Step Out on Nothing

by Byron Pitts

Son, you know your momma loves you. I believe in you. I pray for you. I know you better than you know yourself. And I know a God who is able. You’re not coming home. You’re not going to give up. You’re not going to fail. You are going to endure.

  Love,

  Mom

  Whew! That’s my momma summed up in a single letter: angry, passionate, relentless, unbending, unedited, unforgiving, immovable in her faith, and unwilling to give an inch or give up on her son. Regardless of the times, whether or not the experts, the people around her, or even I doubted what was possible, she stood like stone. Thirty years later, it still makes me laugh a bit, even tear up every time I read this particular letter. She never simply pushed—she lifted. I know that now; I sensed it then. As I recall, back in 1978, I had three reactions. As I was reading the letter, I was crying, for obvious reasons, because it felt like she was piling on. It was symbolic of the tension between a kid growing into manhood and his mother. She didn’t understand that I was trying.

  Then it made me angry. Oftentimes my mother’s tough love brought us together. This time it pushed us apart. I understood her point, but she was wrong about the particulars. Up until that point in my life, she had been right about everything.

  I remember reading the letter again and finally it made me laugh. It reminded me how intense my mother is. As I read the letter over again and again, it was like looking in a mirror. I too was tough. It was okay to get angry, perhaps even curse a bit, then settle down, refocus, recommit, remember not simply who I was but whose I was. As always, included in the envelope was an index card with Scripture. Psalm 37: “Fret not thyself because of evildoers . . . For they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb.” I wasn’t sure if that biblical threat was aimed at me or Dr. Lucas. Mom would later explain that negative thoughts and pessimism were like “evildoers.” She was saying don’t worry about things. Her bottom line was always, let God fight your battles.

  Maybe it was the training that came with being a social worker or the innate skills of a good parent, but even when she was at her harshest, Clarice always seemed to know what was needed and when it was needed. She made a compelling argument. Did I want to return to Baltimore and cut grass on the interstate? Was I giving up? For weeks Clarice continued to write letters of encouragement while I wrestled with the decision to withdraw from school.

  My mother was appealing to the dream of who she thought I could be. But Dr. Lucas spoke directly to who I believed I was. “You’re not Ohio Wesleyan material,” he had said.

  My mother was being hopeful. But, in my mind, he was being realistic, more honest. Finally, I was exhausted and wanted to escape them both. If I left school, I would be done with him, and if I went back to Baltimore, I couldn’t stay in my mother’s house. On a chilly February morning I walked over to University Hall to pick up the forms to withdraw from Ohio Wesleyan.

  Sitting on a bench outside, I had my book bag on one shoulder and blank forms in my free hand. Somewhere between sadness and anger, my emotions provided insulation from the winter cold. I didn’t seem to notice the temperature or that I was now crying. Not small tears, mind you, but nose-running, lose my breath, shoulders-shaking tears. How pathetic I must have looked. I guess that’s why a plump woman with long brown hair and a heavy coat stopped in front of me.

  “Young man, are you okay?” came a slightly accented voice.

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m fi . . . fi . . . fine.” It was almost guaranteed that whenever I was overcome by emotion, the stuttering would start.

  “You don’t look fine. Please tell me what’s wrong,” she insisted. By this time my spirit was broken, and I was too emotionally spent to make up a story, so I just started blabbing. I must have talked for several minutes because the woman in the big coat interrupted me and said, “May I sit down while you continue your story?”

  I continued to ramble on for at least twenty minutes. This round-faced stranger just kept smiling and listening. Her body language assured me that what I had to say was somehow important. First I told her what Dr. Lucas had said, that I wasn’t college material. I was failing his class, and it was his recommendation that I leave. “I guess I’m just stupid,” I told her. “I was fooling myself to think I could make it here.” I told her that I was tired of being embarrassed in class. But I knew that if I dropped out of school, it would embarrass my family. I told her I didn’t feel as if I had any choice. All the while I was crying, sniffling, and stuttering.

