When I retired from teaching last year, it was time. I hadn’t lost my love for young people, or for teaching, but I couldn’t think of a better graduating class for my goodbyes than the Arroyo Grande High Class of 2015.
One of my very favorites—she’s just starting her freshman year at Poly—is named Leila. The smile you see on her face is a constant: she radiates the kind of warmth and openness that captures others, but there is nothing calculated in the capturing. Leila’s smile comes from Leila’s heart. At the end-of-the-year Senior Assembly, she gifted me with a farewell bouquet. She was fighting tears, and seeing her struggle to master her feelings was an even greater gift. It’s good to know the love you’ve spent means something to someone so important.
I have rarely read a college letter that brought me to tears, but Leila’s did. One part told of her family’s trip to Egypt, to visit her grandmother. I saw photos of the woman and she has a kind of Leila-ness about herself, as well. You wonder if there are applications you can send for to become her adoptive grandson. Her health has not been good. She had to have surgery, and the passage I remember is when Leila volunteered to change the dressing on her wound. Her grandmother apologized for its appearance, but Leila did not hesitate and did not flinch, and I don’t think anything so clinical has been done with such gentleness and compassion.
The experience only reinforced Leila’s dream to become a doctor. We have common heroes–Doctors without Borders—and I could easily see Leila doing their work. I immediately thought of her while listening to an NPR story about a doctor who lost 19 of the first 20 patients he’d treated for Ebola in West Africa. It was heart-breaking, but this doctor was a man of spiritual depth. “Curing disease isn’t the most important thing a doctor does,” he said. “The most important thing a doctor can do is to enter into another’s pain.” Leila has that kind of empathy and she has the spiritual strength to sustain it.
I will come to the obvious part. Leila is an observant Muslim, and as captivating and welcoming as her smile is, there are those–some have been in the news lately–who are blind to kindness because it’s so threatening to the comfort they find in hating. Leila can take care of herself–she gets those reservoirs of strength from the deep wells her family has made for her–but she also is the kind of student who can provoke every paternal instinct a male teacher has. You want to protect her from the blind and the bigoted who also have the unpleasant tendency to be loud.
The comfort is knowing that those people do not matter and have no enduring impact, unless you count, of course, the agonizing depth of the pain God feels when they broadcast their hatred.
I gained a lot of wisdom by talking to Haruo Hayashi in researching a book I’m writing about Arroyo Grande during World War II. In 1942, his family was among those interned Japanese-Americans who slept in stinking animal stalls at the Tulare County Fairgrounds; they were then sent to the remote Rivers Camp in the Arizona desert, where the hot winds, carrying the spores for Valley Fever, began to kill their grandparents.
When I visited the Hayashis, I saw three generations of a family whose bedrock is hard work relaxing on a Sunday, watching television, reading, raiding the refrigerator, and all of them were present, were living in the moment, and the devotion you sensed among them was unforced and unpretentious, which only made it more powerful. Haruo’s extraordinary wife, Rose, was dying. Her son, Alan, remained at her side, attentive but respectful and unobtrusive, his love for her a mirror-image of the love she’d always given so selflessly.
Haruo went through, after Pearl Harbor, the kind of bigotry that I fear so much. But, while the bigots were loud and threatening, they do not matter to him 75 years later. They were small people whose names he’s lost. He hasn’t lost the names of Don Gullickson or Gordon Bennett or John Loomis, constant friends whose constancy has lasted four lifetimes. He smiled when he remembered another name, of a tough classmate, Milton Guggia, who told Haruo he would personally beat the living crap out of any kid who called Haruo a “Jap.”
Milton Guggia. That’s a real American name.
As is Leila’s. She’s the girl who went to Proms, who served on the ASB, who played Powderpuff Football, who participated every year in Mock Trial, who played in the school band. Haruo played in the school band, too. And you can see him in a yearbook photo with the 1941 AGUHS Lettermen’s Club–his bad eyesight ruled out sports, but he managed for every team and earned his spot, with all the jocks, right next to Coach Max Belko, the kind of big, boisterous and indestructible coach whom every kid idolizes.
He was destructible, it turned out. Belko, a Marine lieutenant, died on Guam in 1944.
But there, and forever, in the old yearbook, are Max Belko and Haruo Hayashi, shoulder to shoulder: two real Americans. Leila—and Leila’s marvelous family, so much like Haruo’s—are no different. Their fidelity to each other, their quiet insistence on hard work and service to others, and the openness of their daughter’s heart–all of these have been blessings in my life. They are, I think, the kind of Americans we would all wish to be.
A Work in Progress 