day. I brought my Wonder Woman bracelets.”
“You did? How wonderful!”
“Do you want me to sing you a song? I know three songs from Annie.”
And then my daughter sings.
The sharp evening breeze sails through the window, and the mess in our apartment settles around me like an old soft quilt. I listen to my daughter crooning to her grandmother, caring for her with exquisite patience.
I spend so much time wishing she had a “real” grandmother, wishing she knew my “real” mother. In this moment, I see that she does have a real grandmother, and she does have a real relationship with her. It isn’t the one I had hoped for, but to her, this is normal—to care for a loved one is a part of life.
When they hang up, after many kissing noises, I tell my daughter it is bath time. She wildly protests, but I draw the bath anyway. I am still Mommy, after all, and she is still five.
And yet tonight, she taught me how to answer the phone like a grown-up.
Originally published in the March 2019 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.
• YOUR TRUE STORIES •
&n
bsp; CAN YOU LOVE ONE CHILD MORE THAN ANOTHER?
As a mother of three grown and wonderful children, I am spending a lot of time looking back over my life. I wondered one day if it is possible for a parent to love one of their children more than another? I decided that it is indeed possible and so I let each one of my children in on my secret. To my oldest child Lisa, I told her, “I love you the very best because you were my very firstborn child and my only daughter.” To my oldest son Rick, I said, “I love you the very best because you were my firstborn male child and the bearer of your late father’s name.” To my youngest son Mike, I said, “I love you the very best because you are my baby.”
—Katherine Doe Johnson Watertown, New York
PETE LOVES SUE
When my husband and I were dating, we visited the home of our friend’s parents and I noticed a note on their refrigerator that read, “Pete Loves Sue” (the parents’ names). I told my then-boyfriend, Bruce, that I’d like to see a note like that on my refrigerator. A few days later I approached my refrigerator and what did I see on the door—a note that read, “Pete Loves Sue!” My husband and I have been married for 25 years and that joke has continued to show up, most recently on the screen of my phone.
—Laura Payne High Point, North Carolina
PHOTO OF LASTING INTEREST
Kingo of the Jungle
Q: What does a 300-pound silverback gorilla eat? A: Anything he wants. Kingo prefers the finest of jungle delicacies—that’s kangwasika, an herb found in the swamps of the Congo basin of Central Africa, that he’s getting ready to munch in this 2006 photograph. Researchers have been studying how his search for food affects his social behavior since 1995. One fascinating finding: When provisions run low, Kingo will sometimes steal from his own family. No wonder he keeps up to four “wives” at a time. Photograph by Ian Nichols/National Geographic
• YOUR TRUE STORIES •
LOVING MIDDLE SCHOOL
People think I’m crazy for teaching middle schoolers. The truth is that I enjoy learning about life from my students. Here’s what they’ve taught me. You can be angry at someone one day, and be best friends by the next, if you’re just willing to communicate. Asking for help can be scary, but usually works. Snacks should always be shared—they taste better that way. You can start believing in yourself if you make time to study for a test and then pass it. Once in a while, you just need to put your head on your desk and rest. But most importantly, it’s never a bad day to giggle and smile.
—Guida Detamore Boca Raton, Florida
LUCKY COIN TOSS
My husband lost his wedding ring while working in the yard. We looked everywhere and decided it was no use. I was determined to find it, so I bought a metal detector. It didn’t seem like it was working, so I tossed a nickel into the grass. My husband started moving toward it with the detector, but nothing happened. I bent down to pick up the nickel and saw his ring about a foot away. I couldn’t believe my luck. Amazing. What a feeling of joy. I’ll never forget that moment, and I’m going to keep that nickel.
—Joann Nelson Tacoma, Washington
Emergency Whistle on Block Island
by Floyd Miller
As they studied the forbidding rocks and the sullen seas, islanders were certain of just one thing: the children would be found alive—or not at all.
The single long blast of the whistle could be heard from one end of Block Island to the other—seven miles north to south, three and one-half miles at its widest. The summer people—swimming, surf casting, pleasure boating—were hardly aware of the sound. But the island people knew the whistle was a cry for help, a summons to the Block Island Volunteer Rescue Squad.
It was the afternoon of last August 4 and the sun was shining for the first time in a week. After the long days of fog and wind and rain, the drenched but refreshed island began to sparkle—a small green jewel set in the sea off the shore of Rhode Island at the eastern entrance of Long Island Sound. Several hundred visitors had poured out of Victorian hotels, cottages and rooming houses, eager to enjoy at last the sand and the sea.
The Kramek family, of Parsippany, New Jersey, had left their rented cottage at about 2:15 and, at the urging of their 18-year-old daughter, Diane, headed north to Cow Cove, a rocky inlet at the northern tip of the island. On this forbidding shore stands a concrete-and-stone lighthouse, which looks not unlike a small, stern church with an automated light in its belfry. Just north of the light, the island narrows to a 50-foot-wide spit of sand called Sandy Point, which runs beneath the water to become the treacherous Block Island North Reef.
