Sharing Too Much, page 10
“Almost all of it,” I answered.
He looked even more surprised. “I’ve never seen a celebrity use their own money,” he said. “They usually just do fundraising events.”
The next day I received a call from the man’s assistant. “Mr. —— wanted me to call and let you know that he is wiring you a million dollars to help you finish your shelter.”
Six months later, the shelter was completed and housing children. The first child to come through our doors was a baby taken from a meth house. I was blessed to be there and held that child. The shelter has been occupied every day since, for more than twenty-five years.
We went on to build a second shelter, and then a third. Since that time we’ve helped more than 145,000 children—enough to fill Madison Square Garden more than seven times. Many of those children are now adults raising their own children.
A few years ago I was signing books when I noticed a young blond teenager standing near the back of the line, staring at me. When she finally reached my table, she was nearly vibrating with excitement. She said, “Mr. Evans, my whole life I’ve wanted to meet you.”
“You like my books?” I asked.
“Never read them,” she responded.
Her reply made me grin. “Then why did you want to meet me?”
“I’m one of your Christmas Box House kids,” she replied. She went on to explain that her biological parents were drug addicts and when the state took her and her brother away, no one wanted both of them. “We lived in your shelter until Mom and Dad adopted us. Our caseworker said that if it wasn’t for you, I would have been raised without my brother.” She put her arm around the teenage boy next to her. “I’ve always wanted to thank you for my brother.”
That was a beautiful moment—and a sharp contrast to the first four years of frustration, panic attacks, and misery. I remember during those years feeling angry that everything seemed to go wrong. Many times I felt abandoned by God.
Since then I’ve come to believe there are two reasons our good deeds are met with opposition. The first is to allow us the opportunity to prove to ourselves the level of our commitment. It’s been said that adversity introduces a man to himself. This is true. If all worthy endeavors were easy, there would be no greatness or nobility in the world. Just expediency and self-interest.
The second reason is more pragmatic. More times than not we do not succeed in spite of our challenges and obstacles but precisely because of them. It is the struggle itself that gives a thing life. Thoreau wrote, “All misfortune is but a stepping stone to fortune.”
In my case, going through the challenges of building the shelter forced me to take a more active role in the organization’s development and management. Without those challenges, our cause to help children would probably not have survived to today.
We all have causes—in our homes and in the world. As we overcome our challenges and obstacles, it is important to remember that oftentimes the rugged road we are forced to walk is the only path to our destination.
ON BEING KIND
Be kind. If you can’t love your neighbors, be kind to them and you may see your kindness turn to love. We see it all too often, the self-adoring virtue signalers who loudly proclaim their great love for the disadvantaged masses but hate their next-door neighbors. Humanity is not the vast, unfathomable ocean we speak about in distant, general terms; it is the lone starfish that washes up on the beach.
Kindness is a symptom of love. Too many think of love as weakness. It’s not. Love is not the fluff of greeting cards, nor the satin-embroidered Valentine’s Day pillow. Love is the hard, rocky shore that holds fast against the ocean’s turbulent waves. Love is the soldier who lays down his life for his friends in the trenches. Love is the mother who goes to bed hungry so her children will have breakfast. Love is the opposite of self-interest, the disciples of which flee at the hint of self-sacrifice and, like the ethereal seeds of a dandelion, scatter to the wind at the first small breeze to find the next real thing.
ROUTE 36 AND IMAGINATION
Running east-west along the northern quadrant of Missouri is a two-hundred-mile stretch of asphalt that’s part of US Route 36. The expressway follows a route from a bygone era—the former tracks of the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad.
My daughter Jenna was my research assistant on a book series I was working on about a man who walked across the United States, and she talked me into taking the route as we drove from one end of the country to the other, from Seattle, Washington, to Key West, Florida.
After crossing the length of South Dakota (stopping at the famous Wall Drug and the Corn Palace), we took Interstate 29 south from Sioux Falls through Omaha, and then, instead of continuing south to Kansas City, we turned our course east at St. Joseph.
St. Joseph, the beginning of Route 36, is a beautiful city with a historic past. At one point it was considered the end of civilization as the last train stop before settlers moved their baggage from train cars to covered wagons and headed west. It was also the home and death place of Jesse James (you can still see the hole from the bullet that passed through his head in the living room wall of his house) and the origin of the short-lived but iconic Pony Express.
I don’t suppose many people go out of their way to drive Route 36. The landscape is as dull as one of my editing pencils. In fact, it was among the more unremarkable stretches we’d encountered as we crossed the country. Not much to see, I initially thought. But I was wrong. It’s not the landscape but the history that was worth the drive. The people who have emerged from this nondescript scenery have changed the world.
After Jenna and I had traveled maybe an hour east on 36 from St. Joseph, I said to her, “Maybe we should have taken Twenty-Nine down to Kansas City.”
“Hang in there,” she said. “There are things to be seen.”
