LETTERS FROM HOME: IN PRAISE OF THE GOOD A TEACHER, A STORY, A FRIEND CAN DO

Dec. 3, 1998

Dear Frisco,

My friend Gail forwards me jokes every day by e-mail. Gail needs jokes because she teaches students who don't fit easily into the usual educational model.

Behavior disordered is the term. In this class, it's the teacher who'd better pay attention.

Not everything Gail passes along is funny. Sometimes she sends updates about her son's latest romance or her own more permanent one. A few weeks ago she e-mailed a story called "All Good Things."

It was written by Sister Helen P. Mrosla, a teacher who one day asked her squabbling class to write down the nicest thing they could think of about each of their classmates. Days later, she gave each of them a list of all the nice things people thought about them.

Some years later, one of the boys in the class was killed in Vietnam, a boy beloved by the teacher even though she'd often had to discipline him.

After the funeral, his parents handed the teacher two pieces of notebook paper that were found on their son when he was killed.

It was his list.

Classmates at the funeral gathered around and one by one admitted that they had kept their lists, too.

The story, which I subsequently learned appeared in "Chicken Soup for the Soul," was sent as a kind of chain letter, with the admonition to forward it to 10 friends within an hour as a means of stirring up this love we all know we feel for each other but most often don't express.

How much easier it seems to convey through words and looks the things we don't like about each other. How cherished are the gifts of acclaim and acceptance so stingily bestowed.

DC still recalls being praised by her Girl Scout leader for washing the top of a can of tuna before opening it.

Driving through Louisville, Ky., last weekend after seeing the Cincinnati kids, DC and I stopped to explore. We happened upon a Dickensian Christmas street fair, the Kentucky Art and Craft Gallery and Hillerich & Bradsby's Louisville Slugger factory. We couldn't have missed the factory and the museum alongside. A 128-foot-tall baseball bat rises out of the entrance.

No matter how the people who run Major League baseball try they cannot ruin a love for the game itself, perhaps because for so many it was a first love. The fresh-sawn smell of the northern white ash stacked in billets throughout the factory and the memorabilia that belonged to baseball greats in the museum were reminders that love doesn't die. Sometimes it does hide.

One wall of the museum is lined with the signatures of every baseball player whose name was ever branded into a Louisville Slugger bat. For $60, you can get your own name put on one.

Four-hundred-eighty bats were shipped to Ken Griffey last year. Unfortunately for Hillerich and Bradsby, Mark McGwire swings a Rawlings model.

We stood behind a piece of clear plastic to see what a 90 mph fastball looks like coming at you from 60 feet, 6 inches. You dare not blink.

I stood there, staring, remembering how excited you were when you showed me your plane ticket to Cooperstown and how thrilled you still were after bathing yourself in the presence of baseball's legends. You were glowing, a one-man testament to the good a game can do your soul.

A good teacher, a good story, a good friend can do the same. It's hard to know or believe how remarkable each of us is until we see ourselves in another person's eyes.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.