A Sailor’s SaviorWhen worried mother Marianne Naslund saw her 16-year-old neighbor Andy Livasy was in trouble, she opened up her heart and home to him.The blistering fights that erupted from the house down the street were legendary in Marianne and Kevin Naslund’s neighborhood. “They echoed off the hillside,” says Marianne. “Everyone got to hear the yelling.” During one particularly nasty fight in February 2008, the neighbors’ 16-year-old son, Andy Livasy, was hit by his stepfather. Watching police cars swarm the street, Marianne realized that she had to help Andy beforehe ran away or “became an angry personwho turned to drugs and alcohol” forcomfort.A few days later, she offered Andy a spoton the Naslunds’ living room couch. Overhis parents’ objections, Andy, who knewMarianne’s sons, Nick, then 15, and Jake,then 13, accepted. No one understood whyMarianne, a dynamo who sat on the Sultan city council and coaches the high school cheerleading squad, would take in a troubled teen like Andy.Then a high school sophomore, Andy scowled at the world from beneath a mess of shaggy blond hair and picked fights with Nick and Jake. At the local high school, he either slept through classes or made them a nightmare for teachers.But Marianne saw herself in Andy. She, too, had grown up in an unsettled household, “with a lot of yelling and not a lot of love.” No matter what, she told people, “kids are not disposable.” Surprisingly, her children understood. “Sometimes Andy could be a downright bully to me,” says Jake, “but when I thought about the future Andy would face if we turned him away, I just couldn’t let myself be a part of that.”It wasn’t easy. For Andy, moving in with the Naslunds was like entering a foreign country of chores and consequences and family dinners—after years of eating most meals alone. “I was used to getting screamed at if I ever messed up, so I was kind of waiting for that,” says Andy. But the day he was suspended from high school for fighting, the screaming and epithets never materialized. Instead, Ma rianne calmly asked why he did it, listened to Andy’s explanation, and declared computers and TV off-limits for the duration of the suspension.“Marianne did it so that instead of fearing a punishment, I didn’t want to let her down,” says Andy. “I didn’t get into another fight for the rest of high school.”With his biological family, Andy had yelled himself into regular migraines. With the Naslunds, his headaches disappeared, along with most of his angry meltdowns. After six months, he asked Kevin to cut his hair. Two years later, he volunteered to coach youth soccer. And though few adults expected it from the boy with the grade-F mouth, in 2010 he graduated on time from Sultan’s alternative high school.“If I hadn’t moved in with the Naslunds, I probably would have dropped out,” Andy says.After four years, Marianne calls Andy her third son, and “if someone asks about my family, I say that he’s one of my brothers,” says Jake. Andy has had no contact with his mom and stepdad since moving out, even though they still live in the neighborhood and say they’re pleased with how their son has turned out. And Andy, who recently joined the Navy, at age 19, knows where he’s heading when he comes home on leave.Says Andy, “What were the chances of my living across the st reet from someone who had a similar childhood, like Marianne, who would take me in and explain, ‘You can change your life around’?”How a Rwandan Teen Overcame a Legacy of GenocideFar from home, in a war-torn land, a charity worker met a child who had every reason to hate—and yet taught volumes about love.He works with the energy and intensity, if not the skill, of a mechanic twice his age. He keeps his head down, focusing on his task, talking to himself—threading greased pedals onto one of 120 sturdy b lack bikes we’re here to build and donate to a Rwandan charity so people can ride to work, to school, to a well with clean water. He looks to be the same age as my third-grade twins. We’ve been working together for an hour in a small auditorium in a walled compound outside Kigali. A choir practices somewhere outside, the ethereal music blending with the clouds that descend down the green ravines of thehills that define Rwanda. Although hespeaks no English and I no Kinyarwanda,we use the universal signs of thumbs-ups,head nods, and “no problem.” We work asa team.And we smile. A lot. The kid has a smilelike no other I’ve seen in more than sixyears of working with African relief agencies to build and donate bikes to charitable groups. I’ve seen lots of hard workers. Lots of incredible people. But there’s something