Before long we came to a sign that read:
Hamilton, Missouri
Boyhood home of J.C. Penney
James Cash Penney (his parents were clearly having fun with that name) was born in Hamilton, Missouri. At its peak, the Penney chain had more than two thousand stores. Walmart founder Sam Walton got his start at one of those stores. Penney changed the way the retail world operated. And he came from a little nowhere town.
“I guess you have to come from somewhere,” I said to Jenna.
That somewhere I was referring to was just beginning. Not too much farther down the asphalt we came to a sign that read:
Laclede, Missouri
Boyhood home of Gen. John J. Pershing
We took the exit to see the general’s home and monument. At one time, Pershing commanded more than three million soldiers and was conferred the rank of General of the Armies of the United States, making him the highest-ranking US military officer in history. In fact, President Gerald Ford posthumously raised George Washington’s rank so that he would not be outranked by Pershing.
He also won the Pulitzer Prize in history for his two-volume memoir, My Experiences in the World War. The man had a tank and a missile named after him.
An hour later we continued our drive to a town called Chillicothe, whose city sign bragged:
Chillicothe
Home of Sliced Bread
I suspect people have been slicing bread for as long as there have been knives and bread, but it was Otto Rohwedder, a Chillicothe resident, who invented the bread slicer and made it not only the standard in bread preparation but a cliché as well.
The next exit of interest was Marceline—the boyhood home of Walt Disney. To Disney, it represented his halcyon days—his childhood era of joy and wonderment. Disney claimed that he patterned Disneyland’s Main Street, USA, after his fond memories of this small town, which, after we drove through, showed that he really did have a powerful imagination. Or, maybe he just, like many of us, carried idealized childhood memories.
Our last stop on 36 was Hannibal, Missouri, legendary home of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, the man William Faulkner called the father of American literature.
“I was wrong about this road,” I conceded. “This region of America changed the world. It makes me wonder what was in the water.”
Of course it’s not what was in the water. It was what was in these people’s heads. The one thing these game changers all had in common was the ability to see beyond their staid rural reality and create a world that didn’t exist around them. What they had was imagination.
Einstein claimed that imagination was more important than knowledge. Knowledge is finite. Imagination isn’t. He was right, of course. If I could put a sign on every child’s bedroom wall, it would say the following:
The success of your life is more determined by imagination than by circumstance
Imagination is the soil in which your future is planted. It is the power to see past the four walls around us, past borders, cultural and physical, even cosmic. It was the way these innovators saw past the dull landscape of Route 36. Perhaps the very dull nature of the terrain was why it was such fertile ground for innovation.
I once asked a successful friend of mine how she got to where she was in the world. She came from a tiny town with an abusive father who spent most of his life preparing for World War III. They lived on top of a mountain because her father believed he could blow up the road when the Russians invaded.
My friend told me that she spent her life imagining a world beyond her home, one far away from the small town and her father’s paranoia. Her answer to my question was worth noting. “I just waited for reality to catch up with my imagination.”
We can all learn from this. We can imagine ourselves into something better—a world of love and peace. We can imagine ourselves being the instruments to carry this out. We can imagine being good in the face of the world’s darkness.
Lewis Carroll wrote, “Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.”
Imagination is the greatest power we have to make a new world. Without imagination, as the renowned scientist Carl Sagan once said, “we go nowhere.”
CHASING PRADA
Italy, of course, is known for its fashion, spawning globally recognized brands like Armani, Gucci, Versace, and Valentino. One of those famous brands is Prada, which had an outlet in the town of Montevarchi, about forty minutes from where my family was living at the time in Florence.
One summer my agent, Laurie, came to visit us for a week. She had done her pre-travel research, and one of the items on her Italy checklist was to stop at the Prada outlet. So, the day before her departure, Laurie, Keri, and I climbed into our Volvo station wagon and drove off to the outlet. Forty-five minutes later I turned off the autostrada for Montevarchi. As I approached the city’s tollbooth, I asked Laurie which way I should turn after we passed through the gate.
“I actually didn’t get that far,” she said. “I thought we’d probably just see it when we got here. The town’s bigger than I thought it would be.”
Much bigger. Montevarchi has been around for nearly a thousand years and covers almost twenty-two square miles. This was a few years before we all had GPS on our phones, so I pulled off to the side of the road to make a plan. Just then a delivery truck imprinted with the word Prada came through the gate we’d just passed through. Laurie shouted, “It’s a Prada truck! Follow that truck.”
I turned out into traffic behind it. The truck followed a circuitous route, through roundabouts, small streets, and neighborhoods. At times it almost felt like the driver was going in circles. Then, after nearly fifteen minutes, I suspected he knew I was following him and was trying to lose me, especially since he had waited at one light until it was just about to turn red before darting through the intersection. I ran the light after him. After nearly half an hour of this cat and mouse, I said, “I don’t think he’s going to the outlet.”
“Just keep following him,” Laurie said.
“I have to follow him now,” I said. “I’m lost.”
