Finding a Higher Power

Last January, I took a trip to Hawaii with my mother. Petras, our exchange student, plays for the University of Hawaii on a basketball scholarship, so Mom and I spent a week on Waikiki drinking pina coladas during the day and watching Petras play in the evenings.

The first morning after we’d arrived, we set out from our hotel on Kalakaua Avenue walking east toward Diamond Head. It was close to 7:30 in the morning, and as we power-walked through Kapiolani Park, my mother pointed out a group of twenty or thirty people congregated under the spread of a few large royal Poinciana trees. Some were sitting on their bicycles, some sat in stadium chairs they’d brought, and some stood. “I wonder what they’re doing?” my mother said.

“That’s got to be an AA meeting,” I answered immediately. And I was right. When we got within hearing distance, I could just make out the words of the man who was speaking. “Did you hear what he said?” I asked her. “’Higher power.’ It’s definitely some sort of ‘Friends of Bill’ meeting.”

I wish I didn’t know what it was, I thought.

In all my wildest imaginings, I’d never once thought I would have such intimate knowledge of what the Friends of Bill talked about when they got together or that I would even be able to recite the Twelve Steps. Somehow, it just wasn’t fair that a preacher’s daughter who had always followed the rules and tried to do what was right would be the family expert on Twelve-Step meeting. To my way of thinking, I should have been wondering what all those people were doing in the park at 7:30 in the morning, because that would mean I’d never been married to an addict. But here I was, both weary and wary of recovery programs, feeling a great deal of animosity over the fact that after spending $35,000 at one of the better treatment facilities in the country, my husband had come home blaming me for his problems. And on top of all that, I was so damn tired of the term “Higher Power.” What’s so hard about using the word “God?”

I got my answer from my little nephew, Joe. In July, I was at the beach with my sister and her children. We spent some lovely afternoons sitting on the beach, and one evening we drove to our favorite beach dive, the World-Famous Oasis, for their annual Christmas in July celebration.

The Oasis is managed by a good-natured little man named Hoover who, incidentally, drives a Hummer. When I say “little man,” I mean it in the sense of the television program “Little People Big World.” Hoover is about three feet tall, and the evidence of his good-naturedness is the fact he dresses up as a leprechaun for St. Patrick’s Day and as Santa’s Elf for Christmas in July.

To begin the yearly festivities, Santa and his Elf are transported by helicopter to a parking lot across the street from the Oasis, where hundreds of Santa’s constituents wait with their lists in hand. Santa and Hoover jump out of the helicopter clad in their respective red velvet Santa pants and green elf pants, Hawaiian shirts, and sunglasses. And they each have a gorgeous blonde on their arm.

My sister’s kids watched the proceedings with utter joy, and then we corralled them to a table, where my sister informed them that Santa would visit our table if and when they ate all their dinner and behaved while they ate.

Bless his heart, little Joe has an awfully hard time sitting still at the dinner table, and he has an even harder time eating all his food. He began horsing around and knocked over his Sprite. “Joe,” his mother warned, “You’d better be careful. You don’t know who’s watching.”

The kid looked up to the sky and promptly said, “God, please don’t tell Santa!”

And that’s when I completely understood Step Two: “We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” I’d always thought the term “Higher Power” was used by the program as a way for those who struggled with the idea of God to reconcile themselves to, well, God. But the word “God” is used throughout the other eleven Steps. What the program is alluding to, I think, is the fact that since we can't see God, sometimes a "higher power" exists in the form of a visible motivation to change our ways.

For Joe, it’s Santa.

Teaching Profanity

I looked around the room the very first day of my English as a Second Language Class and wondered what I'd gotten myself into. My class was comprised of three Polish guys -- Jakub, Krzysztof, and Aleks, a Nigerian named Solomon, Petras from Lithuania, Ousmane from Ivory Coast, a little South Korean girl named Noah, and C.J., who came to us from the nearly third-world Albany, Georgia. The average height of my students would have been around 6'7", but little Noah barely hit 5 feet, bringing the average down considerably.

I passed out copies of the required reading, Phil Jackson's Sacred Hoops. Now, I'll readily admit that I'm not an expert teacher. This was my first day in the classroom, and to top it all, I'd been given no curriculum. In fact, until I devised my own curriculum, I'm not sure one existed that focused on teaching teenagers from different continents enough English to pass the SAT in nine months. But the one thing I was absolutely sure about was that they had to read to be successful. And to get them to read, I had to find books that interested them. Phil Jackson has won more NBA titles than any coach in history. He was Michael Jordan's coach during the years the Chicago Bulls dominated the NBA. I was pretty sure he could keep those guys' attention.

And then I handed out the spelling and vocabulary books, explaining that since we needed to cram as many English words as we could into their brains before the SAT, they would be required to write five sentences, each using a new vocabulary word correctly, every night as part of their homework.

The next day, the boys and Noah arrived for class and turned in their vocabulary assignments. That evening, I checked over them for accuracy, and when I got to Solomon's, I laughed out loud.

The vocabulary word was "profane." And Solomon, the one his teammates called "preacher," because he was a just little over the top with his devotion to Christianity at the Christian school, and who struggled mightily with English, had written, "It was profane for the soldiers to stable their whores in the church."

He got an A. It was a perfectly correct use of the word "profane."

Most English majors, it seems, devise the same backup plan if all their other dreams don't come true.  The safety net?  We can all teach English.

I resisted teaching for many years, mostly because I didn't believe I had the patience to be a teacher.  But four years ago, I volunteered to oversee an international student program at my children's Christian school.  The school, over the course of two years, hosted nearly twenty high school boys from several different countries.   What they had in common was that they were all very, very tall, and they all played basketball.  

My boys came from Poland, France, Nigeria, Lithuania, Ivory Coast, Canada, and the Canary Islands.  A few did not even speak English when they came to the school.  The English teacher, a nice enough woman who had her hands full with the school's regular kids, put her foot down one day and refused to give extra help to the international students.

I was frantic.  Without a sympathetic English teacher, these boys would flounder.  And really, they needed a high-speed course focused on helping them pass the SAT and preparing them for freshman English -- assuming they actually made it to college.

The school administrator said to me, "You're so concerned about their English.  Why don't you teach it?"

And I responded, "I will."  

And then he said, "Oh, and we have a young lady from South Korea who is an exchange student with one of our school families.  She'll be in your class, too."

It's one thing to teach English.  But teaching English as a second language to ten young men and one girl, all from different countries and cultures, when I'd never taught before?  

I was scared.