Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul II

by Jack Canfield

  As the clock neared noon, we took our lunch break

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  in the shade of a small tree in Jim's front yard. Sam, our moderator, planted Jim's chair beside us and announced that since he was eager to help in any way possible, Jim would lead us in a before-meal prayer. He kept it succinct and we all began to eat.

  "Let me tell you a story. . . ." he then began. And from the pit of his humble heart he began to unravel his eighty-some-odd years for us. He was a school teacher and a baseball coach who had a loyal dog named Pretty-Face. He told of old hunting expeditions in the mountains where his life was almost lost to a bear, and he talked of conquering a rattlesnake, even showing us the rattles.

  Then his cavernous eyes just wandered off as if he was no longer talking solely for our benefit, but more for his own. He described that day his dog died, as fat tears rolled down his weathered cheeks and he gripped the end of his cane. He recalled her loyalty to the end as with one last thump of the tail, looking up at him, Pretty-Face passed on. He remembered his wife gazing up at him much the same way seconds before her death.

  He always affectionately called his wife "Mama," and he told of how she'd always stayed up until the small hours of the morning to bake the bread for the next day, while he, often tired from a long day of teaching or hunting, would retire to bed.

  "Why didn't I just stay up with her?" he said in a distant voice as his eyes gazed beyond us. "Why couldn't I have just taken that extra time? Why?"

  I remember how profoundly those words rang inside of me. Here was a man brimming with wisdom and reflections on his life, telling me to make the most of mine, to take that extra time with those I love. I was inspired; I was mesmerized by this extraordinary old man that I had thought I was helping. Jim's house was not a job at all, it was a classroom.

  Kate McMahon

  Submitted by Olive O'Sullivan

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  The Bat

  The best part about running, for me, is the finish. The moment when, flushed and out of breath, I reach my destination: my backyard. Ironically, I have run full circle, ending up where I began. Yet, I have also taken a positive step forward in my life, determined and acted out by no one other than myself. My decision, my action.

  As I sit and wait for my breathing to slow and the rush to subside, I wish upon a star. "Star light, star bright . . . " A bat flits across my path of vision and my eyes follow it. Without any warning, the bat suddenly swerves and changes direction. It has changed its path forever.

  And now, having been interrupted, my wish seems futile and absurd. I am filled with a rushing understanding of the part I play in my own life.

  I am not just a bystander. My life is not to be controlled by the stars, but by me, and me alone. Like the bat, I am free to choose my own path, however haphazard and illogical it might appear to be.

  Bryony Blackwood

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  The Player

  It was his attitude that got me. That self-assured smile and those cocky mannerisms gave me the irresistible urge to challenge such conceit. I had never met a person so sure of himself. He assumed that when you first met him, you had no choice but to like him. It made me want to prove him wrong. I would show him that I could not only resist his charms, but that I could beat him at his own game.

  So our relationship began as a battle, each trying to gain a foothold, trying to pull ahead of the other and prove our dominance. We waged an unrelenting war of mind games, insults and tests.

  But somewhere in the middle of our warfare, the teasing became playful and we became friends. We found in each other not just a challenge, but someone to turn to when we didn't feel like fighting anymore. Josh loved to "communicate." He often talked for hours as I listened, covering every topic that affected him and his life. I soon realized that he was more concerned about himself than anything else. But because I didn't always have a lot to say, it didn't seem that it would be a conflict in our relationship.

  It was several months after our friendship started that

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  Josh began a discussion about love. ''It takes a lot for me to love someone," he told me, in a tone more serious than I had ever heard from him. "What I need is trust. I could never fall in love with someone who I didn't feel I could tell everything to. Like you. You're my favorite person in the entire world. I could tell you anything," he said, looking straight at me.

  I blushed, unsure of what response I should give in return, afraid that whatever I said would betray the new emotions I had begun to feel for Josh over the past few weeks. The look in my eyes must have given me away, because from that moment on, it seemed that he began to do everything in his power to make me fall deeper and deeper into the way I felt about him. Was it love? He seemed to glow in the attention that I paid him. And I enjoyed adoring him. Yet it didn't take me very long to figure out that Josh had no intention of returning my devotion.

  When we were alone, he would kiss me and hold me and tell me how special our relationship was to him, and that he didn't know anyone else who made him so happy. But a few weeks into our relationship, I found out that he was involved with another girl and had been for some time. The pain I felt at his betrayal was overwhelming, but I found I couldn't be angry with him. I felt sure inside that he really did care, and that it was his friendship that was important to me.