  Eventually she interrupted me and said, “I’m so sorry, but I must get back to work now. But can we continue our talk tomorrow. And promise me you won’t drop out of school before we talk?”

  “Bu . . . bu . . . bu . . . but I’m just stupid. I don’t belong here,” I mumbled.

  Then she flashed a part of her personality I would come to see plenty of in the years to come: “That’s just nonsense. Stop it. Stop that right now! Now give me your word you will speak to me tomorrow before you make any final decision on school! Give me your word! Look me in the eye and give me your word!”

  Confused about why this stranger would be raising her voice at me, I simply said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, good,” she answered with a reassuring smile. “My name is Ulle. My office is on the second floor of Slocum Hall. Can you come see me at around eleven?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then it is settled. Go on with the rest of your day, and we will speak tomorrow.”

  I welcomed the chance to delay what seemed like the inevitable. Clarice was always big on going to bed and allowing trouble to rest the night as well. Somehow I felt a bit relieved and finished the day. The next morning I made my way to Slocum Hall. Perhaps because of my own emotional state or her odd accent, I wasn’t sure I caught her name correctly. Ohio Wesleyan is a small and friendly campus, and most people could put a name with a face. She did say second floor. Inside Slocum, I asked a student, “Do you know a lady who works in this building—she has long brown hair, friendly round face, a bit on the plump side . . .” (There are a number of plump women in my family, and “plump” was always the preferred description).

  “Oh, you mean Dr. Lewes,” the student responded.

  I smiled. She must be mistaken. “No, this lady isn’t a doctor.” I thought to myself that maybe she was on the University staff in some capacity. Perhaps administrative or something clerical. Professors, I believed, looked and acted like Dr. Lucas.

  “Well, you just described Dr. Lewes. Around the corner on the right. I gotta go.”

  With that, I was alone in the hallway with directions to a professor’s office who couldn’t possibly be the woman who listened to my sad and lengthy story the day before. Since I had nothing to lose, I walked to the office as directed, and there to my surprise on the door was the name DR. ÜLLE LEWES. Inside the office, behind the desk, was the plump woman with long wavy brown hair, her face buried in a book. With a knock at the door, I asked, “Dr. Lewes?”

  “Good morning, young man,” she answered with that familiar smile. “Please come in.” It was a greeting that would change my life. The remarkable Dr. Ülle Lewes. If ever I doubted that angels really do exist, those doubts were now cast aside. In time, she didn’t simply change my life—she saved it.

  SEVEN

  An Angel from Estonia

  . . . he shall send his angel . . .

  —Genesis 24:7

  ÜLLE LEWES RECOGNIZED MY struggle because she has survived a lifetime of her own struggles. I’ve never been to Estonia, but in my eyes Ülle Erika Lewes is the embodiment of her native land. Proud but not boastful, optimistic yet a realist, tough but easily wounded, loyal but at times distant, independent but willfully vulnerable, always prepared to fight for what she loves, and willing to love based on blind faith. She is like all the women I love. An inner beauty cast inside an outer toughness. A beating heart wrapped in warm steel. Open to all but truly welcoming only to a few.

  Ülle was born in Tallinn, Estonia, during Wo
rld War II, when the country was caught in the middle, with the Soviet Union pulling and bombing from one direction and Germany pulling and bombing from the other. Her earliest memories of childhood were running into the basement with her mother during aerial attacks by both sides. At the age of three, with her father off fighting the war, Ülle and her mother, grandmother, aunt, and a cousin escaped from Estonia on a barge. They eventually became refugees, first in Latvia, then Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and finally in Germany. It was there that she took her first bitter taste of discrimination. She went to school with German kids who hated the foreigners. Surrounded by prejudice, Ülle would pass by police checkpoints and soldiers every day going to and from school. The innocence of childhood and each new day were often interrupted by slurs and intimidation. Her tales of life in a distant world drew me closer to her. The difficulties she had to overcome put my own in a new perspective.

