Chicken Soup Unsinkable Soul

by Jack Canfield

  There were plenty of dark days, too. Days when I had to ask Tracy to help me finish dressing. Through all of this, she was spectacular, giving me the love and support I needed. I felt so blessed. Gradually, my recovery took shape. In time, the words of the doctor seemed far away.

  Finally, I felt ready to set a goal for myself.

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  The challenge came in the form of natural bodybuilding. I had played football in high school and college, and I was certainly no stranger to the weight room. I began working out diligently with a trainer six days a week. He put me through different weight routines. My goal was to compete in a bodybuilding contest.

  A few months later, all the hours of sweat and training brought me to a competition that included one three-minute routine. I found myself in front of an auditorium filled with people.

  I completed my routineflexing, stretching, showing off the body I had fought so hard to achieveand walked off. As I waited for the judges to tally my score, I spotted my family and friends in the fourth row. When the judges announced that I had placed sixth, I felt a rush of pride and relief. As I took a bow, I stole a quick glance at my family, who were all standing up and clapping and cheering as hard as they could.

  Before we left to celebrate at a nearby restaurant, my dad came over and put both his hands squarely on my shoulders. "Jason, I'm so proud of you. As far as I'm concerned, you are number one!" he said.

  He looked me right in the eye. "We build foundations in our business, but let me tell you, the real foundations in life are family."

  I hugged my dad tightly then, and as I did, I saw Tracy give me the thumbs-up sign and dazzle me with a smile as big as all outdoors.

  Today, Tracy and I are the proud parents of two little girls. They are more precious than we could have ever imagined. And every day I remember my father's words: The real foundations in life are family.

  Jason Morin

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  How to Be New and Different

  If I could wish for my life to be perfect, it would be tempting, but I would have to decline, for life would no longer teach me anything.

  Allyson Jones

  The year 1993 wasn't shaping up to be the best year of my life. I was into my eighth year as a single parent, had three kids in college, my unmarried daughter had just given birth to my first grandchild and I was about to break up with a very nice man I'd dated for over two years. Faced with all this, I was spending lots of time feeling sorry for myself.

  That April, I was asked to interview and write about a woman who lived in a small town in Minnesota. So during Easter vacation, Andrew, my thirteen-year-old, and I drove across two states to meet Jan Turner.

  Andrew dozed most of the way during the long drive, but every once in a while I'd start a conversation.

  "She's handicapped, you know."

  "So what's wrong with her? Does she have a disease?"

  "I don't think so. But for some reason, she had to have both arms and legs amputated."

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  "Wow. How does she get around?"

  "I'm not sure. We'll see when we get there."

  "Does she have any kids?"

  "Two boysTyler and Codyboth adopted. She's a single parent, too. Only she's never been married."

  "So what happened to her?"

  "Four years ago Jan was just like me, a busy single mother. She was a full-time music teacher at a grade school and taught all sorts of musical instruments. She was also the music director at her church."

  Andrew fell asleep again before I could finish telling him what little I did know about what had happened to Jan. As I drove across Minnesota, I began to wonder how the woman I was about to meet could cope with such devastating news that all four limbs had to be amputated. How did she learn to survive? Did she have live-in help?

  When we arrived in Willmar, Minnesota, I called Jan from our hotel to tell her that I could come to her house and pick her and the boys up, so they could swim at our hotel while we talked.

  "That's okay, Pat, I can drive. The boys and I will be there in ten minutes. Would you like to go out to eat first? There's a Ponderosa close to your hotel."

  "Sure, that'll be fine," I said haltingly, wondering what it would be like to eat in a public restaurant with a woman who had no arms or legs. And how on earth does she drive? I wondered.

  Ten minutes later, Jan pulled up in front of the hotel. She got out of the car, walked over to me with perfect posture on legs and feet that looked every bit as real as mine, and extended her right arm with its shiny hook on the end to shake my hand. "Hello, Pat, I'm sure glad to meet you. And this must be Andrew."

  I grabbed her hook, pumped it a bit and smiled sheepishly. "Uh, yes, this is Andrew." I looked in the back seat

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  of her car and smiled at the two boys who grinned back. Cody, the younger one, was practically effervescent at the thought of going swimming in the hotel pool after dinner.

  Jan bubbled as she slid back behind the driver's seat, "So hop in. Cody, move over and make room for Andrew."

  We arrived at the restaurant, went through the line, paid for our food, and ate and talked amidst the chattering of our three sons. The only thing I had to do for Jan Turner that entire evening was unscrew the top on the ketchup bottle.

