The Best of Reader's Digest

by Editors of Reader's Digest

  As a physical therapist in the 1940s, Doman was frustrated by the high failure rate of the techniques used on stroke victims and, later, children with disabilities. He and his associates at the clinic developed a new approach founded on the theory that the brain can grow and change through use—today called neuroplasticity. His clinic amassed evidence, case by case, that with enough hard work, kids like Alexander often exceeded every limitation that had been placed on them.

  At that point, the simple exercises at the clinic inspired nothing but frustration from Alexander. But following specifications in a book by Doman’s son, Douglas, my father and I built a “crawling track” in our living room. It was a simple ramp with low sides made of heavy plywood, like a jungle gym slide, wrapped in padding and turquoise vinyl. Following the instructions, we propped the track at an incline steep enough that Alexander’s slightest wiggle would result in movement. Then, against any number of parental instincts, we placed my son at the top. He was seven months old and had never willfully moved an inch in his life. He howled in protest, squirmed in defiance—and the motion sent him skidding down the track.

  Within a week, he was propelling himself, angry at first, but eventually with resolve and even joy. We reduced the incline as he improved, until it was lying flat. A few months later, he crawled right off the end of it. And then he kept right on going.

  We signed up for the next available introductory session at Glenn Doman’s clinic, now directed by his daughter-in-law, Rosalind. Alexander was the first diagnosed Kleefstra kid the clinic would ever treat.

  In Philadelphia the following April, when Alexander was just 11 months old, we found ourselves surrounded by three dozen parents who had come from as far away as Belarus, Singapore, and India. In a week of all-day lectures, our expectations for Alexander—and for our role in his therapy—were turned upside down. The clinic’s program was wildly ambitious and nearly impossible to implement fully. It involved almost constant, regimented stimulation, physical activity, and intellectual engagement: daily crawling distance targets, reading and math exercises, workouts aimed at improving breathing and coordination—all of it done by parents themselves. As Rosalind told us at the time, “There are lots of reasonable programs out there. Trouble is, they don’t work very well.”

  Alexander and his mother, Ashley Bristowe, at home in Calgary in late 2014

  When we returned home the next week, we reorganized the main floor of our house around Alexander’s therapy. We filled our living room with mats and flash cards emblazoned with words and dots for counting. As part of Alexander’s physical therapy, we installed an elaborate “monkey bars” ladder apparatus. (Learning to walk while alternating hands on the rungs would help train Alexander’s brain in “cross-pattern” movement, and the raised arms would encourage good posture.) Our son’s diet was stripped of known allergens and inflammatories to eliminate any possible nutritional impediments to his development. His daily regimen looked like something prescribed to an Olympic athlete.

  The standard approach for a developmentally delayed person is not this ambitious. But we didn’t want to wait until after our child’s malleable brain had stiffened into adulthood. Ashley and I now had the tools to make the most of Alexander’s crucial early years. We intended to use them all.

  “Alexander’s progress isn’t a miracle,” says the author, Chris Turner (here with his wife and son). “It’s the product of hard work.”

  Ashley threw herself into running Alexander’s therapy program full-time, and my daily routine as a work-from-home freelancer soon involved at least as much duty as a therapy assistant. The stress was enormous, and our debt grew whenever we sacrificed more work time for Alexander’s sessions. For my wife, the manager of our ersatz team, administering the multiple programs meant constructing a self-made cage. Once, our professional lives had involved extended research trips, and now whole weeks could pass without either of us leaving the house except to ferry our daughter to and from school.

  Still, we agreed that the strain on our family was far better than the despair of not knowing what to do. We believed, most of the time, that there was a smart little boy straining to emerge from those flapping, disorganized limbs. Alexander’s program required a platoon of volunteer helpers, which meant most of our block knew all about his condition. The spring after he turned three, when he started to walk up and down the street on his own, his first trips were victory laps to cheering neighbors.

