Then we received news that a recent MRI had shown more of the mass. In August, Riley once again went to UCLA. The single operation that would remove the
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remaining mass turned into seven more surgeries and five weeks in the hospital.
Once again, Riley beat the odds and survived the surgeries. Once again, her motor skills were sacrificed to reach the mass by manipulating the brain stem during the operation. Once again, she woke up only able to communicate her pain with her eyes. But once again, Riley did not give up.
By now I had relocated my job back to L.A., and I saw firsthand her daily struggle to do the simple things we all take for granted.
As I write this, Riley is a beautiful six-year-old girl. For the past three years, she has fought many battles and has gotten the upper hand on a war that most adults would have lost long ago. As with all wars, there are emotional and psychological wounds besides the physical damage. Yet Riley's laughter rings throughout our home every day. Physically she still battles some facial paralysis and has some vision problems, both of which are expected to improve with therapy. Yet, in June of this year, Riley's dream came trueshe performed in her first ballet recital.
Jeffrey Weinstein
[EDITORS' NOTE: Riley's amazing progress has inspired a new research foundation at UCLA headed by Dr. Lazareff called "Kidz 'n Motion." This foundation studies the brain's plasticity and searches for medical ways to improve disabilities caused by traumas to the brain.]
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You Can Beat the Odds and Be a Winner, Too
Bury him in the snows of Valley Forge, and you have a George Washington.
Raise him in abject poverty and you have an Abraham Lincoln.
Subject him to bitter religious prejudice, and you have a Disraeli.
Spit on him and crucify him, and you have Jesus Christ.
Label him "too stupid to learn," and you have a Thomas Edison.
Tell her she's too old to start painting at eighty, and you have a Grandma Moses.
Have him or her born black in a society filled with racial discrimination, and you have a Booker T. Washington, Harriet Tubman, Marian Anderson, George Washington Carver or Martin Luther King Jr.
Make him the first child to survive in a poor Italian family of eighteen children, and you have an Enrico Caruso.
Afflict him with periods of depression so severe that he cut off his own ear, and you have a Vincent van Gogh.
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Tell her in the late 1800s and early 1900s that only men can be scientists, and you have a Madame Curie, who eventually won two Nobel Prizesone for physics and the other for chemistry.
Tell a young boy who loved to sketch and draw that he has no talent, and you have a Walt Disney.
Take a crippled child whose only home he ever knew was an orphanage, and you have a James E. West, who became the first chief executive of the Boy Scouts of America.
Make him a second fiddle in an obscure South American orchestra, and you have a Toscanini.
Abigail Van Buren
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Superman Learns How to Ride
It was the summer of 1967, and the moment was nearing when I would unlatch my training wheels and learn to ride a bike.
My family owned a humble roadside motel called the Bonaire in the tranquil, picturesque town of Flat Rock, North Carolina. We lived in the basement below the motel's lobby, where I shared a room with my older sister. My parents prayed for those nights when our neon Vacancy sign would no longer cast its orange glow across the empty country highway.
For an adventurous little boy unconcerned with matters like occupancy rates, it was a time to put my overactive imagination to good use. I shuffled along as the bookish Clark Kent, with an old straw hat, pipe-cleaner glasses and ragged gray overcoat. Then, at the first hint of something amiss, I disappeared into the motel phone booth and emerged moments later with a red towel hanging from the collar of my dirty blue T-shirt and an ironed-on S boldly emblazoned across my boy-sized chest.
"This is a job for Superman!" I would cry out as I flew to meet imaginary dangers that threatened the world.
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"Hey, Superman, when are you going to learn to ride a bike?" the neighborhood kids would taunt as they rolled past. "The Man of Steel still uses training wheels!" they teased.
As I watched them ride away, I realized I was being left behind. To claim my place among their ranks, I needed to cast off my training wheels and learn to ride with the big kids. I enlisted my father's help.
"Okay, I'm going to let go, and you just remember to balance," Dad counseled as he rolled me across the lawn. We were on take number tenI had already made nine falls onto the grassy field behind the motel. After each mishap, my father would take hold of my bicycle seat and we'd begin again. He was the engine, and I was the pilot. He'd propel me across the grassy runway and then let go. I would fly solocareening through the meadow, holding my breath in nervous anticipation as the grass rolled beneath my wheels.
Suddenly I was riding! This time I had it! I dared to grin as my father's shouts of encouragement faded into the background. My smile widened. Victory was mine.
