Rochelle Riley

This Christmas, I am working harder on holiday gifts than ever. This year, I’ve decided not to buy them. This year, I am writing letters, notes of admiration, realization and reflection, for my dearest friends.

The decision really made itself. I just returned from a trip to Dakar, and just didn’t have time to spend in stores trying to decide which thing that my friends already own I should try to replace. I imagined strolling down aisles and through department stores and the very idea gave me a headache.

Which one could use another sweater? Which one might like another pair of earrings that are more my taste than theirs? How many more ties can I buy?

Nope, this time, this year, I am using the gift God gave me to create a unique gift for each of them: notes of encouragement and gratitude, words to let them know how I feel about them, how much I appreciate them being in my life.  If they take them in the right spirit, they won’t think I’m dying and saying goodbye, but will understand how much I love them.

I made three exceptions: my friend, Shelley, who is among the smartest, funniest and most practical people I know. I got her a picture frame. She’s already decided what to put in it. my friend, Phyllis. I had decided before I left that I wanted her to have something tangible that she could show off; and daughter, sister, brother, aunt and cousin, who comprise my nuclear family, the core that is left back in North Carolina. I knew before the plane took off for Senegal that I would bring them something back from there.

Everyone else gets the best of what’s inside of me, what I think of them and feel about them.

I hope they appreciate the words as much as I appreciate them.

I love it when an old man calls me “baby.”

I know that when it happens, the man means no harm, no offense, that he is remembering, that he is, for just a moment, living another time when he was a mack daddy and he called all the girls “baby.” He might have, for a moment, been thinking of his daughters or granddaughters and let me have their term of endearment for a moment.

The man, whenever and wherever he is, could have been my grandfather, who called me that almost every day. My grandfather was a gruff, hard-working man who raised two families and never complained. He called me baby and he called every boy and man in our town “Charlie.”

I was as amazed that he did it as I was that everyone let him. No matter who he saw, he’d cry out, “Hey, Charlie!” And they’d always say, “Hey!” – whether it was Donald or Nathan or Bridgers or Derek or Tony or Nino or Winston.

The man on the scooter looked nothing like my grandfather, save skin like ebony and a wonderful smile.

I was walking, Desi, The Wonder Dog, when I saw the old man this evening. He was on a scooter with a basket in front and his cane in back. He was bowed over his lap. My heart stopped. Had he died while out for a ride? I called over, “Sir, are you all right?”

Nothing.

I called louder, “Sir, is everything OK?”

And he stirred as if from sleep, because that is what it was. He raised his head, still looking forward, never at me, and raised his thumb in the universal sign of “Everything’s all right.”

I smiled and continued our walk. But before I got to the corner, the old man was flying past, doing at least 5 miles per hour. He was totally awake, vibrant, the lost moment gone. He turned and waved, “Hey baby, how ya doing?”

“Fantastic, sir!”

And like that, he had turned the corner and headed down the street. I am a writer, not a photographer. By the time I realized that I should get a photo of him and fumbled with my Iphone to take it, he was gone.

It was the third time I’d been called baby by an old man this week, and every time, I thought of my grandfather. Those “baby’s” were gifts, and I didn’t mind at all.

She was trying to help.

Rachel Beckwith decided last spring that her friends should skip the birthday presents and instead help her raise money to provide clean water to African villages. She was trying to raise only $300.

On the page, she wrote this message: “I found out that millions of people don’t live to see their 5th birthday. And why? Because they didn’t have access to clean, safe water so I’m celebrating my birthday like never before. I’m asking from everyone I know to donate to my campaign instead of gifts for my birthday. Every penny of the money raised will go directly to fund freshwater projects in developing nations.”

By the time she turned nine on June 12, she had raised $220. She closed her page.

Rachel didn’t live to see her tenth birthday.

She was killed last week in a 13-car pile-up not far from Seattle. The pastor at her church, Eastlake Community Church, reopened her page. Rev. Ryan Meeks gave Rachel a second chance at her goal.

By Thursday morning, she had raised $518,916 – and counting.

From tragedy, miracles rise like phoenix from ashes.

Her heartfelt effort keeps Rachel alive for her community and for her nation. That moment when she decided to put passion to action meant she would continue to make a difference for people she ever met. Her generosity of spirit should inspire us all.

When the pastor takes the money to whatever country Rachel had in mind, I hope the TV cameras go with him. Or maybe he can call the folks at www.water.org, the charity that actor Matt Damon supports, and they can make the trip for him – and for Rachel.

We’ll be watching – and remembering a little girl whose heart was as big as the world and whose passion could inspire a generation.

Thank you, Rachel.

To contribute to Rachel’s medical bills and her cause to bring water to an African village, visit http://mycharitywater.org/p/campaign?campaign_id=16396.

