Chicken Soup Unsinkable Soul

  The stigma was lifting like a cloud. We decided we'd never hide this child. We weren't ashamed of him.

  Reviewing the past, I realized my childhood family had it all wrong: Scott hadn't been "our problem"we were

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  his! Confronting that truth hurt, but the pain brought a rush of adrenaline and determination. It hit me like a bolt of lightning: whether something's a curse or a blessing depends on our interpretation.

  As my wife and I struggled to understand Ted, we were determined not to neglect our second child, born three years later. Having been Scott's brother, I could identify with my younger son's concerns and needs, though he never spoke them. He craved a "normal" brother and worried through his adolescent quest for identity.

  Raising two sons with such different needs tested us to the fullest. We stumbled through their childhoods, waiting for graduation like a light promised at the end of the tunnel.

  Ted's twenty-second birthday found us well-prepared for his passage into the adult world. He'd graduate at the end of the year. Between part-time jobs and some government help, he'd have a reasonable income. His supervisors knew him well and had trained him during student internships. We even fixed up a basement apartment for him.

  We thought everything was planned for graduation, but Ted didn't agree. That spring, in his senior year, he caught us off-guard with his announcement: "I'm going to the prom."

  He had thought about it for years. At eighteen, he'd seen kids his own age plan their prom night. Now Ted saw his chance. All he needed was a date.

  But he simply couldn't get a date on his own. Some of the girls called him "cute" and tolerated his attention at assemblies, but none would actually date him. However, a family friend had a daughter named Jennifer. A striking blonde, Jennifer had met Ted and liked him. And she understood what prom night meant to him.

  As the big evening approached, we helped Ted prepare. We dusted off the family tuxedo; it fit Ted better than me.

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  He agreed to let me chauffeur him in the family car. He even planned their dinner before the dance. Only one detail remained: the corsage.

  I could have ordered that corsage in two minutes flat, but I wanted Ted to have the experience. I poignantly wondered if he would ever have occasion to present a woman with flowers again.

  Before the trip to the florist, Ted "role-played." Practicing the words at home makes it easier to say them in another setting. Ted gave me the florist's role, so I invited him into my imaginary shop. We rehearsed until Ted seemed letter perfect. Then we strolled to our neighborhood florist.

  Hearing the door, the florist stopped filing and turned her attention toward us. I waited for Ted to speak, looking at him expectantly. It grew very quiet in the shop. His entire body had grown rigid. Then he drew his face into a grimace and blurted out, "I'm Ted. I'm here to rent the purple flowers."

  The clerk looked startled. She glanced at me as I calmly prompted, "Let's try that again, Ted." He drew a couple of deep breaths and furrowed his brows.

  I encouraged him to stay calm and speak slowly. Finally he was able to explain.

  He needed a corsage for Saturday. His date wanted to wear it on her wrist. He preferred lavender roses. He'd pay when he picked it up Saturday afternoon.

  I hadn't expected the clerk's reaction. "You have a lot of patience," she told me. "I could never be so patient."

  "No!" I'd wanted to shout. This isn't patience, this is understanding. Our nervous systems work. They transmit signals instantaneously from memory banks to nerve centers to vocal cords and back. Ted has to labor these pathways, struggling upstream toward a life the rest of us take for granted. The florist was admiring the wrong person! Unknown to her, Ted had climbed mountain-high barriers

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  and swum oceans of confusion to reach this point. Saturday night wouldn't find him working a jigsaw puzzle, as his Uncle Scott had done so often. Ted was going to the prom!

  On prom night, I dropped Ted and Jennifer at the dance. At home, I called one of my sisters. We talked about our brother's stunted life and the amazing progress Ted had already made. We cried.

  I keep a photo from the dance on my desk. Jennifer stands beside Ted. On her wrist, she wears a corsage of lavender roses.

  Charles A. Hart

  Submitted by Edna Smith

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  4

  THE POWER OF SUPPORT

  When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion.

  Ethiopian Proverb

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  The Ludenschide Connection

  One day, the people of the world will want peace so much that the governments are going to have to get out of their way and let them have it.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Bill Porter, an American prisoner of war in Germany, braced himself against the icy windsand German guards with guns. A shadow of his former high school football physique, the twenty-year-old infantryman knew he was in real trouble not only from starvation, chronic dysentery and a festering leg wound, but from an increasing, familiar painthe agony of corneal ulcers, which had threatened to blind him each time he caught a cold or got run down during his childhood years. Now, without medication, Bill was losing his sight, and the morning came when he collapsed in the line-up of prisoners being forced to rebuild a bombed-out railroad track. He was trucked to a hospital in Ludenschide.