  Later that night, as our three sons splashed in the pool Jan and I sat on the side and she told me about life before her illness.

  "We were a typical single-parent family. You know, busy all the time. Life was so good, in fact, that I was seriously thinking about adopting a third child."

  My conscience stung. I had to face itthe woman next to me was better at single parenting than I ever thought about being.

  Jan continued. "One Sunday in November of 1989, I was playing my trumpet at the front of my church when I suddenly felt weak, dizzy and nauseous. I struggled down the aisle, motioned for the boys to follow me and drove home. I crawled into bed, but by evening I knew I had to get help."

  Jan then explained that by the time she arrived at the hospital, she was comatose. Her blood pressure had dropped so much that her body was already shutting down. She had pneumococcal pneumonia, the same bacterial infection that took the life of Muppets creator Jim Henson. One of its disastrous side effects is an activation of the body's clotting system, which causes the blood vessels to plug up. Because there was suddenly no blood flow to her hands or feet, she quickly developed gangrene in all four extremities. Two weeks after being admitted to the

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  hospital, Jan's arms had to be amputated at mid-forearm and her legs at mid-shin.

  Just before the surgery, she said she cried out, "Oh God, no! How can I live without arms and legs, feet or hands? Never walk again? Never play the trumpet, guitar, piano or any of the instruments I teach? I'll never be able to hug my sons or take care of them. Oh God, don't let me depend on others for the rest of my life!"

  Six weeks after the amputations as her dangling limbs healed, a doctor talked to Jan about prosthetics. She said Jan could learn to walk, drive a car, go back to school even go back to teaching.

  Jan found that hard to believe so she picked up her Bible. It fell open to Romans, chapter twelve, verse two: "Don't copy the behavior and customs of this world, but be a new and different person with a fresh newness in all you do and think. Then you will learn from your own experience how his ways will really satisfy you."

  Jan thought about thatabout being a new and different personand she decided to give the prosthetics a try. With a walker strapped onto her forearms near the elbow and a therapist on either side, she could only wobble on her new legs for two to three minutes before she collapsed in exhaustion and pain.

  Take it slowly, Jan said to herself. Be a new person in all that you do and think, but take it one step at a time.

  The next day she tried on the prosthetic arms, a crude system of cables, rubber bands and hooks operated by a harness across the shoulders. By moving her shoulder muscles she was soon a
ble to open and close the hooks to pick up and hold objects, and dress and feed herself.

  Within a few months, Jan learned she could do almost everything she used to doonly in a new and different way.

  "Still, when I finally got to go home after four months of physical and occupational therapy, I was so nervous

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  about what life would be like with my boys and me alone in the house. But when I got there, I got out of the car, walked up the steps to our house, hugged my boys with all my might, and we haven't looked back since."

  As Jan and I continued to talk, Cody, who'd climbed out of the hotel pool stood close to his mom with his arm around her shoulders. As she told me about her newly improved cooking skills, Cody grinned. "Yup," he said, "She's a better mom now than before she got sick, because now she can even flip pancakes!" Jan laughed like a woman who is blessed with tremendous happiness, contentment and unswerving faith in God.

  Since our visit, Jan has completed a second college degree, this one in communications, and she is now an announcer for the local radio station. She also studied theology and has been ordained as the children's pastor at her church, the Triumphant Life Church in Willmar. Simply put, Jan says, "I'm a new and different person, triumphant because of God's unending love and wisdom."

  After meeting Jan, I was a new and different person as well. I learned to praise God for everything in my life that makes me new and different, whether it's struggling through one more part-time job to keep my kids in college, learning to be a grandmother for the first time or having the courage to end a relationship with a wonderful friend who just wasn't the right one for me.

  Jan may not have real flesh-and-blood arms, legs, hands or feet, but that woman has more heart and soul than anyone I've ever met before or since. She taught me to grab on to every "new and different" thing that comes into my life with all the gusto I can muster . . . to live my life triumphantly.

  Patricia Lorenz

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  I Was Thirty-Seven Years Old at the Time

  Youth is a gift of nature,

  Age is a work of art.

  Helen M. Carrall

  For years, you've watched everyone else do it.

  The children who sat on the curb eating their lunches while waiting for their bus.

  The husband you put through school who drank coffee standing up and slept with his hand on the alarm.

  And you envied them and said, ''Maybe next year I'll go back to school." And the years went by and this morning you looked into the mirror and said, "You blew it. You're too old to pick it up and start a new career.

  "This wisdom is for you.

  Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Gone with the Wind in 1937. She was thirty-seven years old at the time.

