Treasury of Joy & Inspiration

by Editors of Reader's Digest

“I can’t do anything,” I said to Cookie.

  She stared back at me. You got us into this, her eyes said, and you’d better get us out.

  I climbed up the bank to the trestle and began to release the dogs one at a time. Each crossed the trestle, moving carefully from tie to tie. On the other side they didn’t stop. The older dogs had been here before and knew the way home. The pups followed. Soon they vanished in the night.

  “Well,” I said to Cookie, “it’s you and me.”

  I let her loose and in disbelief watched her take off after the team. “Traitor,” I said with great feeling.

  I managed to drag the sled off the trestle. Once on solid ground, I trudged along with the sled behind me, feeling as if I were on a treadmill. With some 30 miles to go, it would take three days to get home.

  After about 40 minutes I heard a sound. Minto, a large, red dog, came up and sat down facing me.

  “Hello,” I said. “Get lonely?” As I was rubbing his ears, another dog, Winston, trotted up.

  “What is this?” I said. “Loyalty?”

  The truth was, they shouldn’t have been there. Race teams are trained for only one thing: to go and never stop. They do not come back. But four more did, then one more, then the last two pups and, finally, Cookie.

  I hooked them up and managed to get a “thank you” past the lump in my throat. As I drove them forward, I noticed that some of the dogs had slight bite wounds on the ends of their ears.

  Sitting in the kitchen later, I said to my wife, Ruth, “It sounds insane, but it looked like Cookie went after them and sent them back. I’ve never heard anything like it.”

  “I know one thing,” Ruth replied. “You aren’t paying her nearly enough.”

  Cookie and I had to retire from racing at around the same time. Arthritis in her ankles sidelined her. Then one day, breaking up a dogfight, I felt a sudden pain in my chest. The doctor said I had heart disease.

  I found someone to take the other dogs and moved Cookie into the house. She stayed with me constantly, sitting next to me on the couch to watch TV and growling whenever a cat or dog came on.

  Diet, medication and exercise helped me, and I became more active. On the first hard fall morning I went out to the woodpile to split kindling, Cookie by my side. At the pile I stopped, but she kept going.

  I knew what she was thinking. Long runs, towing a wheeled sled, had always come with first cold. Cookie had loved them.

  I found her at the precise spot in the kennel where she’d stood hundreds of times, waiting for the team to be hooked up.

  “No,” I said, coming up next to her. “We don’t do that now.”

  She whined softly.

  I walked toward the woodpile. I did not dare look back, or I would have lost it. As always, her determination to be with me won out even over the call of the trail. When she caught up to me, I reached down to pet her. She leaned against my leg.

  Two more summers and one more winter came and went. Cookie stayed by my side.

  Then one morning in late summer I let her out, and she did not come back for breakfast. I found her under a spruce tree, dead, her face to the east, her eyes half-open.

  I sat next to her crying. Then I took her back to the place in the kennel where she loved to stand, the place where we harnessed. I buried her there with her collar still on, bearing the little metal tag with the number 32—her number, and mine, in the Iditarod.

  I thought of when she was young and there was nothing in front of us but the iceblink on the horizon. I hoped that wherever dogs go, she would find, now and then, a good run.

  The Gratitude Club

  BY STEVE HARTMAN

  July/August 2012

  from the CBS News Archives

  I’ve been reporting on extraordinary people for 25 years as a television journalist, but this small Oregon town and the man at its center, Woody Davis, stand alone in my memory.

  When I read a newspaper clip about the community’s reaction to Woody’s declining health, I knew that this would be a special story for my CBS Evening News series, On the Road (the transcript of which is below). But nothing prepared me for what happened when I traveled to Oregon last December and began knocking on doors. Every single person knew Woody and had countless stories to tell about his selflessness and generosity.

  For five decades, he had helped plow cars out of snow, chopped wood, repaired farm equipment and more. He was the consummate good neighbor, and in his time of need, the community was rallying around him. I’d never seen anything like it.

  Corbett, Oregon, December 2011—On a high ridge above the Columbia River, just down from heaven, you’ll find an angel on a front-end loader.

  Woody Davis, 69, is kind of a jack-of-all-trades. And although he’s never made much money at it, by all accounts, he has earned his wings.

  Here is some of what people in town have said of him:

  “He’s the epitome of something dear.”

  “You have to chase him down to pay him sometimes.”

  “He’s uncommon, he’s special, he’s a gift that this community has had all these years.”

  Which is why folks in this small town east of Portland are now going out of their way to thank Woody for the thousands of good deeds he’s done for them over the past 50 years.

  Recently, they all got together to cut and stack his firewood for winter. A couple of guys fixed up his old pickup. Someone even built him a beautiful wooden box and invited the whole town to sign it.

  “Did you know how much the community cared for him?” I asked Woody’s son, Clint.

  “Not to the degree I do now,” he said.

  Clint said all the work his dad did for people has been repaid tenfold. “Bill Gates could not come to Corbett and buy this. You can’t buy the love that people have poured out for Dad.”

