On the Subject of Strength: Daniel Eladio Reyes (May 20, 1941 - January 1, 2021)

 

"Eladio" (pen and pencil, from a photo)

     

Notions of weakness and strength.  I'm not certain why strength and weakness have been on my mind lately, but I have a feeling there are a number of factors making my thoughts trend in this direction.

My father-in-law, Daniel Eladio Reyes de Leon, was a strong man, in more than one sense of that word.  A hard worker, he went at manual tasks -- whether painting a wall, building a table, chopping down weeds and dead trees, or even carving that dead wood into baseball bats for his grandsons -- with a laser-focused persistence until that job was done.  Then, after his wife or daughter reminded him to eat and drink water, he would refuel and find a new physical task to attack.  Those labors gave him, I believe, great pleasure, and, like Hercules and his twelve labors, increased strength.  Eladio was not weakened by all that hard work; on the contrary, what made him feel weak was inactivity.  Don't get me wrong:  He was very content to sit in his chair watching his Yankees.  But that contented tiredness -- which often led to him being "asleep at the wheel," as my brother calls it, remote in hand -- was not weariness.  It was pure satisfaction.

"The TV's watching him at this point," his wife, Sita, would say in these moments.

One evening, sitting in the airy openness of the sala in their Santo Domingo home, Eladio wanted to make a point to me about politics.  In my fading memory, the topic was Donald Trump, though it may have been his complaints about the weakness of Leonel Fernandez, former president of the Dominican Republic.  

"Mira," he said, taking hold of my forearm in his strong grip.  He didn't drink much in his later years, but I think we may have had one or two glasses of Brugal at that point.  "Intenta soltarte."  

"Ummm," I said, not wanting , as he said, to try to get loose.  I also didn't want to disrespect him by not honoring his wishes.  So I did nothing, smiling dumbly at him, until he laughed his bright-eyed laugh,  and let me go.  He patted me on my knee.

"Ay, Dan," he said.  "La fortaleza es muy importante." ("Strength is very important.")

"Si," I answered, rubbing the feeling back into my forearm.  

My father-in-law, leaned back into his big recliner, and shut his eyes, the picture of contentment.

And of strength.  

    

On Kindness and Strength

"I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again." - Etienne (Stephen) De Grellet

I'm not quite sure why certain status updates stop and command my attention to the point of posting a response; there are likely a number of reasons. I'd imagine it depends on my state of mind, if there's an individual I've been thinking about of late, or if something someone writes strikes me as particularly funny, touching or thought-provoking.

As I recently did my usual obsessive check of the Facebook News Feed, I read the following post: "Why do people mistake kindness for weakness." The person who posted it is someone who I knew on a professional level, for a relatively brief period of time a few years back. She was one of those people, however, with whom I "clicked," to borrow a cliche. From time to time I've met those who, despite how long or how deeply I know them, just feel like they're cut from the same cloth as I am, in terms of how they look at the world around them.

In other words, I sort of see myself in this person.

Her post made me think not only about the way I see the world, but about the way I choose to live my day to day life. In the profession I've chosen -- or the calling that's chosen me, maybe -- kindness is a necessary tool. And, interestingly, so is strength. I'm not talking about "power," or "authority," although they do certainly enter into the equation of what it means to be a good teacher. (Mostly in the teacher's ability to share them, I think.)

My students looked to me for a number of things: knowledge, guidance, humor, and, yes, kindness and strength. It became clear to me as I grew into and accepted my role as a teacher that young people in the classroom need more than just whatever content they happen to be presented with.

Students need an adult's take on how to use the limited time we have on this planet. My students were receiving multiple messages from multiple sources on what it means to be a human being breathing in and out in this world. Like most teens (myself included, way back when), they got a healthy dose of "live-fast-die-young" stuff, because that message has, and continues, to sell to that market.

I chose to model kindness for my students, in the hopes it might give them a piece of what they needed from me, a way to look at the world, and to live in it. A way that would make the world better after our respective walks on her are done, as well as a way to give them that most precious commodity for a young person hoping to make it to adulthood:

Strength.