  At school one day, I saw him standing with a group of girls, and by the flirtatious smile on his face, I could tell he had again been working his magic. "Josh!" I yelled down the hallway to him. He looked up at me, then back at the girls, and with a groupie under each arm, he turned and made his way in the opposite direction. I stood completely deflated, not wanting to acknowledge what had just happened. But I couldn't avoid the truth any longer. My "best friend" had ignored me so I wouldn't hurt the

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  reputation he was working on.

  After that, I began to watch Josh, not as someone who had a crush on him, but as an outside observer. I began to see the darker side of his personality. It was only when I moved away from him that my cloudy vision cleared. It was as if the shadow my adoration had thrown over the situation grew smaller, and I finally saw what I had not been able to see before.

  Josh spent day after day making new acquaintances that he thought might adore him. He flirted with girls, knowing how to make them feel pretty. He knew how to play the game just rightto make sure that everyone felt they had his complete attention. When you were with him, you felt he was interested only in you. He hung out, telling jokes and acting cool, giving off an aura that made people want to be around him. But now I could see that he did it all for himself because he needed to be surrounded by people who thought he was great.

  And while he acted as though he really cared about these people, I heard him belittle them behind their backs, saw him ignore them in the process of making new friends. I saw the pain on their faces that I understood only too well.

  I talked to Josh once more after that day. Even though I understood his nature and was opposed to everything he stood for, there was still a part of me that wanted him to care, and still wanted things the way they used to be.

  "What happened?" I asked him. I cringe when I think how pitiful I must have sounded. "I mean, I thought we were best friends. How can you just give up all the time we spent together? All the things we talked about? The . . . the love that you always told me was there?"

  He shrugged and replied coldly, "Hey, these things happen," before he turned and walked away.

  I stood, watching him go, with tears running down my

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  face. I cried not for him, but for the friendship I thought we had, for the love I thought we had felt. I had lost the game in a big way.

  Now, even though it was one of the most painful experiences I've ever endured, I am grateful for my "friendship" with Josh because it made me stronger. Now I know the kind of person and the kind of friend I never want to be.

  Perhaps I won the
game after all.

  Kelly Garnett

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  The Porcelain Bride Doll

  When I was a little girl, I was given a porcelain bride doll as a gift from my father. The doll was gowned in layers of lace. The material was shot through with strands of shiny silver so that if I turned her slowly in the sunlight, she sparkled. Her soft blond hair, partially covered by her mantilla-like veil and train, curled gently around her face. It was her face that was made of porcelain, and whoever painted her features was truly an artist.

  Her small rosebud mouth, a soft rosy pink, was curved in a perpetual shy smile, and her cheeks blushed gently with the merest suggestion of color. And oh, her eyes! They were the most wonderful clear shade of blue, like clean lake water reflecting the summer sky. Her irises had been painted with a small fleck of white so that there appeared always to be a light in them. She wore tiny pearl-drop earrings and white high heels, and I thought she was the most beautiful, serene-looking doll in the world. My own dark hair and eyes and olive skin notwithstanding, I knew that when I became a bride, I would look just like her.

  Every day after school, I would come home and take

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  the doll down from its stand on my dresser and carefully hold her, fingering her dress, her shoes, the little earrings. My enjoyment of her was not diminished by the fact that she was a "doll for looking at" and not for playing with, as my father had explained. It was enough for me just to have her in my room, where I could see her and gently touch her.

  My best friend, Katy, was as delighted by the doll as I was. She often begged me to allow her to hold it. Sometimes I did. Often, we'd play "wedding," holding sheets on our heads and letting them drape the floor in back of us, like the train on my doll. We'd practice the exaggerated slow steps we'd seen brides in movies take, then collapse in giggles as we fantasized about who our grooms would be.

  Katy wanted a doll like mine and told me that she had asked for one for Christmas. But Christmas came and went, and Katy did not get a doll. I knew she was disappointed. She stopped asking to hold my doll when she came over and didn't want to play "pretend wedding" anymore. But one day, while we were coloring on the floor in my room, under the gaze of my bride doll, Katy said, "You know, someday I'm going to be a bride and look just like that doll!"

  "Me, too," I said happily, thinking that Katy was beginning our old game again.

  But then she said, "Don't be silly. You'll never look like her. You look too Jewish."