After another fifteen minutes he turned down a small side road and then jumped out of his truck, gesturing wildly. “Che cosa!?” (What!?)
I got out of the car and pointed to the Prada sign on his truck.
He nodded. “Ma certo,” he said. “Un momento.” (Of course. One moment.)
He carried a package into a house, and when he came back he said, “Segue mi.” (Follow me.)
We followed his truck to the Prada outlet, waving to him as we pulled into the parking lot. I let the women off at the door, then pulled out to park. As I got out of the car, the women were walking back toward me. The store had closed just five minutes earlier.
LIVING GRATITUDE
I’ve come to believe that few things in life will bring as quick a change in our world as the active pursuit of gratitude. I’ve also concluded that few virtues have as much power to alter the very foundation of who we are and where we’re going.
In my own observation, I’ve learned a few things about the powerful virtue of gratitude.
First, gratitude is the key component of happiness. It is both the gateway and the destination. We do not feel grateful because we are happy, we feel happy because we are grateful. It may be impossible to separate the two. Conversely, those who choose lives of ingratitude are never happy.
Second, gratitude enhances our ability to receive and draw even more to be grateful for. This is simple to illustrate. Let’s say neighbors bring you a plate of cookies. You accept the offering, then send them on their way without so much as a thank you. I guarantee you will never enjoy their cookies again. But, if you show demonstrative, sincere gratitude, you will likely be a regular recipient of their cookies for many years to come.
I’ve seen this principle demonstrated in more substantial ways than cookies. As chairman of a charitable foundation, I would not infrequently hear from new donors that they switched their donations to us because the charity they had donated many thousands of dollars to never bothered to thank them.
Another example. A friend once told me that his business was doing well so he decided to give his employees a generous Christmas bonus—a month’s salary.
He said the first year he did this his employees were grateful and happy. But that changed. The second year, his employees expected the bonus, and only a few of them even bothered to thank him. By the third year, full entitlement had set in, and not one employee thanked him at all. Not even in passing. In fact, he told me, one of them even complained. A new employee had started working for him just a few weeks before Christmas and thought she “deserved” a full month’s salary bonus like everyone else.
That’s when he started giving out Christmas hams instead.
I don’t blame him at all. Ingratitude deserves the wages it earns. Truly, there are none so impoverished as those who will not acknowledge the abundance of their lives.
UNEXPECTED TEACHERS
LESSONS FROM THE VINEYARD
For more than a year, my wife and I lived just outside Florence, Italy, in the Chianti region where the famous Chianti wines are made. Every day I would look out our bedroom window and see the beautiful rolling hills ripe with blushing Sangiovese grapes and think, Sembra una cartolina, it looks just like a postcard.
One day I was out walking along a trail next to a vineyard when I came upon a farmer standing among his vines. Eager to practice my Italian, I said to the man, “This is a beautiful vineyard you have.”
“Tante grazie,” he replied.
“You must have very good soil to grow grapes that make famous wines.”
The man looked at me and said, “No, signore. You cannot grow good grapes in good soil.”
I thought his answer curious, so when I got back home I looked up grape farming on the internet. The farmer was right, of course. I learned that poor soil yields higher-quality grapes than good soil because the vines have to work harder, branching off more roots to gather nutrients. Not only does this increase the amount of nutrients that ultimately get to the grape but it also regulates how much water the plant gets—resulting in a grape with character.
This is an apt metaphor for us humans as well. Sometimes, difficulties rise before us like mountains. But mountains can raise us or bury us depending on which side we choose to stand. Both history and life teach us that, more times than not, we succeed not in spite of our challenges and difficulties but because of them.
Even a grape knows that.
WHAT I LEARNED FROM A PERUVIAN STREET BOY
Around the turn of the century, my wife and I helped build several orphanages in Peru. The first of those was called Colibri, the Hummingbird. On one visit, I had an interesting experience. As I entered the gate through an adobe wall, a small, wild-haired boy ran up to greet me. His face was as dirty as his clothes, and his sandals were made from car tires. What caught my attention most, though, was not the child’s poverty but his smile—a grin that filled his face. The reason for his excitement, I learned, was that a local farmer had generously donated a cow to the orphanage and the boy had been given the important job of getting up early each morning to milk it.
He was clearly excited to have been given such a meaningful responsibility and he asked me if I would like to see how he separated the cream from the milk.
I thought about what a contrast there was between this wonderful little boy and the young American girl in a video I had recently seen who threw a tantrum when her parents gave her the wrong color car for Christmas.
Before leaving the orphanage, we drove to a local store to purchase some groceries for the orphanage. That same little boy came to help us carry them. Almost as an afterthought, I bought him a candy bar. I suppose I had expected him to wolf it down like Charlie with a Wonka Bar. Instead, he just held it. I asked my native translator if the boy didn’t like the type of candy bar I’d purchased. The man laughed at my question. “That is like asking if he did not like gold,” he said.