  Eventually, in November 1951, Ülle and her family would immigrate to the United States, with the promise of a better life. Sponsored by the Lutheran church for the first six months, they settled in Roxbury, Massachusetts. But amid the promise of the New World was an old and familiar problem: prejudice. On the postwar streets of a Germany scarred in battle, people had hated the Estonian girl because she was foreign. In the racially segregated city of Boston, on the awkward side of the civil rights era, black kids hated the nine-year-old white girl, who did not look like them or sound like them.

  When she first came to the United States, it was the same as it was in Germany, the mean looks and crazy questions. But Ülle found peace and comfort in her schoolbooks and in words. Eventually, her family moved to Buffalo, where she graduated valedictorian of her high school class and earned a full scholarship to Cornell. She was fluent in Estonian, Spanish, French, Latin, and German. Ülle’s first love was comparative literature. Soon the little girl from Estonia found her path. After graduate school at Harvard University and a brief time teaching at Temple University in Philadelphia, Dr. Ülle Lewes took a job in the English Department at Ohio Wesleyan University.

  When I met her, Ülle was a full-figured woman, with thick, curly, reddish brown hair, round glasses, and a perpetual smile. Even on those days when her knees hurt or life did not treat her kindly, there was that smile tickling her eyes and stretching across her kind face, along her soft round shoulders down to the tips of her fingers. She was born to teach English. She taught it the way a good masseuse gives massages: with her entire body. During lectures she would actually extend her arms in the air, rub her fingers together like a sculptor rolling clay, as if the words were alive in her hands. That was Ülle, working to become one with the right word.

  She started at OWU in the fall of 1978, the same as me. “I was a new-bee,” she said, describing those early days. And soon the “new-bee” from Estonia and the freshman from Baltimore would cross paths on a cold morning outside University Hall. Perhaps it was Ülle’s own encounters with disappointment or her feelings of being out of place that allowed her to notice me. Although Ülle has never considered herself a religious person, she acknowledges that some sort of spiritual guidance might have been at work.

  At that first meeting in her office she made a commitment to help me. We planned to meet for two hours a week at first, and eventually it increased to three and then four hours. We would get together either in her office or in the Writing Resource Center set up across campus. In the early days, as I struggled with an English assignment, complaining and voicing doubt, she always reassured me. Ülle identified my two basic problems: not enough attention to (as she called them) stupid details; the other, a simple lack of structure. She began to work on my structure issues by organizing my life. Ülle never taught me a single class my freshman year, but she was the only professor I cared about pleasing. She set up something that resembled a shadow class to my scheduled English class. In one hour Professor Lucas would strip at my confidence like a craftsman stripping varnish off an old floor. I would go to Professor Lewes for a new coat of confidence. She rarely questioned the content of my work. She would patiently have me correct punctuation, grammar, and sentence structure. She insisted I pay attention to every detail. Secretly she would grade Dr. Lucas’s papers with her own grading scale. While Dr. Lucas was still giving me Ds and Fs, Ülle would grade the same assignment and give it As or Bs. Dr. Lucas measured the outcome, and there was simply a right or wrong, black or white. Ülle graded in the gray area. She measured effort, creativity, and the slightest improvement from the previous assignment.

  “He graded you on surface areas like punctuation and sentence structure. It’s all important, of course. I graded you on rhetorical structure, development, and detail. Detail provides those vivid nuggets,” she said.

  With the improvements I was making, by the end of the semester, Dr. Lucas would mark my papers with Bs and Cs and an occasional A. Dr. Lewes, on the other hand, had changed her standards, and suddenly she was giving Cs and Ds. She had helped break Dr. Lucas’s code, his standard. Now she was teaching me to set my own and continually move the bar higher.

  “Never settle. Push! Push! Push harder.”

  Ülle showed the sort of kindness, optimism, and concern I had seen in only a handful of people till this stage of my life. She and my mother were from completely different worlds, but they shared this relentless faith in me and in hard work. Both would flash their tempers, not at results but at lackluster effort. Both would use profanity to lecture but never once to scold. It is a characteristic they shared with my favorite athletic coaches. And Ülle seemed inexhaustible. We would often meet at the end of a day after she had taught several classes and met with several other students.