about this one that has a hold, quite unexpectedly, of my heart, more so than the other kids working with volunteers around the compound.Maybe because he’s about the same age as my own three children, a world away in an American suburb. Maybe it’s his warmth, laid bare by a complete absence of any artifice. His eyes glow and his teeth sparkle, and my jet lag melts away as this kid, whose name I don’t know and can’t seem to find out, beams with pride and happiness at finally getting the pedals onto the bike. I give him a thumbs-up, and he beams anew. Over the course of this humid morning, we’ll assemble 15 or so bikes, half of what I could do working alone. But I have a new friend.And he likes me. Anytime we stop work so I can explain something to him, he holds my hand. When we stop for tea, he holds my hand again, and I slip him some Skittles. A woman in traditional dress comes over, ignoring me, and speaks to him sharply, then raps his hand. I’m shocked, but parenting methods are different in central Africa than in New Jersey, so I say nothing as he struggles to hold back tears. Then he takes my hand and pulls me back to the bikes. Within two minutes, he’s beaming, and this time, I’m the one trying to hold back tears.At lunch, I tell Jules Shell, the director of Foundation Rwanda, the charity group we’re working with, what a great hustler we have on our hands. I ask again what his name is. She says, “Well, we call him Jean-Paul. But he doesn’t have a real name.”I must look confused. She smiles a little. “I don’t think his mom could bring herself to call him anything at the time.”I don’t get it, but she continues. “How old do you think he is?” she asks.“Nine, maybe ten,” I say.She looks at me with the tired eyes of a relief worker exhausted by explaining the unexplainable. “He’s 16,” she says. I say it can’t be; he’s tiny. “Sixteen. All these kids are. The genocide was in 1994. Do the math.”At the Vietnam Veterans MemorialOn March 26, 1982, Emogene Cupp stood on a grassy site in Washington, D.C. to take part in a historic event: the breaking of ground for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the luminescent black wall now inscribed with the names of more than 58,000 Americans who were killed inVietnam or remain missing. One of those names belongs to Cupp’s son, Robert. Today, March 26, 2012, she was back to attend an official ceremonycelebrating the memorial’s 30th anniversary. Carrying theshovel she received at the groundbreaking three decadesago, Cupp, now 92, was there to honor her son, who waskilled in June 1968 and buried on his 21st birthday. “I misshim,” she said.On this glorious spring day, Cupp, along with other familymembers, Vietnam veterans, elected officials and decorated war heroes joined Jan C. Scruggs, founder and president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF), for the commemoration. Speakers, including Brigadier General George B. Price and General Barry McCaffrey, saluted the nation’s servicemen and women, past and present. They lauded the memorial as a place for healing, and applauded the VVMF’s future education center, which will include photos and stories of those who served. Scruggs, who conceived the idea of a memorial and helped raise more than $8 million to bu ild it, told Reader’s Digest, “It’s a great example of three million people who were willing to do what their country asked them to do.” He continued, “These are people who loved their country—and that’s their legacy.”Steve Nelson feels that legacy very personally. Nelson was 19 when he went to serve in Vietnam and Cambodia between April 1969 and October 1970. Eleven men from his unit and his best friend were killed. Among other injuries, Nelson took a bullet in his back and his shoulder. Twenty-five years ago, Nelson spent two nights sleeping in shrubs near the memorial, where he contemplated ending his life. A fellow vet helped save him. Today, he was back to commemorate the wall and the people on it. “I live for these guys, because they didn’t live,” sai d Nelson, now 62, as he pointed to the memorial. “This here makes me feel good.”The Birth of a FamilyDavid Marin was in his early 40s, longing to be a dad.“I’d led an interesting life,” he writes in his new book, “traveled to 11 countries, jumped out of airplanes, graduated from law school, and I’d had three holes in one.” But as a divorced single man, his dream of raising kids eluded him.