  Their words and deeds are sincere and lasting. Unfortunately, the box is pine—and the outlook isn’t good.

  A few months ago, Woody was diagnosed with ALS—Lou Gehrig’s disease. Doctors tell him he has about six months. The disease, which attacks the nervous system, is already making it hard for him to lift much of anything or even talk. But his attitude remains unaffected.

  “What do you think of what everybody’s been doing for you?” I asked.

  “I feel blessed that I’m dying slowly.”

  I really didn’t think I’d heard him right. “Wait, did you just say you feel blessed that you’re dying slowly?”

  “Because people have a chance to express to me how they feel,” he said.

  In most communities, death is whispered, and praise is saved for the eulogy. But Woody Davis and the people of Corbett, Oregon, show us why that may be too late. Turns out even angels like to know they’ve made a difference.

  The Christmas Present

  By James A. Michener

  December 1967

  When I was a boy of nine in the little town of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, I used to mow the lawn of Mrs. Long, an elderly lady who lived across from the Presbyterian Church. She paid me very little for the chore, which was not surprising for she had not much money. But she did promise me, “When Christmas comes I shall have a present for you.” And she said this with such enthusiasm that I felt assured the present would be magnificent.

  I spent much time wondering what it would be. The boys I played with had baseball gloves and bicycles and ice skates, and I was so eager to acquire any one of these things that I convinced myself that my benefactor intended choosing from among them.

  “It would hardly be a baseball glove,” I reasoned with myself. “A woman like Mrs. Long wouldn’t know much about baseball.” Since she was a frail little person I also ruled out the bicycle, for how could she handle such a contraption?

  On my last Saturday at wo
rk Mrs. Long said, “Now remember, because you’ve been a good boy all summer, at Christmas I’ll have a present waiting. You come to the door and collect it.” These words clinched it. Since she was going to have the present in her house, and since she herself would be handling it, unquestionably she was giving me a pair of ice skates.

  So convinced of this I became that I could see the skates and imagine myself upon them. As the cold days of November arrived and ice began to form on the ponds which were then a feature of rural Doylestown, I began to try my luck on the ice that would be sustaining me and my skates through the winter.

  “Get away from the ice!” a man shouted. “It’s not strong enough yet.” But soon it would be.

  As Christmas approached, it was with difficulty that I restrained myself from reporting to Mrs. Long and demanding my present. Our family agreed that the first of December was too early for me to do this. “She may not have it wrapped yet,” someone argued, and this made sense. But the 15th was also too early, and the 20th, too. I argued back on the 20th, reasoning that if I was going to get a present I might as well get it now, but my mother pointed out that in our family we never opened our presents until Christmas morning.

  On the 21st of December, a serious cold snap froze all the ponds so the boys who already had ice skates were able to use them, and my longing to possess mine, even though I could not open the package for a few days, became overpowering. On December 22nd I could restrain myself no longer. I marched down the street, presented myself at the door of the house whose lawn I had tended all summer and said, “I’ve come for my present, Mrs. Long.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” she said, leading me into her parlor, its windows heavy with purple velvet. She sat me in a chair, disappeared to another room, and in a moment stood before me holding a package which under no conceivable circumstances could hold a baseball glove or a bicycle or even a pair of skates. I was painfully disappointed but so far as I can recall did not show it, because during the week my advisers at home had warned repeatedly, “Whatever she has for you, take it graciously and say thank you.”

  What she had was an ordinary parcel about 22 centimeters wide, 30 centimeters long and no more than 8 millimeters thick. As Mrs. Long held it in her frail hands, curiosity replaced my initial disappointment, and when I lifted it from her the extreme lightness of the gift quite captivated me. It weighed almost nothing.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “You’ll see on Christmas Day.”

  I shook it. Nothing rattled, but I thought I did catch a sound of some sort—a quiet, muffled sound that was somehow familiar but unidentifiable. “What is it?” I asked again.

  “A kind of magic,” Mrs. Long said, and that was all.

  Her words were enough to set my mind dancing with new possibilities, so that by the time I reached home I had convinced myself that I held some great wonder. “She gave me a magician’s set. I’ll turn pitchers of milk into rabbits.”

  How long the passage to Christmas was! There were other presents of normal dimension and weight. But Mrs. Long’s box dominated all, for it had to do with magic.

  On Christmas morning, before the sun was up. I had this box on my knees, tearing at the reused colored string which bound it. Soon the wrapping paper was off and in my lap lay a flat box with its top hinged about halfway down.

  With great excitement I opened the hinged lid to find inside a shimmering pile of ten flimsy sheets of black paper, each labeled in iridescent letters, Carbon Paper Regal Premium. Of the four words I knew only the second, and what it signified in this context I could not guess. Vaguely I remembered that the present had something to do with magic, and with this word on my lips I turned to the elders who had watched me unwrapping my gift.

  “Is it magic?” I asked.

  Aunt Laura, who taught school, had the presence of mind to say, “It really is!” And she took two pieces of white paper, placed between them one of the black sheets from the box and, with a hard pencil, wrote my name on the upper sheet. Then, removing it and the Carbon Paper Regal Premium, she handed me the second sheet, which her pencil had in no way touched.