  It was the way she said it that shocked me. Her words stung, flung as they were, like so many sharp stones. Without thinking, I shoved my friend backward. She fell against my dresser, shaking it. My lovely bride doll toppled over face forward, stand and all. Her head hit the wood floor and broke. But it didn't shatter as I would have expected. Instead, it just kind of popped open cleanly,

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  revealing the black empty space between the two halves.

  For just a moment neither of us moved. We were too stunned by the appearance of the doll's head. To a young child, there is something frightening about that black hole inside. It's a place that children aren't supposed to see. But the next moment, Katy was screaming that I had hurt her, and my mother was running into the room.

  My mother picked up the two pieces of the doll's head and asked for an explanation. Katy was crying and would only say that I had pushed her and she wanted to go home. I was confined to my room.

  After Katy had gone, my mother asked me why I had pushed my friend. I repeated Katy's remark. Just then, I didn't know if I was angry at Katy because her comment was so obviously meant to insult me, or if I was sad that what she said was true. My mother just stared at the doll in her hands.

  That night, Katy and her mother appeared at our door. Katy's mother apologized for the incident and offered to buy me a new doll. My mother just said no. She did not say "thank you."

  After they had gone, my mother gave me the doll back. She had glued the head back together. The break had been on a seam, and she was able to fix it so that you couldn't even tell it had come apart. My mother looked at me a long time before she finally spoke. Then she said, "Your doll is better now than when she was new." She explained that the original glue wasn't of very good quality. As a result, the doll was too delicate to be enjoyed. So my mother had fixed it; she made that doll's head stronger, less fragile. Now it wouldn't fall apart when it was bumped. There was something substantial holding it together, and it could withstand whatever childish insult it might encounter. "Do you understand?" she asked. I did.

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  I held the bride doll in my arms, fingering the thin, barely visible line across her head. I realized that I had looked into a gaping black holethe type of place where ugly things like mean-spirited ethnic slurs might be allowed to exist. But my mother had repaired the damage to the doll, making it stronger. And she showed me that the special type of "glue" was in me, as well. I didn't ever need to be afraid.

  Katy and I continued to play together after that, but more often at my house than at hers. Children learn from their parents. Katy's parents had taught her an effective way to hurt someone. My mother taught me that even though I was a child, I was entitled to respect and I had the power to take it when I needed to. She taught me that some things you'd ordinarily think are delicatelike porcelain, or a child's egoare really quite resilient.

  I kept that doll for many years and gave her to my first daughter when she was about six. But my daughter put the doll on a shelf and rarely took the time to play with it. The doll's blue-eyed, blond, lacy perfection didn't seem to hold the same charm for my child as it had for me.

  The last time I looked at that bride doll, the lace had faded and she was missing an earring and a shoe. She didn't seem quite as wonderful as she had when my father gave her to me years ago.

  But that glue that my mother used was still holding fast.

  Marsha Arons

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  Myself

  A human being's first responsibility is to shake bands with himself.

  Henry Winkler

  I have to live with myself, and so

  I want to be fit for myself to know

  I want to be able as days go by

  Always to look myself straight in the eye;

  I don't want to stand, with the setting sun,

  And hate myself for things I have done.

  I don't want to keep on a closet shelf

  A lot of secrets about myself,

  And fool myself, as I come and go,

  Into thinking that nobody else will know

  The kind of man I really am;

  I don't want to dress myself up in sham.

  I want to go out with my head erect,

  I want to deserve all man's respect;

  And here in the struggle for fame and wealth,

  I want to be able to like myself.

  I don't want to look at myself and know

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  That I am a bluffer, an empty show.

  I can never hide myself from me:

  I see what others may never see,

  I know what others may never know;

  I never can fool myself, and so,

  Whatever happens, I want to be

  Self-respecting and guilt-free.

  Peer Counsellor Workbook

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  Firmer Ground

  I'd had a crush on him for as long as I could remember. His sandy blond hair was to his shoulders. His eyes were brown, his skin pale. He was quiet, mild-mannered. Most of all, I was drawn to his smilewhen I could coax it out of him. I was in junior high. He was in high school.

  He was my friend's brother and, for some reason, I believed he was taboo. Maybe because I knew instinctively my friend would be angry if I ever started to see him. Or maybe I knew the age gap of three years would not sit well with my parents. Or maybe, more than anything, I was terrified he'd reject me.