“At night, I imagined the worst: sittingalone and retired … watching familiesdrive by.” Marin decided to adopt f romfoster care. Although more than 500,000kids are in the foster system in the UnitedStates — one quarter of them available foradoption — the process of winningapproval proved arduous. Marin, who wasvice president of advertising at Pulitzer Newspapers in Santa Maria, California, endured miles of bureaucratic red tape, vetting by two counties, three rounds of fingerprinting, and frustrating delays (a required home-safety class, for instance, was postponed twice). In September 2003, 14 months after he’d first made inquiries about adoption, Social Services called him about three siblings (from the same mother, different fathers —all felons). In December, Marin met the kids. Then came a month of “Family Practice” — weekend and evening visits, with follow-up calls to a social worker.Finally, on February 27, 2004, Marin brought home Craig, two; Adriana, four; and Javier, six, for good. The new family was often met with stares and suspicion (one woman at a restaurant where they were eating called the police, worried that Marin was doing something inappropriate). But the hurdles of this adoption were nothing compared with its joys, says Marin. In this excerpt, he writes about the challenges with his youngest child, Craig, and how, together, he and the kids overcame them.Craig’s life was a cartoon. He was the prey, like Jerry the mouse running away from Tom the cat, or the Road Runner chased by Wile E. Coyote. But two-year-old Craig was neither clever like Jerry nor fast like the Road Runner, so in real life, he probably only whimpered when the predators, his mother and her boyfriends, laid into him. When I first held Craig to smell his baby hair — my dumbbells weighed more than he did — he just held on, waiting for the drop or the throw.Craig didn’t speak; he pointed and grunted. When I told people he didn’t talk, they would ask me his age. After I said he was almost two and a half, they’d turn away. That’s not good, the turning away.He put his clothes on backward and had a hard time keeping up on walks to the Santa Maria river levee, so he rode in the stroller. If we walked for long and his little legs grew tired, I’d hoist him onto my shoulders. He liked heights and a breeze in his face, and when I pushed him in the swing, he wanted to go higher than the clouds, away from it all. He fearlessly climbed the jungle gym, but if a dog came near, he ran toward me until he saw it was a squirrel the dog chased, not him. Nothing was smaller than Craig. He was always looking around; there was danger ahead and behind and, with hawks, above. He could not communicate the truths of his early life, and I had no records or files for him —Social Services didn’t even know his name was Craig; they’d been calling him Chris. He just came along with Javier and Adriana.I worried because he was so frail. During Family Practice, a social worker called me.“Hi, David. Has anyone told you that you have to wake Chris up every night?”“No. His name is Craig.”“Craig? Well, anyway, you have to wake him up every two hours to see if his nose is bleeding. He has bad nosebleeds.”I was game but ill-prepared. One morning I found Craig lying in a pool of blood in his bed. I rushed him to a doctor, who said Craig’s fingernails could be shorter and maybe he was picking his nose. I felt ashamed: It was my job to notice that.To Serve and ProtectHernandez says the real heroes are the doctors, paramedics, and public servants.Daniel Hernandez always knew he wanted to help people. Before he’d even graduated high school, he trained to be a certified nursing assistant and volunteered at a nursing home. A big kid with a gentle, efficient manner, he learned to use needles to draw blood, to lift patients in his strong arms, and to respond swiftly andcalmly to emergencies.He never quite got around to taking theexam to become fully certified, though,because by then he’d decided he wanted towork in public service. He felt inspired bythe good that responsible lawmakers cando, so in his junior year at the Universityof Arizona, he declared a major in politicalscience and began volunteering in political campaigns. One of his heroes was his local congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords. He’d met Giffords while he was working on Hillary Clinton’spresidential campaign and thought Giffords was not just a trailbla zer but “the kindest, warmest human being you will ever meet in your entire life.”He was elated when he was picked for an internship with her, and he gladly gave up a part-time sales job for the chance to work on her team. So eager was he that he started work four days early. On Saturday morning, January 8, he arrived at La Toscana Village mall north of Tucson and began setting up tables