  Margaret Chase Smith was elected to the Senate for the first time in 1948 at the age of forty-nine.

  Ruth Gordon picked up her first Oscar in 1968 for Rosemary's Baby. She was seventy-two years old.

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  Billie Jean King took the battle of women's worth to a tennis court in Houston's Astrodome to outplay Bobby Riggs. She was thirty-one years of age.

  Grandma Moses began a painting career at the age of seventy-six.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh followed in the shadow of her husband until she began to question the meaning of existence for individual women. She published her thoughts in Gift from the Sea in 1955, at forty-nine.

  Shirley Temple Black was ambassador to Ghana at the age of forty-seven.

  Golda Meir in 1969 was elected prime minister of Israel. She had just turned seventy-one.

  Barbara Jordan was given official duties as a speaker at the Democratic National Convention. She was forty years old.

  You can tell yourself these people started out as exceptional. You can tell yourself they had influence before they started. You can tell yourself the conditions under which they achieved were different from yours. Or you can be like a woman I knew who sat at her kitchen window year after year and watched everyone else do it and then said to herself, "It's my turn."

  I was thirty-seven years old at the time.

  Erma Bombeck

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  The Secret Behind My Success

  Be not afraid of going slowly. Be afraid of standing still.

  Japanese Proverb

  My careerTV, stage, movies, all of itwas founded on a strange event that was to be a deep mystery to me for years. Only after my life had changed drastically did I begin to solve the puzzle I was confronted with one long-ago June evening in California.

  In those days I was one of a group of stage-struck drama-school students at UCLA, living on hopes and dreams and not much else. As school ended, one of our professors was leaving for a vacation in Europe. He had a house near San Diego, and a bon-voyage party was planned. It was suggested that some of us drama students might drive down and entertain his supper guests with scenes from musical comedies.

  Nine of us agreed to go. One of the boys and I had rehearsed a scene from Annie Get Your Gun, and that was our part of the program. Everything went well. The guests seemed to enjoy our singing, and we enjoyed it, too.

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  After our performance, supper was announced. I was standing at the buffet when a man I had never seen before spoke to me pleasantly. He said he had admired our performance. Then he asked me what I intended to do with my life.

  I told him that I hoped to go to New York some day and make a career for myself on the stage. When he asked what was stopping me, I told him truthfully that I barely had enough money to get back to Los Angeles, let alone New York. I might have added, but didn't, that at times my grandmother, my mother, my sister and I had been on welfare.

  The man smiled and said he would be happy to lend me the money to go to New York. A thousand dollars, he added, should be enough to get me started. Well, in those days I was pretty innocent, but not that innocent. So I refused his offer politely. He went away, but in a few moments he was back with a pleasant-faced lady whom he introduced as his wife. Then he made his offer all over again. He was quite serious, he said. There were only three conditions. First, if I did meet with success, I was to repay the loan without interest in five years. Next, I was never to reveal his identity to anyone. Finally, if I accepted his offer, I was eventually to pass the kindness along, to help some other person in similar circumstances when I was able to do so.

  He told me to think it over and telephone him when I got back to Los Angeles. He added that he was prepared to make a similar offer to my partner in the scene from Annie Get Your Gun, and he gave me his telephone number.

  The next day, half convinced that I had dreamed the whole thing, I called the number. I was told that if I had decided to accept the conditions, I could drive down on Monday morning and pick up my check. Still unbelieving, I told my mother and grandmother. Their reaction, not

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  surprisingly, was to urge me strongly not to have anything to do with this mysterious benefactor. But somehow I was convinced that the man was sincere, and I believed, furthermore, that God was giving me, Carol Burnett, a strong and unmistakable push. I was supposed to accept the offer. I was being guided. And if I didn't go, I would regret it for the rest of my life.

  At sunup on Monday my partner and I were on the road. We drove for three hours. At nine o'clock, we were at the man's office. We had to wait perhaps half an hourand believe me, that was the longest half hour of my life! But finally we were ushered in. Our friend was crisp, serious, businesslike. He reminded us of the conditions, especially the one about not revealing his identity. Then he had his secretary bring in the checks. I had never seen so many beautiful zeros in my life. We tried to thank him, but he just smiled and ushered us out. When we got to the car, still dazed, we realized we didn't have enough gasoline to get back to Los Angelesand not enough cash to buy any. We had to go to a bank, present one of the checks, then wait while the astonished bank officials telephoned our friend's office t
o make sure that we weren't a pair of international forgers. But finally they did cash it for us.