  The temporary hospital for care of German war casualties had been set up in the town's three-story elementary

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  school. Although Bill was a prisoner, his leg was treated and he was placed in the eye-injury ward on the third floor. There he shared a space with the only other American prisoner, a pilot whose eyes had been burned when he bailed out over Germany, robbing him of sight.

  Since Bill could see out of one eye, he quickly became the blind pilot's companion and guide. He fed himthe pilot's hands and wrists had been burned as welland took him for walks up and down the halls of the building. But empty hours haunted both young men.

  ''If only we had something to read, a newspaper, magazine, anything," Bill said to his friend one day. "I could read to you . . . just as long as it's in English."

  "I have a book," the pilot responded in the warm, midwestern drawl Bill had come to know so well. "Take a look in my jacket pocket." He paused for a moment. "It's . . . it's my Bible."

  From that moment on, day in and day out, through his unbandaged seeing eye, Bill read the Old Testament aloud. Then he read the New Testament and favorite passages until the entire Bible had been read and reread many times. They didn't realize it then, but through the words of the Bible, a bond was growing between them as they found comfort and the strength they needed to survive.

  One morning as they walked down the hall, they heard the unmistakable drone of approaching American bombers. It wasn't until they stopped for a moment to talk with a nurse that Bill detected the whine of misdirected bombs overhead. With no time to search for shelter, he grabbed his friend, threw him to the floor and shoved him under a baby-grand piano. The hospital received a direct hit . . . an explosion that burst Bill's eardrums.

  Bill has no idea how long it was before he regained

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  consciousness or felt the pain from multiple head injuries and an eight-inch shaft of steel through his face. At first, he couldn't hear the shouts of German soldiers outside the ruptured building, or the cries of victims. As a matter of fact, he couldn't hear anything except his own heart hammering in his chest. But he smelled smoke and knew he had to get out. With his one free arm he struggled to extricate himself from confining plaster, planks and debris. Then, with a final upward push, he broke through the fallen roofand caught "a glimpse of hell."

  The dead lay everywhere: the nurse he had been talking to only moments before, doctors, the wounded, the sick. Everyone was deadexcept himself. And his friend? Where was he? Could the old piano have withstood the crushing weight of roofing beams, falling bricks a
nd cement?

  That's when the thought struck him. If his friend had survived, he would not only be blind; he'd be buried alive. Bill's ears screamed. His head hurt. What was his friend's name anyway? He couldn't remember. Was he losing his mind? What difference did it make? He had to crawl back down and find him. Now! Please God, he prayed, let him be alive.

  The searing pain from the steel in his face dimmed amid thoughts of what he might find. He reached under the piano. He felt a leg move. "Are you okay, buddy?" he asked.

  "I think so," the voice replied.

  Somehow during the next ten minutes, Bill maneuvered them both down two flights of shattered stairwells. Outside, the street was milling with a confusion of police, medics, ambulances and fire engines. He found an empty bench, and the two huddled together for warmth in the bitter cold. All the while Bill dodged the Germans spitting at the Americans who had lived while their own had

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  perished. Still others grabbed the glinting steel protruding from his face and tried to pull it out. Perhaps they were only trying to help? What did it matter? Unable to fight them off any longer, he put his head between his knees and covered himself with his arms.

  "Bill," the pilot's teeth chattered, "do you think you can get back inside and get us a blanketand my Bible?"

  "Sure," he said. "I'll try. Just don't go anywhere," he added jokingly. "I'll be back. I promise."

  The climb back up the stairs took longer than Bill thought it would, but his friend's treasured Bible and dog tags were on the bed where he'd left them. He grabbed a blanket, and, with everything clutched in his arms, hurried back down the broken stairs and out to the bench. His buddy was gone.

  Where was he? His voice a plea, he shouted at passersby. "Has anyone seen a guy with bandages over his eyes?" He held up two fingers and pointed to his own patch. No one responded. No one spoke English. God! Keep him safe, he prayed. The guy can't see!

  Alone now, and in excruciating pain, Bill crouched behind the bench and covered his head with the blanket. Hours of sirens, shouts and running footsteps passed before a young Ludenschide doctor peered under at the blanketed figure. He took Bill to his office in a nearby building. There, after giving him a shot of Schnapps, the doctor sliced into his cheek and jaw to relieve the pressure and removed the steel and other pieces of metal embedded in his head. Finally, he rebandaged the eye. Still a prisoner of war, Bill was packed into a boxcar and later forced to walk to Fallingbastel, fifty miles away, where he was interred in another prison camp until the war ended.