  We would have to wait another year for proof that the reading and math exercises were sinking in. Day in and day out, we dutifully held up flash cards containing words and numbers, sentences and equations. But how could we know for sure how much of it was working when Alexander could speak only in fragments and monosyllables? Incontrovertible evidence came one day when we were in the car, about to pull out of a parking lot. Ashley was listing off rhyming words for Alexander to attempt to repeat. “Car,” she recited. Alexander repeated it. Then they ran through far, bar, star.

  Ashley paused, thinking the game was over. From the backseat came a thin, cheerful voice: “Guitar!” An unprompted, two-syllable rhyme. Our explosive cheer was so loud, it startled Alexander almost to tears. The kid could talk—and rhyme! Every agonizing day of his therapy had been worth it for that marvelous rhyme.

  The kid could talk—and rhyme! Every agonizing day of his therapy had been worth it for that marvelous rhyme.

  Alexander recently turned seven, and we no longer have reason to doubt his ability to learn. His daily life is an inventory of things he wasn’t expected to do—possibly ever, certainly not by now. He can tell you his name and address. He’ll ask you to draw a cement truck on his whiteboard, then spell the letters with glee as you write them out. At the grocery store, he counts off the aisles from the signs overhead, calling, “Aisle five!” with particular delight. Then we stand in beloved aisle five to wait for the automated checkout kiosks. “Commpooter!” Alexander announces as I sweep our groceries over the sensor, raising his arms in excitement. Gazing out from beneath a tussle of golden hair, his deep brown eyes are magnetic—they never fail to tease a smile from the checkout attendant.

  Last fall, just a year behind schedule, Alexander started kindergarten in a standard classroom. Whatever his limitations are, he is nowhere near them yet. He might never be completely self-sufficient. But I believe if he winds up anywhere near such a state, it will be because, against the advice of many experts, we maximized every moment during his early years, when his brain was most able to reorganize itself to compensate for the tiny missing sliver of gene in every cell. I want Alexander to be seen as a model of how early intervention should be done: all day, every day, as much as a distressed family can possibly cram in, from the moment anyone suspects anything is wrong.

  This, I hope, is my son’s lesson for all of us: Our approach to special-needs kids is completely upside down. We’ve only just left the dark ages when it comes to our understanding of how the human brain works. The potential waiting there is an enormous untapped resource. And, as Alexander has proved already, many of the limits we long believed were impossible to overcome fall away in the face of the right kind of hard work.

  Originally published in the October 2016 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.

  Alexander can walk, talk, swim, jump on a trampoline, and do many of the same activities as other 10-year-olds. At school, he’s working hard to master reading. He goes on field trips, participates in group projects, and played a tree in a school performance.

  On the Line

  by Mitch Lipka

  With seconds separating them from an oncoming train, one man risked everything to save a woman he’d never met.

  Lisa Donath was running late. Heading down the sidewalk toward her subway stop in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, she decided to skip her usual espresso. Donath, 25, had a lot to do at work, plus visitors on the way: Her parents were coming in for Thanksgiving from her hometown of Minneapolis. But as she hustled down the stair
s and through the long tunnel, she started to feel uncomfortably warm. By the time she got to the platform, Donath felt faint—maybe it hadn’t been a good idea to give blood the night before, she thought. She leaned heavily against a post close to the tracks.

  Several yards away, Ismael “Mel” Feneque, 43, and his girlfriend, Melina Gonzalez, found a spot close to where the front of the train would stop. Feneque, a pattern maker, had a mound of sketches waiting for him in his studio, but on this morning, women’s fashion was far from his mind. He and Gonzalez were deep in discussion about a house they were thinking of buying.

  But when he heard the scream, followed by someone yelling, “Oh, my God, she fell in!” Feneque didn’t hesitate. Yanking off the bag he had slung across his six-three frame, he jumped down to the tracks and ran some 40 feet toward the body sprawled facedown on the rails.

