Treasury of Joy & Inspiration

by Editors of Reader's Digest

  “What was it like? What do you mean?”

  “Well, you know—with guys from such different backgrounds and interests.”

  “You mean, they were black?”

  “Well, yes,” they’d say. “What was it like?”

  “Listen,” I’d answer, “traveling with my team on the road in America was one of the most enlightening experiences of my life.”

  Enjoying warm friendships with black teammates—seeing the powerful role of family in their lives and the strength of each one’s individuality—I also began to understand the distrusts and suspicions they had.

  I came to know the meaning of certain looks and certain cues. I sensed the tension of always being on guard, never totally relaxing. I felt the pain of racial arrogance directed my way. And I realized how much I will never know about what it is to be black in America.

  After my career with the Knicks, I revived an old dream of mine: to become a United States Senator. I first had that dream in the summer of 1964 when, as a college intern on Capitol Hill, I stood in a corner of the Senate gallery and watched the passage of the civil-rights bill. It would desegregate the hotels and restaurants of Jim Crow America. I realized that something had happened that evening to make this country a better place for everybody.

  In 1978 I was elected to the Senate from New Jersey. During my terms, although poverty and violence persisted, I witnessed the dismantlement of the legal architecture of segregation and a rise in the fortunes of Americans of all races. Roughly a third of black American families, for example, can now be characterized as middle class. Latino men imbued with the work ethic have the highest labor-force participation rate in the country. Asian-Americans are models of academic achievement.

  But I saw something else evolve, too; something disturbing. Despite our great advances, the races simply don’t talk candidly to each other about race. There is no genuine communication about our differences or our shared values—and, even more sadly, a growing lack of interest in even trying.

  If we are to have racial healing in America, I’m convinced that the first step is to engage—to talk openly and honestly with someone of another race. Yet people of different races often choose to live their lives apart. When they do engage, they don’t speak with candor or hear with clarity. The result: Our communication about race is barnacled with code words, inconsequential chatter about sports or the weather—and silence.

  But beyond engagement and candor, there must be action. The reason our military is one of America’s most advanced large institutions in racial terms can be traced to two facts: Clifford Alexander, the first black Secretary of the Army, instituted a promotion system penalizing bias, and a multiracial platoon or company must act together. Their lives depend on each other.

  In football, a tackle’s race makes no difference; all that counts is whether he blocked the opponent. The race of a basketball player whose last-second shot wins the game is irrelevant; only whether the ball went into the basket matters.

  If we are ever to move toward racial harmony in America, we must seize every opportunity for similar cooperation. Only through doing things together—things that have nothing specifically to do with race—will people break down racial barriers. Facing common problems as neighbors or coworkers reduces awkwardness in a way that simple conversation cannot.

  It is truly amazing what people working together can do:

  • In Alpine, New Jersey, school principal Mat Glowski arranged for 175 eighth-graders from a predominantly black and Hispanic school and other, largely white and Asian schools to sort and package groceries together for the community FoodBank of New Jersey in Hillside. This first step, says Glowski, “demonstrates a hope.”

  • In tiny Millen, Georgia, the foundation, walls and roof stand where the ashes of a predominantly black Baptist church once lay. The church, burned to the ground in a 1996 hate crime, is being rebuilt by whites and blacks from groups such as the American Jewish Committee and the United Methodists’ Volunteers in Mission. “When you’re sweating beside others on a work site,” says a volunteer, “you get an insight into each other as human beings.”

  • In Memphis, Tennessee, 25 white and 25 black congregations organized a political-action group and began working together in 1990 on a number of issues, including upgrading schools and trying to stop a highway expansion. In more than 400 meetings between blacks and whites, candor was the rule. When Gerald Taylor, a black leader who was the coalition’s organizer, asked white leaders to participate, he told them not to do so “to help poor black folks” but for their own self-interest.

  • Walt Michael of Westminster, Maryland, a musician, was troubled that the races were “parked in different camps.” So each summer he gets people on “common ground” singing in musical programs at Western Maryland College. For example, Kim, Kellie and Krissy Nichols—a trio of blond, blue-eyed sisters who learned about African-American gospel music singing at the Common Ground concerts—now belt out those songs in black and white churches. The music has proved a powerful bridge between the races.

  Can demonstrations of community overcome the suspicions and bigotries that endure? Over time, I think so. But it will take many acts of individual cooperation, and courage as well.

  In 1995 an African-American member of my Senate staff happened to see a Korean-American woman selling refreshments near the Capitol Building during the “Million Man March” on Washington, D.C. At one point a black man walked up to buy a soda.

  Another black man, standing nearby with his arms folded like a Praetorian Guard, spoke up. “Not today, my brother!” he said. “Today you buy from a brother, not from her.” A few minutes later, another man approached, and the self-appointed guardian said the same.