Diane’s diary entry for August 3 reads, “Tomorrow I’ll go and spend all day at Sandy Point. I’ve fallen in love with the view. Plan to build a house there; it is such a perfect place to go on a honeymoon.”
* * *
Near the lighthouse, Stanley Kramek, a retired Marine Corps major, began to surf cast. His wife, Gudrun, set up an easel and began to sketch. Their 13-year-old son, Stephen, and his friend and house guest, Matthew Hikel, 12, went exploring to the west. Diane walked north and settled herself on top of a dune next to the lighthouse, there to dream her young, iridescent dreams. The time was 2:30.
After an hour and a quarter, as Stanley was throwing back his first catch, a sand shark, his wife called to him in alarm: “I hear Stephen shouting!”
He listened and heard only the surf, but Gudrun’s ears heard something more. “It’s Stephen and something is terribly wrong!” she cried.
Then Stanley saw his son. Stephen had run through the dunes all the way from the lighthouse, staggering from exhaustion and hysteria.
Gudrun saw her husband reach Stephen as he dropped to his knees, tears streaming down his face. Then Stanley came racing back, his face set and white. A couple were parked in a car nearby, enjoying the view. Stanley shouted to them, “Two children have been swept into the sea out there at the point! Send for help!”
“Two children have been swept into the sea out there at the point! Send for help!”
The car sped away, and Kramek himself set off for the point. He floundered and scrambled his way along the “road” through the dunes, where the deep, dry sand sucked at his feet. He made it past the lighthouse and finally came onto the wet hard sand of the point. The surf broke to his right and left; straight ahead was the reef. There was nothing else.
Ironically, the very emptiness of the place gave him a moment of hope, for there was no evidence that Diane and Matthew had ever been here. Then he saw a small pile of blue cotton fabric, the work shirt Diane had been wearing over her bathing suit. Beyond the shirt were prints of her bare feet leading directly into the sea.
* * *
When the emergency whistle blew, the 20 volunteer members of the Rescue Squad went into action. They were merchants, carpenters, fishermen, power linemen, highway maintenance men—all bound together by shortwave radios in their homes and cars. Weathered, 55-year-old Charles “Ed” Conley, captain of the Squad, was just arriving home from work when the dispatcher’s voice crackled on his radio: “Possible drowning at Sandy Point.” He yelled to his wife, “Call the Coast Guard.” Then he turned his car and headed north.
Twelve minutes after the alarm, Conley and several other island men had joined the lonely figure of Stanley Kramek at Sandy Point. To a casual observer, the scene might not have seemed threatening. The sea appeared calm, the sky was clear. But Conley knew the place intimately, and at this moment he was scared. A strong ebb tide sweeps the vast waters of Long Island Sound over Sandy Point eastward into the Atlantic; no swimmer had ever made headway against it. As he began to search with his binoculars, he was certain of just one thing: they would find the children alive or not at all. The sea never returns bodies from the east.
* * *
Slowly, disjointedly, young Stephen Kramek told his story to his mother. “Matt and I were exploring,” he said, “and we saw Diane sitting on a sand dune and asked her if she wanted to look for driftwood and she said okay. She wanted fu
nny-looking pieces to arrange with flowers.”
Eventually the three of them arrived on the point, where the sand was hard-packed and led into the water with a most gradual descent. “We decided to go wading,” Stephen said. “Dad had told us not to go swimming, and we didn’t plan to; we only wanted to wade. We got out to where the water was up to our knees, and it gave us a funny feeling. The waves came together from both sides and they would lift us straight up a few inches off the bottom, then drop us back down real gentle. It was real cool, kind of like walking on the moon. We went out a little farther, up to our waists, and we were lifted up and down quite high and Diane said we’d better go back to shore.”
The next wave lifted them higher and when it dropped them down there was nothing beneath their feet, and they were swimming. Matthew Hikel was small, and the Kramek brother and sister put him between them, and tried for the shore in single file, Stephen leading. Shouting encouragement, Diane shepherded the boys forward a yard, two yards, three. Suddenly Stephen felt rocks beneath his feet. He scrambled forward and pulled himself up on the sand, then turned to give the others a hand. In that brief moment the tide caught Diane and Matthew and pulled them out to sea.
Stephen screamed, “Diane! You can make it! Matt! Swim!”
He started to wade back into the water but Diane yelled sharply, “Go back! Go tell Daddy. Hurry, Steve… get help!” He turned and ran.
* * *
A small crowd had gathered, perhaps 50 people, islanders who had known what the whistle meant. There was no carnival atmosphere such as is often generated at disasters on the mainland. These plain-faced men and women, bred of sailors and fishermen, had stood here before, as had their ancestors.
Then there came a collective sigh as the crowd saw the low, gray silhouette of a Coast Guard utility boat appear beyond the swirling waters off the reef. She began a slow run down the west side of Sandy Point and disappeared from view. Ten minutes later she reappeared, her search obviously fruitless. Ed Conley waved her to the east, and she began to search off the mile-long shoreline of Cow Cove.
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