in front of a Safeway store where 30 or so people were gathering to meet Giffords. It was Hernandez’s job to sign people in and guide them into a queue so each could get a photo taken with the congresswoman between an American and an Arizona State flag.At 10:10 a.m., Hernandez heard loud popping sounds. “Gun!” someone yelled. He heard people screaming, saw them falling to the ground. Hernandez was standing 30 feet away from Giffords when she collapsed. In seconds, he was at her side. “When I heard gunfire, I figured there was danger to the congresswoman,” he recalls. “I started toward her.”Everywhere around him was chaos, but Hernandez willed himself to remain calm. “I tried to tune everything out and keep an intense focus. I didn’t want to let my emotions become part of the problem.”Giffords was lying on the sidewalk; blood was streaming down her face from a bullet wound to her head. Gently, Hernandez lifted her into a sitting position against his shoulder so she wouldn’t choke on her blood. Then, with his bare hand, he applied pressure to the wound on her forehead to staunch the flow of blood. She was conscious; he calmed her and told her all would be well. Minutes later, ambulances and paramedics arrived on the scene. Still Hernandez stayed with Giffords, holding her hand and talking. “I just made sure she knew she wasn’t alone,” he says. “When I told her I’d contact [her husband] Mark, she squeezed my hand hard.”Nineteen people fell victim to a deranged man with a deadly weapon that day. Six died. Giffords, though gravely wounded, survived —in no small part because of Hernandez’s quick and selfless actions. Says surgeon Peter Rhee, chief of trauma at University Medical Center in Tucson, where Giffords was taken, Hernandez “was quick to act —he did a heroic thing.”Hernandez never talks about those horrible minutes in a Tucson parking lot without mentioning the people he sees as the real miracle workers: the paramedics and doctors and the public servants who spend their lives helping others —and sometimes give their lives that way. He doesn’t see himself as a hero. The people of Tucson and the nation beg to differ. They’re grateful Daniel Hernandez felt driven to be of service — felt called so strongly, in fact, that he was there at that fateful moment, four days earlier than he was supposed to be. He puts it simply. “Sometimes,” he says, “I wonder if there was a reason for me to be there.”The Memorial Garden MiracleHurricane Irene might have been gentler than expected in some quarters, but in West Hartford, Vermont, it produced a surreal and frightening landscape. The White River jumped its banks and sent waves of contaminated water into nearby homes. Shipping containers, propane tanks, and even entire trucks were spotted washing down the river near Patriots’ Bridge in the middle of the night.Patti and Scott Holmes had a specialconnection to the flood zone. Their son,Marine Lance Cpl. Jeffery Holmes, wasone of three fallen warriors honored on amonument in a memorial garden next to thebridge. Jeffery died on Thanksgiving Day2004 in Fallujah during Operation IraqiFreedom. He was shot in the neck duringan ambush and a rocket-propelled grenade destroyed his legs. Patti took some comfort knowing that her son had perished instantly, serving the military he wanted to join since he was nine years old.The August hurricane spared Patti and Scott’s home. Patti didn’t realize how bad the situation had been at the monument site until one of Jeff’s friends sent a photo the next day. “When I opened it, I just started crying,” she says. All the flowers that volunteers lovingly tended were gone. The granite monument had toppled off its concrete base and was likely ruined. Alone at her desk, Patti wept for the fun-loving blue-eyed son who didn’t live to see his 21st birthday, the boy she still wrote on Christmas and birthdays. Now another piece of him had slipped away.Scott drove to the bridge that night to see exactly what had happened but was forced to turn back. The torrential flooding had destroyed roads, dented railings on the bridge, and propelled a modular home into the middle of a street. Who knows how the angry waters had ravaged the monument? But when Patti and Scott were finally able to get there later in the week, they were greeted with an extraordinary sight. Local residents had returned the monument to its proper place, unharmed. “I didn’t see a scratch, not even on top of it,” Patti marveled in joy and relief.Friends have vowed to help Patti and Scott replant the garden. Come spring, irises, daisies and other flowers in hues of red, white, and blue will surround