  When he returned to the United States, Bill wrote to the War Department and asked them to search for his friend.

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  He placed the letter in a box along with the pilot's dog tagsand the well-read Bible. Then he printed his return address: 7 Sigma Nu Fraternity, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

  Nightmares, panic at sudden sounds and mood swings would plague Bill for the rest of his life, as they do most victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. But even as a young father and a grandfather, he would always find joy in reminiscing about the good things in lifebefore the war and after.

  He never talks about his time as a prisoner. He prefers instead to tell stories about his years as a rancher, one hundred miles from town, where he felt closer to God and his family. He especially likes to tell his children and grandchildren stories about when he was in college fifty-three years agoespecially the day an unfamiliar car pulled up in front of Sigma Nu.

  From the second-floor landing of the fraternity, he remembers glancing out the window at the blue Chevy pulling up to the curb. It was lunch time. He knew he should hurry on down to the living room where the rest of the brothers were waiting for the lunch gong, but there was something about the stranger walking up the sidewalk to the front door that stopped him. The bell chimed. His roommate, Jack Venner, got up to answer. "Hello! Can I help you?" he said.

  From where he stood, Bill felt sudden moisture dampen his forehead. He had to grip the banister to remain steady.

  "Yes," said a voice with a warm, midwestern twang. "I'm looking for an old friend of mine named Bill Porter. I want to thank him . . . for lots of things." He smiled, looking anxious as he stood in the crowded living room. "And this might sound sort of crazy," he added, ''but I wouldn't

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  know him even if I saw him. I . . . I've never seen him before."

  Penny Porter

  POSTSCRIPT: The two ex-POWs talked all night. They promised to keep in touch. But life has its demands. It takes curious twists and turns, and they lost each other. Today, Bill is seventy-four. He can't remember the pilot's name, but the bond born in Ludenschide remains. He hopes someone that does remember will read this storyso he can give the pilot a call.

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  The Day I Finally Cried

  I didn't cry when I learned I was the parent of a mentally handicapped child. I just sat still and didn't say anything while my husband and I were informed that two-year-old Kristi wasas we suspectedretarded.

  "Go ahead and cry," the doctor advised kindly. "Helps prevent serious emotional difficulties."

  Serious difficulties notwithstanding, I couldn't cry then nor during the months that followed.

  When Kristi was old enough to attend school we enrolled her in our neighborhood school's kindergarten at age seven.

  It would have been comforting to cry the day I left her in that room full of self-assured, eager, alert five-year-olds. Kristi had spent hour upon hour playing by herself, but this moment, when she was the "different" child among twenty, was probably the loneliest she had ever known.

  However, positive things began to happen to Kristi in her school, and to her schoolmates, too. When boasting of their own accomplishments, Kristi's classmates always took pains to praise her as well: "Kristi got all her spelling words right today." No one bothered to add that her spelling list was easier than anyone else's.

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  During Kristi's second year in school, she faced a very traumatic experience. The big public event of the term was a competition based on a culmination of the year's music and physical education activities. Kristi was way behind in both music and motor coordination. My husband and I dreaded the day as well.

  On the day of the program, Kristi pretended to be sick. Desperately I wanted to keep her home. Why let Kristi fail in a gymnasium filled with parents, students and teachers? What a simple solution it would be just to let my child stay home. Surely missing one program couldn't matter. But my conscience wouldn't let me off that easily. So I practically shoved a pale, reluctant Kristi onto the school bus and proceeded to be sick myself.

  Just as I had forced my daughter to go to school, now I forced myself to go to the program. It seemed that it would never be time for Kristi's group to perform. When at last they did, I knew why Kristi had been worried. Her class was divided into relay teams. With her limp and slow, clumsy reactions, she would surely hold up her team.

  The performance went surprisingly well, though, until it was time for the gunnysack race. Now each child had to climb into a sack from a standing position, hop to a goal line, return and climb out of the sack.

  I watched Kristi standing near the end of her line of players, looking frantic.

  But as Kristi's turn to participate neared, a change took place in her team. The tallest boy in the line stepped behind Kristi and placed his hands on her waist. Two other boys stood a little ahead of her. The moment the player in front of Kristi stepped from the sack, those two boys grabbed the sack and held it open while the tall boy lifted Kristi and dropped her neatly into it. A girl in front of Kristi took her hand and supported her briefly until Kristi gained her balance. Then off she hopped, smiling and proud.