This I Believe: Life Lessons Read Online Free Page A

This I Believe: Life Lessons
Book: This I Believe: Life Lessons Read Online Free
Author: Dan Gediman, Mary Jo Gediman, John Gregory
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a shot.” I believe in imperfection, because if I believed otherwise I would not dare to cook a meal, knit a sweater, stand up in front of a class, or write a poem. Imperfection invites me to step up to a challenge.
    My art teacher says, “Hang up your bad drawings on the wall, not just your good ones. You learn more from your bad drawings than your good drawings.” Creativity risks failure, perhaps requires failure. It thrives on exploration, discovery, play.
    In childhood my favorite books were joke books. I trace my love of language to reading aloud from these with my father. Imperfection often is the key to jokes. Most humor arises from incongruity, the unexpected shift in which logic or perspective goes wrong.
    Here is my favorite joke: Do you know why bagpipers always march while they play? They are trying to get away from the noise.
    My great-aunt Margaret Cleary Bauer also believed in imperfection. During an annual physical her doctor broached a delicate topic: “You know,” he said, “you probably would feel better if you lost five pounds.” Aunt Margaret responded, “Doctor, I am ninety-four years old. How good do I have to feel?”
    How good, indeed. That’s the question. I can always feel better, look better, do better. I can learn more, sell more, buy more. I can do more, and do it faster. But what is the price of this perfection? Joy. I feel robbed of joy. The good, which is imperfect, becomes not good enough.
    I believe in imperfection, ultimately, because I have to. The world is imperfect, and I choose to love the world. This is not easy. I believe in the bagpiper’s labored song, in lopsided eyeglasses, in children who make fun of what they don’t understand, because they teach me patience, discipline, compassion—qualities I possess only intermittently, imperfectly.
    Suzanne Cleary is a poet whose most recent book is Trick Pear , published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2007. Her current eyeglasses have black plastic frames.

Peace Can Happen

    Christine Kingery
    My grandmother was born in northern Russia to a large family of fourteen siblings. She was sixteen years old when World War II broke out. Her first job was going onto the battlefields to dismantle bombs that hadn’t exploded.
    She was captured by the Nazis when she was seventeen and taken to a “work camp” in Germany. They shaved off her waist-length hair and tortured her. Grandma never saw her parents and siblings again. Her mother died when Grandma was young. Her father was taken away to Siberia for political treason and never seen again, and most of her siblings died in the war.
    My resourceful grandmother escaped the camp and worked for many months as a nurse in underground movements in Germany and Belgium. She was captured by the Nazis again and put into another concentration camp. This one was bigger. A death camp. There she met my grandfather, and the two escaped.
    After the war, they had nowhere to go. They returned to a concentration camp in Stuttgart, which had been converted into a displacement camp. There my mother was born and raised. It took my grandparents eleven years to finally come to America.
    When I was young, I heard many stories about the war. One day when I was eight, I said to my grandmother, “I hate the Germans for what they did to you! Don’t you just get so mad at them?”
    I’ll never forget my grandmother’s response. She said in her broken English, “The Germans are my friends. When I escaped and had nowhere to go, the Germans gave me food, shelter, and clothes. They were my friends even in the camps. The Germans are the kindest people I know.”
    Her answer shocked me, and it was my first introduction to the meaning of compassion.
    A few years later, in high school, I had the chance to visit Japan. My host family took me to Nagasaki to the Atomic Bomb Museum and Peace Park. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings.
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