  “No! Not you!” his girlfriend screamed after him.

  She was right to be alarmed. By the time Feneque reached Donath, he could “feel the vibration on the tracks and see the light coming into the tunnel,” he remembers. “The train was maybe 20 seconds from the station.” In that instant, Feneque gave himself a mission: I’m going to get her out, and then I’m going to get myself out, ASAP. I’m not going to let myself get killed here.

  Ismael Feneque and Lisa Donath

  Feneque, a former high school wrestler who trains at a gym to stay in shape, grabbed Donath under her armpits. She was deadweight. “It was hard to lift her. She was just out,” he says. But he managed to raise her the four feet to the platform so that bystanders could grab her arms and drag her away from the edge. That’s where Donath briefly regained consciousness, felt herself being pulled along the ground, and saw someone else holding her purse.

  “I thought I’d been mugged,” she says. She remembers the woman who held her hand and a man who gave his shirt to help stop the blood pouring from her head. And, she says, “I remember trying to talk and I couldn’t, and that’s when I realized how much pain I was in.” The impact of her fall had been absorbed by her face—she’d lost teeth and suffered a broken eye socket, a broken jaw, and cuts all over her head.

  But as the train closed in, Feneque wasn’t finished. He still had to grab and hoist up a man and a teenager who’d hopped down to the tracks and then use all the strength he had left to lift himself onto the platform. He did so just seconds before the train barreled past him and came to a stop.

  Police and fire officials soon arrived, and Feneque gave his name to an officer and told him the story. “He said that it was a great thing I had done, and I thanked him,” Feneque recalls. Gonzalez says her unassuming boyfriend was calm on their 40-minute train ride downtown—just as he had been seconds after the rescue.

  Donath’s parents joined her at her hospital bedside by the next morning and stayed in town to see her through the series of surgeries she’d need to reconstruct her face. Once Donath returned to her job, she was determined to find the man who had saved her life—the man the police had listed, incorrectly, as Feneque Ismael. “I was never really into going on TV or getting my picture put in the New York Times—as you can imagine, having a scarred-up face isn’t fun,” says Donath. “But I did so to know that I tried everything I could [to contact him].”

  Feneque, for his part, couldn’t stop wondering what had happened to the woman on the tracks. Several weeks later, while surfing the Internet for any new clues… bingo! A television station had posted an update on its website, detailing Donath’s recovery and her search for her rescuer. Feneque e-mailed the address provided to say that he was that man.

  When the two first met, Donath threw her arms around Feneque and wept. It was overwhelming, she says, to try to convey her feelings. “What do you say to the person who saved your life?” When they met again several months later, for this photo shoot, it felt a lot easier. “I finally had the chance to hear his side of the story in detail,” she says. “He really just seems like such a sweet and humble person.”

  Feneque says there’s no point in wondering why he was on the platform—at a different time from when he usually rides and at a station a considerable distance from his apartment—at the moment Donath needed help. “Whether it was pure coincidence or sent from above, who’s to say? All I know is I was there and I’d do it again,” he says.

  “I have a daughter. And I said to myself, I’m going to help this person. She could be anybody’s daughter.”

  Originally published in the November 2008 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.

  • YOUR TRUE STORIES •

  MY WEALTHY LIFE

  At 16 my guitar and I found a captive audience at the local hospital. I went from room to room and miraculously, patients responded with smiles and laughter. Doctors and nurses directed me to Billy, a little boy battling cancer. I sang to him every day for two weeks, then one day his big blue eyes closed forever as I held his little hand. I was just a kid, but realized that music had the power to change lives and my career path was chosen for me. A few years ago, after performing my song “Dreams,” I was signing autographs and a frail little lady with tears rolling down her cheeks gave me a bear hug. She told me she had recently lost her husband of 50 years, and after hearing the song, realized she needed a new dream. For years I thought wealth had eluded me, I was wrong.

