split scores of limbs off the surviving six. Bradford pears have beautiful white flowers for ten days in the spring, but their limbs grow fast and at a steep angle and they are, consequently, brittle trees. After Bradford pear trees reach the age of twelve or so, a stiff wind or ice storm can snap big branches off or smack down the whole tree.
Another neighbor has a magnificent willow tree. Every limb, covered with half an inch of ice, moved and swayed—danced with the winds—but lost not a limb.
In my yard are five Thuja green giant trees, evergreens between eight and twelve feet tall. Covered with ice, the tops of all five bent over and kissed the ground. They looked more like chuppahs than trees. Now a week later and the ice melted, three are perfectly straight, one is almost straight, and the fifth—the oldest and tallest—leans a lot, like a stooped old man bending forward at a forty-five-degree angle.
I can identify with the Bradford pear. Sometimes I am rigid. When I become aware of it, Theognis of Megara’s words may come to me: “Wisdom is supple, but folly keeps in a groove.” I can identify with the willow. I do not break easily. My life work has helped me put things in perspective and shrug off many things as “just” inconveniences that are incidental.
The older I get the more I identify with old Thuja. We get partly bowed by winter storms, but not broken. And it takes us longer to straighten up.
March 7
John Wooden grew up in Hall, Centerton, and Martinsville, Indiana. He led his high school basketball team to the state championship game three years in a row. He made the all-state team each of those years. At Purdue he was a consensus All-American basketball player for three years and led Purdue to the National Championship in 1932.
Wooden went on to become arguably the greatest college basketball coach of all time, leading UCLA to four perfect seasons and ten NCAA championships. What was the magic of the great leader? He credits the seven-point creed his father gave him when he graduated from grammar school for his deep, strong rooting:
1. Be true to yourself.
2. Make each day your masterpiece.
3. Help others.
4. Drink deeply from good books, especially the Bible.
5. Make friendship a fine art.
6. Build a shelter against a rainy day.
7. Pray for guidance and give thanks for your blessings every day.60
Wooden gave his players—and offers us—wings. These are some of my favorite words of wisdom, collected from the greatest coach that I wing to you:
“You can’t live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.”
“Talent is God-given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful.”
“Consider the rights of others before your own feelings, and the feelings of others before your own rights.”
“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”
March 8
“Angry Loner”
Newspaper headlines chose those two words to describe Cho Seung Hui, the mass murderer at Virginia Tech. I recall that the acquaintances of Lee Harvey Oswald described him with the same two words. The two boys who ravaged Columbine had earned the same epitaph. Going it alone is risky business. The first thing the Bible pronounces “not good” is aloneness.
There was a popular book published in 1961 titled A Nation of Sheep. It criticized those who swallow uncritically whatever the authorities—presidents, parents, and preachers—feed them.
Our pride revolts at being called a sheep. Sheep are not known for being smart. They just go with the flock. Sheep-like passivity and docility in humans lead to wars and all manner of ills. Americans value independence and self-sufficiency. We imagine ourselves tigers and lions and eagles and such—almost anything but sheep. But one day, sooner or later, life puts us in touch with, like it or not, our essential sheepness. It may come in the form of a diagnosis, a marriage crisis, a parenting crisis, a job loss, or a death. Then we suddenly realize how frail, weak, defenseless, shorn—sheeplike—we really are.
Support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous have grasped the importance of being in a flock. The first step in their twelve-step program is to admit powerlessness to control or fix or manage their lives on their own.
We need a flock to include and enfold us, to accept us as we are, to draw us out of our autonomy. We need a flock that can allow us to ventilate our self-loathing and dissipate our anger. As the Yale boys put it in their Whiffenpoof Song: “We’re poor little lambs who have lost our way.”
Do I hear a baa?
March 9
How does suffering shape us? There are two leading theories.
One is represented by Somerset Maugham, British author, writing about what he witnessed as a medical student: “Suffering did not ennoble; it degraded. It made men selfish, mean, petty and suspicious. It absorbed them in small things. It made them less than men.”
The other point of view can be summed up in three succinct sentences from three experts on suffering:
Friedrich Nietzsche: “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”
Ernest Hemingway: “The world breaks everyone, and afterwards many are strong at the broken places.”
Helen Keller: “Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.”
Think of Patrick Henry Hughes, born with multiple anomalies—scoliosis, no eyes, inability to walk, and arms that cannot be straightened. Patrick began playing piano at nine months. He played trumpet in the University of Louisville marching band and became a virtuoso pianist and vocalist. He was a “straight A” student in his college classes.
How do we understand a Patrick Henry Hughes and his response to suffering? First, Patrick chose his family well! His mother, father, and two brothers have an earned “A” in family. They bathed Patrick in affirmation, support, and encouragement all the way. What if Patrick Henry Hughes had been born into another family, a family that for whatever reason did not believe in him or did not know how to help him? We do not want to go there.
And then there is Patrick’s indomitable spirit. Smiling, he insists that he is “just an ordinary guy living my life.” He prefers to think and talk about “abilities” instead of “disabilities.”61 No family, however wonderful, can dictate spirit. The child alone holds those controls.
Suffering is no match for the dynamic duo of “A plus” community and “A plus” attitude.
March 10
On his sixty-first birthday, trial lawyer Clarence Darrow wrote:
I once thought that when the time should come that I could no longer play ball there would be nothing left in life . . . I used to wonder what people could do to have fun after they were twenty years