You are going to fall. The thought was at first a whisper and then grew louder and more convincing until I believed it must be true. After all, I had always fallen before. Why should this time be any different? My elation whooshed out of me like air out of a pricked balloon. Dread gripped me, and my confidence faltered. Sure enough, I tumbled to the grass.
"You almost had it," Dad said, catching his breath. "You listened to fear and you fell."
"I quit," I snapped, trying to stave off the tears of frustration. "I don't wanna learn to ride."
So I went back to my world of Clark Kent and Superman, but somehow it didn't feel the same. The intrepid reporter had left a story unfinished. The Caped Crusader had given
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up. And each time I swooped through the backyard en route to foil another bank robbery, I saw my bicycle leaning against the garage door, reminding me that there was work left undone.
Then one afternoon, I glanced over at my bike and a peculiar notion came to mind: I could do it. I was going to ride my bike this very day.
When I boldly grasped the handlebars, fear came againclosing its fingers around my insides. I quickly let go. Maybe tomorrow. But then, all of a sudden, I heard the shouts and laughter of the other children as they rode their bikes through the neighborhood. If they could do it, so could I!
I gripped the handlebars with renewed determination and pushed off, wobbling as I struggled for balance. Then I took a deep breath and began to pedal. I gathered momentum as I started up the driveway and, with my Superman cape flapping in the breeze, I rounded the front of the motel at full speed just as my father stepped out of the lobby door.
"Look, Dad! I'm riding!" I exclaimed.
He smiled and waved as I took a turn up the dirt road to join my friends at play.
The next morning I found my training wheels in the garbage can where my father had tossed them the previous afternoon. Superman had beaten an enemy called "fear," and once again the world was a safer, happier place.
Robert Tate Miller
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A Father's Advice
Once I found a pink moth. Perhaps someone will tell me there is no such thing as a pink moth. There may be no such thing as a flying horse, or a golden calf, but I say once I found a pink moth.
The front door of the large, three-story house where I grew up was protected on the outside by four panels of windowpanes, nearly like a greenhouse. Before we entered the house, we had to turn into this small enclosure of glass, wipe our feet, turn the doorknob and step into the front hallway.
I found my pink moth in this enclosure. It is here that birds often took a wrong turn and flapped their wings in a rush of feathers and noise against the glass, trying to break through the invisible barrier. Here, also, spiderwebs collected, and bees buzzed angrily against
the glass as they, too, were caught in the trap.
One morningperhaps I was eight or tenI stepped out through the front door. I noticed another moth was desperately trying to find its way out of the enclosure.
Each time I found a bee, a bird or a moth trapped in the porch vestibule, I caught it and let it go. But I noticed this insect was a color I had never seen before on a moth:
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pinkcompletely pink. I caught the moth, held it in my cupped hands.
What does a boy do with a pink moth? I stepped back into the house, found a shoebox, filled it with grass and a soda cap of water and placed my moth in the box.
It died, of course. Things cannot be held too long. They need to be set free. I threw the shoebox, the soda cap and the grass into the garbage can. I buried the moth in the garden. I feel as though I am always being pulled between wanting to hold on to things and wanting to let them go.
I remember the afternoon Karen learned how to ride her bicycle alone for the first time. We began in the early fall, Karen and I. I took her training wheels off, but she insisted that I grasp the handlebars and the seat as we walked around the court.
''I'll just let go for a second, Karen."
"No!" she insisted.
Perhaps Karen will be a lawyer someday, or a singer. Perhaps she will invent something, make a discovery, give birth to her own daughter. I thought about these things as we wiggled and rattled our way around the block. It didn't take her long to understand how to turn the pedals with her feet. As I held on to the bicycle, Karen's head and dark hair were just to the right of my cheek. She always looked down toward the front of the bicycle, calling out suggestions or laughing a bit.
After a few weeks, Karen was comfortable enough with my letting the handlebars go, but I still had to clasp the rear of the seat.
"Don't let go, Daddy."
Halloween. Thanksgiving. The leaves disappeared. We spent less and less time practicing. Wind. Cold. Winter. I hung Karen's bicycle on a nail in the rear of the garage.
Christmas. One of Karen's favorite gifts that year was
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five pieces of soap in the shape of little shells that her mother had bought.
New Year's Eve. Snow. High fuel bills. And then a sudden warm spell.