  —Jim Moore Chattanooga, Tennessee

  A DANCING BLESSING

  My stepfather, Marlin, bought a dancing Christmas tree in the mid-2000s as a gimmick decoration. Marlin passed away in 2014. My sister, Stacy, had taken possession of it along the way. Stacy got engaged to her longtime boyfriend on Thanksgiving night (Marlin had met him). The tree was unpacked, but had no batteries. Later that evening, with all the ladies sitting around talking, the tree lit up and started to dance! The empty battery pack was in hand and the only conclusion we could reach was that Marlin was sending his blessing and dancing a jig.

  —Norman Powers Sheffield, Alabama

  “Information Please”

  by Paul Villiard

  The voice of this genie-in-the-telephone receiver had an enduring message.

  When I was quite young my family had one of the first telephones in our neighborhood. I remember well the polished oak case fastened to the wall on the lower stair landing. The shiny receiver hung on the side of the box. I even remember the number—105. I was too little to reach the telephone, but used to listen with fascination when my mother talked to it. Once she lifted me up to speak to my father, who was away on business. Magic!

  Then I discovered that somewhere inside that wonderful device lived an amazing person—her name was “Information Please” and there was nothing she did not know. My mother could ask her for anybody’s number; when our clock ran down, Information Please immediately supplied the correct time.

  My first personal experience with this genie-in-the-receiver came one day while my mother was visiting a neighbor. Amusing myself at the tool bench in the basement, I whacked my finger with a hammer. The pain was terrible, but there didn’t seem to be much use crying because there was no one home to offer sympathy. I walked around the house sucking my throbbing finger, finally arriving at the stairway. The telephone! Quickly I ran for the footstool in the parlor and dragged it to the landing. Climbing up, I unhooked the receiver and held it to my ear. “Information Please,” I said into the mouthpiece just above my head. A click or two, and a small, clear voice spoke into my ear. “Information.”

  “I hurt my fingerrrr—” I wailed into the phone. The tears came readily enough, now that I had an audience.

  “Isn’t your mother home?” came the question.

  “Nobody’s home but me,” I blubbered.

  “Are you bleeding?”

  “No,” I replied. “I hit it with the hammer and it hurts.”

  “Can you open your icebox?” she asked. I said I could. “Then chip off a little piece of ice and hold it on your finger. That will stop the hurt. Be careful when you use the ice pick,” she admonished. “And don�
��t cry. You’ll be all right.”

  After that, I called Information Please for everything. I asked her for help with my geography and she told me where Philadelphia was, and the Orinoco—the romantic river I was going to explore when I grew up. She helped me with my arithmetic, and she told me that my pet chipmunk—I had caught him in the park—would eat fruit and nuts.

  And there was the time that Petey, our pet canary, died. I called Information Please and told her the sad story. She listened, then she said the usual things grown-ups say to soothe a child. But I was unconsoled: Why was it that birds should sing so beautifully and bring joy to whole families, only to end up as a heap of feathers, feet up, on the bottom of a cage?

  She must have sensed my deep concern, for she said quietly, “Paul, always remember that there are other worlds to sing in.”

  Somehow I felt better.

  Another day I was at the telephone. “Information,” said the now familiar voice.

  “How do you spell fix?” I asked.

  “Fix something? F-i-x.”

  At that instant my sister, who took unholy joy in scaring me, jumped off the stairs at me with a banshee shriek—“Yaaaaaaaaaa!” I fell off the stool, pulling the receiver out of the box by its roots. We were both terrified—Information Please was no longer there, and I was not at all sure that I hadn’t hurt her when I pulled the receiver out.

  Minutes later there was a man on the porch. “I’m a telephone repairman,” he said. “I was working down the street and the operator said there might be some trouble at this number.” He reached for the receiver in my hand. “What happened?”

  I told him.

  “The operator said there might be some trouble at this number.”