  Finally, a third marcher came by, but he wasn’t having any of it. “What do you mean, ‘Buy from a brother’?” he said. “Don’t you see you’re doing the same thing to her that was done to us for two hundred years? I’m buying from her!” And he did.

  That man, who saw a fellow human being in that Korean-American woman is a reason to hope that we might one day be able to see beyond skin color or eye shape to the uniqueness of each individual. And he is not alone. Countless men and women of all races share his strength of character.

  We can no longer put off the enormous task of racial healing. It is, first, a moral obligation. If our religious faiths teach us that we are our brother’s keeper, then we must begin to walk the talk. No longer can our spiritual convictions exist alongside subtle discrimination or a sense of superiority.

  Second, it is our obligation as a world leader. Our democratic ideals have the power to stir the world, but they cannot if they are selectively realized at home.

  Finally, racial harmony is in our economic self-interest. By the end of the first decade of the next century, only about 60 percent of new American workers will be native-born whites. Clearly, we will all advance together or each of us will be diminished. That is not ideology. It’s demographics.

  Every Thanksgiving, Americans congregate around a meal and share the joy of friends and family. They laugh, give thanks, nurture each other. Sometimes they even learn from each other.

  What America needs now is an annual Sunday of racial healing, in which millions of families of different races sit around common tables and break bread as friends.

  It is something every family could do. Blacks would invite whites; whites would invite blacks. A family would invite Asian or Latino neighbors, and vice versa. If enough of us tried it, we would create connections among people now isolated from each other. Through our talk and action, we would get past the initial awkwardness—and restore hope.

  Russian writer Leo Tolstoy once observed, “Many people want to change the world; only a few want to change themselves.” To achieve racial healing in America, we must start changing ourselves. Making brotherhood work begins with each of u
s.

  Quotable Quote

  If we take care of the moments, the years will take care of themselves. Maria Edgeworth

  The Night I Met Einstein

  by Jerome Weidman

  November 1955

  When I was a very young man, just beginning to make my way, I was invited to dine at the home of a distinguished New York philanthropist. After dinner, our hostess led us to an enormous drawing room. Other guests were pouring in, and my eyes beheld two unnerving sights: Servants were arranging small gilt chairs in long, neat rows; and up front, leaning against the wall, were musical instruments.

  Apparently I was in for an evening of chamber music.

  I use the phrase “in for” because music meant nothing to me. I am almost tone deaf—only with great effort can I carry the simplest tune, and serious music was to me no more than an arrangement of noises. So I did what I always did when trapped: I sat down, and when the music started, I fixed my face in what I hoped was an expression of intelligent appreciation, closed my ears from the inside and submerged myself in my own completely irrelevant thoughts.

  After a while, becoming aware that the people around me were applauding, I concluded it was safe to unplug my ears. At once I heard a gentle but surprisingly penetrating voice on my right: “You are fond of Bach?”

  I knew as much about Bach as I know about nuclear fission. But I did know one of the most famous faces in the world, with the renowned shock of untidy white hair and the ever-present pipe between the teeth. I was sitting next to Albert Einstein.

  “Well,” I said uncomfortably and hesitated. I had been asked a casual question. All I had to do was be equally casual in my reply. But I could see from the look in my neighbor’s extraordinary eyes that their owner was not merely going through the perfunctory duties of elementary politeness. Regardless of what value I placed on my part in the verbal exchange, to this man his part in it mattered very much. Above all, I could feel that this was a man to whom you did not tell a lie, however small.

  “I don’t know anything about Bach,” I said awkwardly. “I’ve never heard any of his music.”

  A look of perplexed astonishment washed across Einstein’s mobile face.

  “You have never heard Bach?”

  He made it sound as though I had said I’d never taken a bath.

  “It isn’t that I don’t want to like Bach,” I replied hastily. “It’s just that I’m tone deaf, or almost tone deaf, and I’ve never really heard anybody’s music.”

  A look of concern came into the old man’s face. “Please,” he said abruptly. “You will come with me?”

  He stood up and took my arm. I stood up. As he led me across that crowded room, I kept my embarrassed glance fixed on the carpet. A rising murmur of puzzled speculation followed us out into the hall. Einstein paid no attention to it.

  Resolutely, he led me upstairs. He obviously knew the house well. On the floor above, he opened the door into a book-lined study, drew me in, and shut the door.

  “Now,” he said with a small, troubled smile. “You will tell me, please, how long you have felt this way about music?”

  “All my life,” I said, feeling awful. “I wish you would go back downstairs and listen, Dr. Einstein. The fact that I don’t enjoy it doesn’t matter.”

  Einstein shook his head and scowled, as though I had introduced an irrelevance.

  “Tell me, please,” he said. “Is there any kind of music that you do like?”

  “Well,” I answered, “I like songs that have words, and the kind of music where I can follow the tune.”

  He smiled and nodded, obviously pleased. “You can give me an example, perhaps?”