Rochelle Riley (center) celebrates receiving the Will Rogers Humanitarian Award from James Rogers (second from left), the great-grandson of humorist, actor and cowboy Will Rogers. From right: the award’s founder, Bob Haught, NSNC conference chairman Brian O’Connor and Riley’s editor, Ron Dzwonkowski.

Sometimes, you have to stop. Just stop and live in a moment, life fully in it.

That happened to me Friday night when I stood before a group of hugely talented writers and journalists because someone wanted to give me a pat on the back.

Newsrooms aren’t keen on pats on the back. We are, after all, producing products that are vital one day and trash the next.

But every now and again, someone stops you with a word of encouragement, a pat of recognition and thanks. And it takes your breath away.

For 10 years, I’ve written about adult literacy and the challenge Detroit and Michigan face because of the number of adults who read below a sixth grade level – something that, at the height of American auto making, didn’t matter.

But in the new global economy, one where most auto jobs require college degrees and there are fewer auto plants than in the past 30 years, reading is – as it has always been –fundamental and necessary.

On Friday night, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists recognized me for that decade of work with the Will Rogers Humanitarian Award.

Rogers, Oklahoma’s most famous resident and one of America’s most beloved celebrities of the 1920s and 1030s, was born in November 1879 and died in August 1935, but in that span, he was a humorist, vaudeville performer, cowboy, actor and comedian. A descendant of the Cherokee Nation, he wrote more than 4,000 newspaper columns, made dozens of silent movies and became a a part of America’s tragic lore when he died in an airplane crash with pilot Wiley Post. Known for his quick wit and hilarious stories, Rogers has been among the most quoted Americans in history. His most famous: I never met a man I didn’t like.

Seventy-six years later, I stood in a Detroit Great Lakes museum and received a bronze statue of him that moved me to tears. It was one of those moments that I always tell people to take a breath and listen to.  It was one of those moments that Oprah tells people to live in.

It took my breath away.

But when I get my breath back, I’ll be back on the job, back in the streets, fighting the good fight some more. The need is great and growing.

But I’ll have more fuel in my tank because of a pat on the back that was inspiring, encouraging and appreciated.

The mission is now accomplished.

President Barack Obama did what he said: He got the man who brought down the Twin Towers on 9/11 – a date that never again needs a year or an explanation after it.

In the days since the late Sunday announcement, I have watched with mixed emotions the swirl of reaction to the death of a madman.

I participated in the early Twitter chaos:

Trump: “I got the birth certificate.” Obama: “I got Osama bin Laden.”

I watched television journalists chomping at the bit to break the news, not knowing that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson had already scooped them all.

And I watched for spontaneous jubilation in the streets of New York.

Except it didn’t look like New York. It looked like coverage from all those other cities on the other side of the world where the oppressed cheer death in a sustained release borne of years of hurt.

I don’t remember seeing that before.  It seemed wrong to celebrate a death, even that of a monster.

Then I remembered the images and the horror and the numbness and the anger that I felt that day.  And I thought of the thousands of victims and  the police officers and the firefighters and the continuing suffering, all from the malignant hatred that led to a plan to wipe our landscape.

President Obama closed a heavy, heart-breaking chapter in the book on terror.

It wasn’t an hour before goofballs and so-called pundits  began to question whether the operation, the death, was real, demand proof, question whether the president deserved the credit and whether we are now in more danger.

It wasn’t a day before the demands increased for the White House to release pictures of a dead body. I hope that never happens. I hope we don’t put our children through that. The White House should deny a blood lust so great that it makes us look like. . .

. . . Them.

Please, Mr. President: Don’t release photos and videos full of blood and gore. It’s time to stop having to prove anything to people for whom satisfaction is not the goal. I hate that you released your birth certificate. You don’t need to release a death certificate.

Screw ‘em.

We need to focus, as one nation, on the future.

America is as safe as we decide we want to be. We won’t be if we invite terror. We won’t be if we aren’t  But mostly, we won’t be if we continue to make petty politics more important than our national security.

The election cycle hasn’t quite begun, but already the silliness has begun, as if America didn’t have the most wonderful, united moment Sunday night that it had had in a decade.

And I couldn’t help but marvel at and reflect on the fact that while Donald Trump, the circus-haired businessman, was taunting the president – asking for papers to prove that he is legal, much like slave hunters who stopped black men on lonely roads and much like poll workers did to black Americans during the civil rights movement – Obama was quietly, with grace and authority, giving America something it had needed for a decade: justice and closure.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is wrong: The death of Osama bin Laden does bring closure, at least to this chapter in the book on terror.

And we should respect and reflect on that feeling – and spare our children more gory images of death – before it’s back to political business as usual.