this community treasure, which is once again standing tall.Merry, Silly ChristmasMy best Christmas was the year we had Ken and Barbie at the top of our tree. We had an angel first, for Christmas Day, but then we had Ken and Barbie. Let me explain. When my daughter was four, I hired a ballet dancer to babysit for a few afternoons a week. Randy was tall and confident, with that dancer’s chest-first carriage, and, though he was only 27, a sure, cheerful bossiness. For four years, he and Halley roamed the city on adventures: to climb the Alice in Wonderland statuein Central Park, to smile at the waddling,pint-sized penguins at the zoo. They hadtheir own world, their own passions: adevotion to ice cream, to Elmo, to Pee-weeHerman.He orchestrated Halley’s birthday partiesto a fare-thee-well: One year he declared aPeter Pan theme, made Halley a TinkerBell outfit with little jingle bells at the hem, and talked my father into making a scary appearance in a big-brimmed pirate hat and a fake hook for a hand. Randy took charge of my grown-up parties, too, dictating what I wore, foraging in thrift shops to find the right rhinestone necklace to go with the dress he’d made me buy.When Halley was eight, Randy left New York to take over a sleepy ballet company in a small city in Colorado. He taught, he choreographed, he coaxed secretaries and computer salesmen intopliéing across the stage.Halley missed him terribly, we all did, but he called her and sent her party dresses, and he came to see us at Christmas when he could. The year Halley was ten, we had a new baby. That same year, Randy was diagnosed with AIDS. He told me over the phone, without an ounce of self-pity, that he had so few T cells left that he’d named them Huey, Dewey, and Louie.It seemed insane for him to travel, insane for him to risk one of us sneezing on him and giving him pneumonia, but he had decided, and that was it. He was as cheerful and bossy as ever. Terribly thin, his cheeks hollow but eyes bright, he took Halley all over the city once again, with baby Julie strapped to his chest in a cloth carrier.“We’ve got to do something about this tree,” he said one day. The tree, with its red ribbon bows, looked fine to me; I was even a little vain about the way every branch shone with ornaments.A few days later, on New Year’s Eve morning, he sum moned our little family. He was wearing the old pirate’s hat, fished out of a costume box and, for hair, curly colored streamers that stuck out of the hat and tumbled down to his shoulders.As we watched — me irritable at first, wondering how much you were supposed to yield to a dying houseguest, even if you loved him like a brother — he stripped the tree. Then he brought out more curly streamers, heaps of them, and tooters and little party-favor plastic champagne bottles. “Now we’ll turn it into a New Year’s tree,” he declared.A New Year’s tree! Of course! We threw the streamers all over the tree, we covered it with the tooters and the tiny champagne bottles. “And now, for the pièce de résistance,” Randy said. Stretching his tall self way up to the top of the tree, he removed its gold papier-mâché angel. Solemnly, carefully, he placed on top Halley’s tuxedoed Ken and her best Barbie, the one in a sparkly ball gown.“Ta da!” he said, and beamed. It was a wonderful tree, happy and goofy and perfect.Randy lived for another year and a half. None of us will ever get over his death, not really. But every Christmastime, I raise a glass to Randy — to his tree, to his bossiness, to the Christmas he taught us that courage is a man in a pirate hat with silly streamers for hair.Sharing the SweetnessOn the 25th of December, my mother expects her children to be present and accounted for, exchanging gifts and eating turkey. When she pulls on that holiday sweater, everybody better get festive. Of course, I would be the first Jones sibling to go rogue. As the middle, artist child, I was going to strike out and do my own thing, make some new traditions. From a biography of Flannery O’Connor, I drew inspiration —I would spend the holiday at an artistcolony!No one took the news very well. From theway my mother carried on, you wouldthink that I was divorcing the family. Still,I held my ground and made plans for mywinter adventure in New Hampshire. TheMacDowell Colony was everything Icould have wished for. About 25 to 30 artists were in attendance, and it was as, well, artsy as I had imagined. It felt like my life had become a quirky independent film.By Christmas Eve, I had been at the colony more than a week. The novelty of snowy New England was wearing off, but I would never admit it. Everyone