  When you are in Ülle’s presence, you have her undivided attention. It was during one of those sessions that Ülle touched my hand and shouted, “Look at me! Someday you will write a book.” I was eighteen, on academic probation, and a breath away from flunking out of college. A book seemed beyond impossible.

  The closer we became as professor and student, the more she sounded like Clarice. I do recall at least one F from Dr. Lewes. On at least one occasion, she did not like my effort.

  “Don’t get lazy,” she snapped. It was as if she had cut me with a knife. Laziness was rarely my problem, but impatience often got the best of me in college and in the years that followed. Why am I still struggling? Why do I still comprehend things so slowly? Why can’t I read a chapter once and grasp its meaning? There were times I wanted to give up, not because I was lazy but rather because I was overwhelmed by impatience. The two-step forward one-step back dance often became tiresome. Ülle would always push me past those moments.

  “Anyone who reads your work carefully can see you have a brilliant mind,” Ülle said. “You have to make them see it and I will help you.” Instructive and encouraging. That was her style. Over many years and a few meals, we have discussed Dr. Lucas. What could she see that he could not? “I don’t know,” she would answer modestly.

  To his credit, Dr. Lucas had a wonderful reputation for working with and inspiring honor students. In fact, he was one of the leading advocates for raising the academic standards at Ohio Wesleyan. Standards quite frankly that would have kept me from ever being admitted to OWU. I am sure there are countless OWU grads who can attest to his brilliance and care. That is not my testimony or that of at least two other OWU graduates I’ve met over the years. Twice while giving speeches around the country, where I told the story of my experience at Ohio Wesleyan and without mentioning his name, a person in the audience would walk up to me afterward, shake my hand, and ask, “Were you talking about Dr. Lucas?” I guess I wasn’t alone. We would exchange notes and quickly come to the conclusion that the experience only made us stronger. Perhaps it just serves to illustrate that even in a place as small as Ohio Wesleyan, there are the right people and the wrong people placed in a person’s path. You must survive one and cling to the other. I was in Dr. Lucas’s class, but I was never one of his students. That first ye
ar I was not in a single one of Ülle’s classes, but I was most certainly one of her students.

  As often as she would allow it, I would eat my lunch in Dr. Lewes’s office. Sometimes she was there. Sometimes she wasn’t. Her office had become my second home. There were even times I would sit outside her classroom and do my homework. Even her encouraging words aimed at other students would lift my spirits.

  Ülle and my mother first met by phone and hit it off instantly, although there was some adjustment required in the beginning because college professors are not used to being treated like daycare providers. Clarice has always taken great pride in keeping tabs on her children. She has called teachers, professors, and a few news directors whenever she has seen fit. One of the few who never seemed to mind was Ülle. “Once your mother called me and asked, ‘How is my boy doing? Is he getting an A?’ I said no, but if he works hard he may get an A-,” recalled Ülle. “She really wanted to understand. I liked Clarice right from the start. She wasn’t pushing me—she wanted to understand. Her tone was, I want to understand what’s going on. I could sense her heart,” Ülle said of my mother.

  Two women from different worlds who endured different hardships and whose paths intersected. There have been countless strong women in my life: my mother, sister, grandmother, aunts, and my wife. I revere Ülle Lewes as much as I do any of them. Others have been bonded to me by blood or marriage, but Ülle just showed up one day and never left. Because of her, I believe in angels.

  While some students found Dr. Lewes’s style odd, pushy, and invasive, she did teach one course that was a particular favorite. Advanced English Composition. It was a class in which profanity was encouraged. Early in the semester Dr. Lewes would have us close our textbooks, and she would ask us to scream. Then scream and curse. Initially, students were reluctant and shy. Eventually, they would embrace the concept. Before long, she would have to temper their enthusiasm.