  There was my name! It was clean, and very dark, and well formed and as beautiful as Christmas Day itself.

  I was enthralled! This was indeed magic . . . of the greatest dimension. That a pencil could write on one piece of paper and mysteriously record on another was a miracle which was so gratifying to my childish mind that I can honestly say that in that one moment, in the dark of Christmas morning, I understood as much about printing, and the duplication of words, and the fundamental mystery of disseminating ideas as I have learned in the remaining half-century of my life.

  I wrote and wrote, using up whole tablets until I had ground off the last shred of blackness from the ten sheets of carbon paper. It was the most enchanting Christmas present a boy like me could have had, infinitely more significant than a baseball glove or a pair of skates. It was exactly the present I needed and it reached me at precisely that Christmas when I was best able to comprehend it. Because it enabled me to learn something about the reproduction of words, it opened vast portals of imagination.

  I have received some pretty thundering Christmas presents since then, but none ever came close to the magnificence of this one. The average present merely gratifies a temporary yearning, as the ice skates would have done; the great present illuminates all the years of life that remain.

  It was not until some years later that I realized that the ten sheets of Carbon Paper Regal Premium which Mrs. Long gave me had cost her nothing. She had used them for her purposes and would normally have thrown them away, except that she had the ingenuity to guess that a boy might profit from a present totally outside the realm of his ordinary experience. Although she had spent no money on me, she had spent something infinitely more valuable: imagination.

  I hope that each year some boys and girls, will receive, from thoughtful adults who really love them, gifts which will jolt them out of all they have known up to now. It is such gifts and such experiences—usually costing little or nothing—that transform a life and lend it an impetus that may continue for decades.

  Laughter, the Best Medicine

  The devout cowboy lost his favorite Bible while he was mending fences out on the range.

  Three weeks later a cow walked up to him carrying the Bible in its mouth. The cowboy couldn’t believe his eyes. He took the book out of the cow’s mouth, raised his eyes heavenward and exclaimed, “It’s a miracle!”

  “Not really,” said the cow. “Your name is written inside the cover.” Roman Wilbert

  • • •

  A farmer pulls a prank on Easter Sunday. After the egg hunt, he sneaks into the chicken coop and replaces every white egg with a brightly colored one. Minutes later, the rooster walks in. He spots the colored eggs, then storms out and beats up the peacock.Adam Joshua Smargon

  The Man on the Train

  By Alex Haley

  February 1991

  Whenever my brothers, sister and I get together we inevitably talk about Dad. We all owe our success in life to him—and to a mysterious man he met one night on a train.

  Our father, Simon Alexander Haley, was born in 1892 and reared in the small farming town of Savannah, Tennessee. He was the eighth child of Alec Haley—a tough-willed former slave and part-time sharecropper—and of a woman named Queen.

  Although sensitive and emotional, my grandmother could be tough-willed herself, especially when it came to her children. One of her ambitions was that my father be educated.

  Back then in Savannah a boy was considered “wasted” if he remained in school after he was big enough to do farm work. So when my father reached the sixth grade, Queen began massaging grandfather’s ego.

  “Since we have eight children,” she would argue, “wouldn’t it be prestigious if we deli
berately wasted one and got him educated?” After many arguments, Grandfather let Dad finish the eighth grade. Still, he had to work in the fields after school.

  But Queen was not satisfied. As eighth grade ended, she began planting seeds, saying Grandfather’s image would reach new heights if their son went to high school.

  Her barrage worked. Stern old Alec Haley handed my father five hard-earned ten-dollar bills, told him never to ask for more and sent him off to high school. Traveling first by mule cart and then by train—the first train he had ever seen—Dad finally alighted in Jackson, Tennessee, where he enrolled in the preparatory department of Lane College. The black Methodist school offered courses up through junior college.

  Dad’s $50 was soon used up, and to continue in school, he worked as a waiter, a handyman and a helper at a school for wayward boys. And when winter came, he’d arise at 4 a.m., go into prosperous white families’ homes and make fires so the residents would awaken in comfort.

  Poor Simon became something of a campus joke with his one pair of pants and shoes, and his droopy eyes. Often he was found asleep with a textbook fallen into his lap.

  The constant struggle to earn money took its toll. Dad’s grades began to flounder. But he pushed onward and completed senior high. Next he enrolled in A & T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, a land-grant school where he struggled through freshman and sophomore years.

  One bleak afternoon at the close of his second year, Dad was called into a teacher’s office and told that he’d failed a course—one that required a textbook he’d been too poor to buy.

  A ponderous sense of defeat descended upon him. For years he’d given his utmost, and now he felt he had accomplished nothing. Maybe he should return home to his original destiny of sharecropping.

  But days later, a letter came from the Pullman Company saying he was one of 24 black college men selected from hundreds of applicants to be summertime sleeping-car porters. Dad was ecstatic. Here was a chance! He eagerly reported for duty and was assigned a Buffalo-to-Pittsburgh train.