around me was having too much fun. Sledding and bourbon! Deep conversations by the fireplace! And that guy with the piercings. So cute! What was wrong with me? This was the holiday I’d always dreamed of. No plasticreindeer grazing on the front lawn. No football games on TV. Not a Christmas sweater anywhere in sight. People here didn’t even say “Christmas,” they said “holiday.” Utter sophistication. Then why was I so sad?Finally, I called home on the pay phone in the common room. My dad answered, but I could barely hear him for all the good-time noise in the background. He turned down the volume on the Stevie Wonder holiday album and told me that my mother was out shopping with my brothers. Now it was my turn to sulk. They were having a fine Christmas without me.Despite a massive blizzard, a large package showed up near my door at the artist colony on Christmas morning. Tayari Jones was written in my mother’s beautiful handwriting. I pounced on that parcel like I was five years old. Inside was a gorgeous red-velvet cake, my favorite, swaddled in about 50 yards of bubble wrap. Merry Christmas, read the simple card inside. We love you very much.As I sliced the cake, everyone gathered around — the young and the old, the cynical and the earnest. Mother had sent a genuine homemade gift, not trendy or ironic. It was a minor Christmas miracle that one cake managed to feed so many. We ate it from paper towels with our bare hands, satisfying a hunger we didn’t know we had.Some Assembly RequiredMy five-year-old daughter knew exactly what she wanted for Christmas of 1977, and told me so. Yes, she still would like the pink-and-green plastic umbrella with a clear top she’d been talking about. Great to observe patterns of rain spatters. Books, long flannel nightgown, fuzzy slippers —fine. But really, there was only one thing that mattered: a Barbie Townhouse, with all the accessories.This was a surprise. Rebecca was not aBarbie girl, preferred stuffed animals todolls, and wasn’t drawn to play in astructured environment. Always a make-up-the-rules, design-your-own-world,do-it-my-way kid. Maybe, I thought, thepoint wasn’t Barbie but house, adomicile she could claim for herself,since we’d already moved five times during her brief life.Next day, I stopped at the mall. The huge Barbie Townhouse box was festooned with exclamations: “3 Floors of High-Styled Fun! Elevator Ca n Stop on All Floors!” Some Assembly Required.Uh-oh. My track record for assembling things was miserable. Brooklyn-born, I was raised in apartment buildings in a family that didn’t build things. A few years earlier, I’d spent one week assembling a six-foot-tall jungle gym from a kit containing so many parts, I spent the first four hours sorting and weeping and the last two hours trying to figure out why there were so many leftover pieces. The day after I finished building it, as if to remind me of my limitations, a tornado touched down close enough to scatter the jungle gym across an acre of field.I assembled the Barbie Townhouse on Christmas Eve. Making it level, keeping the columns from looking like they’d melted and been refrozen, and getting that eleva tor to work were almost more than I could manage. And building it in curse-free silence so my daughter would continue sleeping — if, in fact, she was sleeping — added a layer of challenge. By dawn I was done.Shortly thereafter, my daughter walked into the living room, stuffed bear tucked under her arm, feigning shock and looking as tired as I did. Her surprise may have been sham, but her delight was utterly genuine and moves me to this day, 34 years later. Rebecca had spurred me to do something I didn’t th ink I could do. It was for her, and — like so much of the privilege of being her father —it brought me further outside myself and let me overcome doubts about my capacities.Now that I think about it, there probably was real surprise in her first glimpse of her Barbie Townhouse. Not, perhaps, at the gift itself but that it had been built and remained standing in the morning light. Or maybe it was simpler than that: Maybe she was surprised because she’d planned on building the thing herself.All I’m Asking ForI must have been about nine years old, too dignified to sit on Santa’s lap at the Mason’s department store in Anniston, Alabama, but still young enough to ask — please, please, please —for a G.I. Joe. “You’re too old to play withdolls,” my brother Sam hissed at me. Samnever was a child. My kin liked to say theday he was born, he dusted himself off inthe delivery room and walked home.“G.I. Joe ain’t no doll,” I hissed back, myface red.“Is,” Sam said.。