"Roe?" I said as we woke up. "Do you hear that bird? It's a cardinal. It's been singing for the past ten minutes. Listen." Roe listened. I listened. The children were downstairs watching television.
After I showered, dressed and ate breakfast, I found Karen in the garage trying to unhook her bicycle. In this last week of January, when it is usually too cold for the children to be outside on their bicycles, it was nearly sixty degrees. I walked into the garage and lifted the bicycle off the nail.
"I love my bicycle, Daddy."
She hopped on as I pushed her across the crushed stones of our driveway to the street. I gave her a slight shove. "Let go, Daddy!" And Karen simply wobbled, shook, laughed and pedaled off as I stood alone watching her spin those wheels against the blacktop.
Einstein spoke about time, about the speed of light and objects moving beside one another. I wanted to run to Karen, hold the seat of her bicycle, hold on to her handlebars, have her dark hair brush against my cheeks. Instead I kept shouting, "Keep pedaling, Karen! Keep pedaling!" And then I applauded.
There is no use holding on to a pink mothor your daughter. They will do just fine on their own. Just set them free.
Christopher de Vinck
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Highsights
There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
Willa Cather
Cessna planes flew me and my climbing team, along with overstuffed packs and sleds, across the Alaska range and onto the Kahiltna Glacier, the base camp of Mt. McKinley.
That day, we worked to carve a camp out of the harsh snow and ice of the glacier. Even in McKinley's extreme cold, the intense heat of the sun reflecting off the ice burned my eyes through my goggles.
When the snow walls were built and tents were set up, we sat around our gas stove feeling the temperature drop fifty degrees as the sun sank behind the mountains. Sam, my climbing partner, took my finger and began pointing it at prominent parts of the West Buttress Trail. Then I tried to point on my own towards the summit, but Sam only laughed and said, "Higher!" So I pointed higher and higher until I imagined I was pointing at the sun. "There," he said, "there's the summit of McKinley." For the first
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time I was afraid of what we'd undertaken.
Afterwards, we sat listening to the nightly weather report given by Base Camp Annie and other local stations. On one, we heard the voices of two Spanish climbers croaking their location to a rescue party. That morning, they had pushed for the summit but had been turned back by high winds and whiteout conditions. Now, ten hours later, they lay in their tent, suffering from high-altitude edema. The next morning, we learned that one of the climbers had died. I worried that this tragedy, on our first night, might be a bad omen.
Sam and I asked ourselves whether we were putting our lives at unnecessary risk by attempting this climb. I thought back to when I had begun training more than a year ago, by running trails with my guide dog in the desert. One day I had tripped over a cactus, landing on my hand. I needed a couple of stitches. The next day, I showed my fifth-grade class my bandaged hand and told them what happened. One very brave little girl stood up and asked, "Mr. Weihenmayer, if you fell down in the desert, how do you expect to climb that big mountain?" I didn't yet have an answer, but I knew within a year, I would have to!
For the next year, we trained by running up stairs in the tallest building in Phoenix with sixty-pound packs on our backs, going on many training climbs as a team to Mt. Rainier, Long's Peak and Mt. Humphrey, and reading several Braille books on McKinley.
Now I said, "Sam, we've come a long way in a year. We've made mistakes, but we've learned from them. We've taken risks, but they've been calculated ones. We've solved problems and compensated for all the things that could go wrong on the mountain. We've worked well as a team. We've prepared all we can."
Trying to fall asleep that night, I remembered hard lessons learned. For example, on our team's second
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training climb, we had worked our way up a steep ridge. It was getting dark and cold. I was assigned to set up the tents. But I found that, with my thick layers of gloves on, I couldn't feel the intricate sleeves and loops of the tent. Each time I took the gloves off to orient myself, tiny splinters of ice pricked my hands and they went instantly numb. Finally, I had to have a teammate set up the tent for me.
Frustrated and embarrassed, I made a promise to myself. The things I couldn't doand there were manyI would let go, but the things that I could doand there were also manyI would learn to do well.
Later, back in Phoenix in hundred-degree weather, I went often to a field near my school. With my thick gloves on, I worked on setting up the tent and breaking it down again. I wanted to contribute to the team, carry my share. I wanted the team to be able to put their lives in my hands, as I would put mine in theirs.
When I decided to attempt McKinley, I knew the risks. Risk is like the next hold on a rock face: you reach for it expecting that it's there, hoping that it's there, but ready to find the next hold if it's not!
Chicken Soup for the Unsinkable Soul Page 21