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Saturday, Nov. 10, 2007

This they believe

Teens explain what's at the core of their faith

What do you believe? What force has lodged itself in your soul?

The Herald-Leader asked the students on our Teen Board to contribute pieces on the theme of the National Public Radio feature This I Believe.

The responses we received were as varied as the teens themselves. Here's a taste:

• Josie Degler of Lexington's Paul Laurence Dunbar High School believes in "stopping at lemonade stands, especially the ones run by little kids."

• Clark Brooks of Lexington Catholic High School believes that "football has surpassed the sport of baseball in regards to being America's number one pastime."

• Christian Trent of Lexington's Lafayette High School writes: "This may seen uniquely detached from everyday life, but I believe and admire the work of garbage workers."

Inside are four full This I Believe pieces that stood out to the Teen Board sponsors. Would we come to the same conclusions, or express ourselves in the same way? Not necessarily. But we admired the vigor and maturity with which our students expressed themselves.

I believe nature takes its course

Many people die of cancer. It is the brother to baldness and blindness and wrinkles. It is the path of nature in our bodies, twisting our long-faithful cells into enemies of immortality. It tears at every pulsing organ, taunts the living with the odor of formaldehyde, dances with them to death.

"Her mother is in the hospital" leaves a residue of pity at my lunch table while I eat the sandwich I made myself because my mother is in the hospital. I am happy to make my own lunches because my mother puts too much peanut butter on my sandwiches and gives me too many Cheetos, which I must eat because otherwise, I may hear the reverberation of my scandal from across the cafeteria: "How can she waste that food? Didn't her mother prepare that for her? She of all people should understand its worth!" Therein lies the curse of a child born into poor fate.

My mother's neck is a mass of scar tissue, her vocal cords on the verge of paralysis, her knee trying to crumple under her weight. Every day when I come home from school she makes me a snack. She runs errands and programs computers and attends lengthy high school band concerts. I once asked her what she will do when I am gone and she is old and gray and she said, "I don't really expect to live to be old and gray." And that is that.

When a doctor tries to diagnose me with some horrific malady, I will pack my bags. My friends will not gather to pray that I be healed of this age-old act of nature. I will take my life to a foreign country beyond telephone lines and have a garden and one day I will be sick and after a while perhaps I will die in my vegetable patch, and I will call it old age no matter how old I am.

It is not old age for my mother. But it is death nonetheless, a suave waltz with the whispered C word that everyone has been careful not to say near me in case I am inclined to break into tears. My mother has not complained, but she has been hacked into by curious doctors too many times, and every surgery has elicited a fountain of undesired sympathy for me from my teachers, my friends, my family. I will not make the same mistake. Human beings deserve to die without forcing impossible remedies on their tired bodies. And those who have succeeded in surviving the dead should have no well-intentioned pity poured upon their heads.

This I believe, because the many daughters of sickened mothers, like me, are tired of handling condolences for the inevitable.

April Dodd
Henry Clay High School

I believe in the Western

I believe in the Western. It's the old American mirage, I know, manifest destiny reincarnated and everything a good modernist shouldn't be, but I bought it like I bought superhero action figures when I was little.

The hero rides into town, you see, with nothing but his wits and his reflexes. I can see his icy eyes and his stony face right now, his complacent features, always bigger than life. More than that, I think his story is a true one. The calmly certain gunslinger does rescue the poor, isolated town from an evil its own law cannot contest.