  “Well,” I ventured, “almost anything by Bing Crosby.”

  He nodded again, briskly. “Good!”

  He went to a corner of the room, opened a phonograph, and started pulling out records. I watched him uneasily. At last, he beamed. “Ah!” he said.

  He put the record on, and in a moment, the study was filled with the relaxed, lilting strains of Bing Crosby’s “When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.” Einstein beamed at me and kept time with the stem of his pipe. After three or four phrases, he stopped the phonograph.

  “Now,” he said. “Will you tell me, please, what you have just heard?”

  The simplest answer seemed to be to sing the lines. I did just that, trying desperately to stay in tune and keep my voice from cracking. The expression on Einstein’s face was like the sunrise.

  “You see!” he cried with delight when I finished. “You do have an ear!”

  I mumbled something about this being one of my favorite songs, something I had heard hundreds of times so that it didn’t really prove anything.

  “Nonsense!” said Einstein. “It proves everything! Do you remember your first arithmetic lesson in school? Suppose, at your very first contact with numbers, your teacher had ordered you to work out a problem in, say, long division or fractions. Could you have done so?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Precisely!” Einstein made a triumphant wave with his pipe stem. “It would have been impossible, and you would have reacted in panic. You would have closed your mind to long division and fractions. As a result, because of that one small mistake by your teacher, it is possible your whole life you would be denied the beauty of long division and fractions.”

  The pipe stem went up and out in another wave.

  “But on your first day, no teacher would be so foolish. He would start you with elementary things—then, when you had acquired skill with the simplest problems, he would lead you up to long division and to fractions.

  “So it is with music.” Einstein picked up the Bing Crosby record. “This simple, charming little song is like simple addition or subtraction. You have mastered it. Now we go on to something more complicated.”

  He found another record and set it going. The golden voice of John McCormack singing “The Trumpeter” filled the room. After a few lines, Einstein stopped the record.

  “So!” he said. “You will sing that back to me, please?”

  I did—with a good deal of self-consciousness but with, for me, a surprising degree of accuracy.

  Einstein stared at me with a look on his face that I had seen only once before in my life: on the face of my father as he listened to me deliver the valedictory address at my high school graduation ceremony.

  “Excellent!” Einstein remarked when I finished. “Wonderful! Now this!”

  “This” turned out to be Caruso in what was to me a completely unrecognizable fragment from Cavalleria Rusticana, a one-act opera. Nevertheless, I managed to reproduce an approximation of the sounds the famous tenor had made. Einstein beamed his approval.

  Caruso was followed by at least a dozen others. I could not shake my feeling of awe over the way this great man, into whose company I had been thrown by chance, was completely preoccupied by what we were doing, as though I were his sole concern.

  We came at last to recordings of music without words, which I was instructed to reproduce by humming. When I reached for a high note, Einstein’s mouth opened, and his head went back as if to help me attain what seemed unattainable. Evidently I came close enough, for he suddenly turned off the phonograph.

  “Now, young man,” he said, putting his arm through mine. “We are ready for Bach!”

  As we returned to our seats in the drawing room, the players were tuning up for a new selection. Einstein smiled and gave me a reassuring pat on the knee.

  “Just allow yourself to listen,” he whispered. “That is all.”

  It wasn’t really all, of course. Without the effort he had just poured out for a total stranger I would never have heard, as I did that night for the first time in my life, Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.” I have hea
rd it many times since. I don’t think I shall ever tire of it. Because I never listen to it alone. I am sitting beside a small, round man with a shock of untidy white hair, a dead pipe clamped between his teeth and eyes that contain in their extraordinary warmth all the wonder of the world.

  When the concert was finished, I added my genuine applause to that of the others.

  Suddenly our hostess confronted us. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Einstein,” she said with an icy glare at me, “that you missed so much of the performance.”

  Einstein and I came hastily to our feet. “I am sorry too,” he said. “My young friend here and I, however, were engaged in the greatest activity of which man is capable.”

  She looked puzzled. “Really?” she said. “And what is that?”

  Einstein smiled and put his arm across my shoulders. And he uttered ten words that—for at least one person who is in his endless debt—are his epitaph:

  “Opening up yet another fragment of the frontier of beauty.”

  The Good Samaritans

  I got talking to a couple at the supermarket and subsequently missed my bus. As I walked home, a car pulled up. Seeing it was my new friends, I jumped in and told them where I lived.

  “This was great—thank you,” I said when we reached my house. “Do you have much farther to go?”

  “Not really,” they replied. “We were outside our door when you got in.”Doreen Connor

  • • •

  “Hello, Mrs. Miller,” said the bearded guy behind the counter of the bagel shop.

  My husband and I looked at him but drew complete blanks. “I’m sorry, do we know each other?” I asked.

  “Yeah, you was my English teacher.”

  Leaning over, my husband whispered, “Good job, honey. Good job.”Elizabeth Miller