Do You Believe in Miracles: The Speech I Didn't Give

2323 Community Drive, Bath.

That was my address from age 5 until I stopped living with my parents.

2323 Community Drive, Bath is not in Bath. It’s in Moore Township. What I saw from my bedroom window was an old farmhouse and the Blue Mountain behind it. Beautiful. Not what I thought. Boring, to my thinking, was the more apt B word.

My house was so far away from my high school that it took a half hour to drive there. 45-minute bus ride. 45 minutes, both ways, that’s an hour and a half out of every single school day. An hour and a half. Some nights I only had twice that amount of time to sleep. Sometimes I slept during that hour and a half.

My house was closer to a rival high school than it was to my high school.

My house was so far away that the land line was the same exchange as the rival high school, a toll call from my own school. If after-school practice ended early, it cost me extra money to call home for a ride, and it took that ride a minimum of 30 minutes to get to me.

Life in Moore Township consisted of spending all your time mowing grass and driving places.

So, it seemed to me.

I attended a K through 6 building at that time. But I wasn’t in that school’s main building for the K year. That year they sent me to what was called “Berlinsville”.

“All the way out there?!” is what every adult said when they heard that’s where I was going to kindergarten.

Same thing happened in 7th grade. The junior high building wasn’t big enough, so a group of us were bused to something called the “Annex”. That building, which is older than God, is still there, on one of those streets. I don’t remember which one. Every now and then I pass it and think, “That’s the Annex.” Although it’s called something else.

Despite living in the same house, never moving, I was sent to 5 different buildings for my education.

At Penn State I learned that’s not good for a kid.

What’s really not good for a kid, though, is this: K through 6, 7 years, I was an abundantly punished kid. I was the kid who wrote, 25 times, 50 times, 100 times, 500 times, “I will do my work.” I was the kid who was never allowed to go out for recess. Because I never got my work done. I was the kid whose desk was moved next to the teacher’s desk at the front of the class where all the other kids could see just how naughty I was.

I was the kid you didn’t invite to your birthday parties.

Question: how does a kid go from that to taking honors classes by senior year, where I performed better, usually very much better, than half the students in every one of those honors classes? How does that kid get accepted into Penn State’s main campus as a freshman and earn a BS on time, making dean’s list every semester except one, graduating with a 3.48? (A 3.48, by the way, is like winning a silver medal. The silver medalist is the one who lost gold. A 3.48?? Two one hundredths of a point from a proper 3.5.) How does a kid who can’t get their work done, finish and publish six novels?

The sociopsychological phenomenon known as Self Fulfilling Prophesy, which I learned about at Penn State, insists that can’t happen.

That is Story One.

Story Two. My husband is the one, of the two of us, who speaks most frequently to kids – middle school, high school. And by most frequently, I mean I almost never do and he does, and has, many times a year. I’ve heard him give his story many, many times. With some work, I’ve managed to get it down to one sentence: Toward the end of his senior year of high school he was hospitalized in an ER in Allentown where he was given eleven hours to live; at about hour ten he got better.

He's still living in that final hour. In that final hour, he married me, we’ve had 5 kids, he has become the Deputy Editor of The Morning Call, he’s volunteered countless hours trying to speak some truth and light into the hearts and minds of teenagers. And he’s had a ton more visits to the hospital and a ton times a ton of visits to doctor’s offices. I think the count is now up to three. Three times that he’s survived a fatal event.

Story Three. A few months ago, I was driving my two daughters and one of their friends around. I asked if they believed in miracles. They didn’t answer me, I guess they thought it was a stupid question. After too long of an awkward silence, the one who wasn’t my kid, out of politeness probably, finally answered, “Well, I mean, I’m sitting right next to one.” He was referring to the oldest of the two girls. She had been born with 7 different heart defects. And, at the time of her birth, no one knew it. She’s had three open heart surgeries and functions on what is essentially half a heart.

She was several years old before I found the miracle in that. Or miracleS. Medicine is a science. It is research and a lot of bad, very very bad outcomes, and data, a lot of data, and a lot of analysis, that result in the sort of thing that fixed my kid.

One miracle happened before she was born. We’d had a house fire on December 8th. She was born on January 19. Between the fire itself and the cleanup and restoration that the fire had necessitated, the house we brought our newborn home to was nearly sterile. Our newborn who was far more fragile than most newborns. Far more fragile than we knew.

I’m not sure that the friend in the car that day believed that fire story the first time I told it to him. His father had been the Fire Chief at that time and never responded to a fire at our address. He’d asked. Then this kid found out that fire day was December 8th. December 8th was the day he was born. His father was at the birth, instead of responding to our fire. That kid? He and my daughter have been a couple for over 4 years.

Another miracle was that we discovered the problem before it was too late. Two weeks after the baby was born, my mother-in-law noticed tht the baby wasn’t breathing well. My mother-in-law hadn’t seen her for at least a week. It was such a subtle thing, that those of us with the baby all the time hadn’t noticed. Her observation put me on alert and by the next morning we were seeking medical attention.

Do YOU believe in miracles?

You’re National Honor Society Students. What’s your verdict on miracles?

How about outliers? I took a Six Sigma class and, among other things, learned that outliers are to be paid attention to. Six Sigma is all about process improvement. Business leaders used to be into it.

Penn State, at the time I was there, was one of the top research universities in the nation. I already knew that outliers needed to be looked at.

Story Four. A summer internship that I worked here in the Valley had us assess possible participants in an Allentown program for young teens designed to “level the playing field.” There was a questionnaire with things like are you two or more grades behind your age in school, do you live in a one parent household, do you qualify for free or reduced lunches, and so on. If a kid checked yes to a certain percentage of the items, that kid was considered disadvantaged. I know a woman who probably met the criteria. She grew up in a center-city neighborhood and graduated from a high school designated as high needs. She did her undergraduate work at Harvard, her graduate work at Penn Law, and passed the PA bar on the first try.

We make movies about people like that. Check out Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story or They Call me Sirr. This is entertaining to us. We think these people are outliers in the best possible way. For outliers to be outliers, there can’t be very many of them. There are likely no outliers in this room. If there are too many outliers, they’re not outliers anymore. They’re a cluster. It’s not the same. It’s not interesting. It’s common.

We know there are outliers; we can even believe in miracles. We can hope a miracle will come our way. We can hope being an outlier will explain away whatever we want to explain away.

Was my husband’s story a miracle? It feels like it. My daughter’s? Also feels like it. Mine? Probably not. The woman I know with degrees from Harvard and Penn? Also, probably not. She and I came from bookish families that valued academics. Family trumps world. I learned that at PSU too. I just did what people in my family do -- homework. Once I got into the homework years. I did homework. And I wasn’t in trouble any more.

Remember that 45-minute bus ride? If I brought a flashlight on the bus in the morning, I could study German vocab. I got As in German.

Knowledge I later used at work.

Do you believe your challenges are liabilities or assets?

Do you believe in miracles? Do you believe in outliers? Do you think you ARE one?