Frank T. Pool

It’s been a good week; it’s been a terrible week. My own week was delightful, with the exception of concern for a beloved sister’s health, though worry is the price of love.

The rest of the world is awash with war and disaster and collapse of many kinds. I won’t even list them here — you certainly know them.

Instead, I want to share with you a few images of the other side of life. Some of these happened to me recently or in the past; other incidents have been told to me. Perhaps they can help us tear our eyes away from the abyss and raise our eyes to the uplands of human goodness.

Last weekend I made a trip to East Texas for a high school reunion—less informal and somewhat smaller than the ones celebrating years that end in zero. I was glad I went.

I stayed with a friend I had met in high school. We’ve been through a lot together in those many years, each with many successes and some rough patches, and our friendship has endured. Cool weather had arrived like the breaking of a long fever. We celebrated with pumpkin-spice bourbon. (No, not really.)

The morning after my arrival, I sat in the sunroom and watched the dew evaporate near the tree line beyond Pancho’s Pond, named after my friend’s donkey. I’ve seen morning evaporation hanging low over lakes and marshy ground before, but this looked like smoke from a fire, billowing and twisting slowly upward for at least thirty feet. In all my years I’ve never seen anything like it. I found it mesmerizing and calming.

I had dinner with one of my best friends, my high school English teacher. We discovered email about thirty years ago and have been regular correspondents since. Our conversation was warm and open. I remember her getting an award for Outstanding Young Teacher and joking to the class that she didn’t know if she was more pleased to be called outstanding, or young. She was 34 then.

One item I had on my agenda was to drive to Liberty City and deliver some books to my great-niece and nephews. My niece, a bright and beautiful young woman who looks just like her mother did at her age, married a good man and after a few years decided to start a family.

Triplets. Two boys and a girl. Then another wonderful child came, a happy and much-loved boy who has some physical challenges.

I had some books to deliver. The older children got leather-bound books from my library. “Alice in Wonderland” for the girl, “Robinson Crusoe” and “A Tale of Two Cities” for the two triplet boys, and “Johnny Tremain” for the little guy.

I know some of the novels are beyond their current reading abilities, but they are beautiful books that they can grow into. The kids were excited and polite, and I inscribed each of them to the recipient. They got the gift of books; I received the gifts of their joy.

I told them I was Great Uncle Frank, but they could call me Pretty-Good Uncle Frank.

At the class reunion I felt more comfortable and at home than I had when I was younger. Maybe it’s because some people I don’t know well told me they read my columns. One man had grown up with me on Maple Street, and we had lots of reminiscences of riding bikes and hanging out with the boys on the block.

A couple of women walked up. In our conversation I mentioned a classmate, my best pal in high school, who was not at the reunion. A photo of her had shown up on Facebook a couple of years ago, and I had remarked that she was one of the prettiest girls in the class. He added, “and one of the nicest.”

It seems that when he was in 10th grade, a smart, nerdy band kid, he encountered this girl in the hall. She was on her way to being homecoming queen, beautiful and poised and popular. When she saw him, she smiled and said hi to him. A little gesture from her, but he still remembers it half a century later.

When I told her he said she was nice, she said her mother had told her that you never know what people are going through in their lives, so you should make an effort to be kind to them. Her eyes filled with tears when talking about her mother. By the way, she still is lovely to behold.

A man I know talks about how his lover, a Christian woman, told him she knew that he, an unbeliever, would get to heaven. She said that she had faith that she would go to heaven, and if she went and he wasn’t there, it wouldn’t be heaven. The relationship did not endure, but he tells me he will cherish this remark for the rest of his life.

Sometimes we teachers are privy to secrets students tell us. I suppose this is particularly true of English teachers, because we do free writing, and sometimes they want to share. I wrote about this last year, about all the trauma—and sometimes the triumphs—my students journaled about.

Sometimes, maybe usually, we don’t have a clue. I ran into a former student at the gym a few years back. He was a physician specializing in allergies. He had missed a lot of class, and was obviously close to his mother. At the time I thought she was overprotective and he just didn’t have the willpower to come to class. I was wrong, and because I never showed frustration, he was able to tell me years later that I had meant a lot to him.

I never knew. Often we never know. That’s my point.

A woman told me how after her cancer diagnosis, she went to an oncologist’s office, frightened and anxious. An old Jewish doctor came in, and his face lit up, and he smiled at her, and that smile relaxed and reassured her. She had tears in her eyes as she told it.

The poet William Wordsworth, in a poem I read in my English teacher’s high school class, wrote about the “best portion of a good man’s life, the little nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.”

The woman who graced my friend’s life by simply smiling and saying hello doubtless didn’t remember the moment, but he will never forget it.

In a world of fear and danger, we can still cultivate the habits of the heart, trying to be kind and gentle to each other.

Nations rise and fall. Love endures.