An unexpected compliment

It was in Summer School where we Catholic kids learned catechism in preparation for our first communions and confirmations. Two nuns would come to Helmville each summer and teach for two weeks after regular school had been dismissed.

One afternoon the nun read us the parable of Abraham and Isaac. According to the story, a voice from a burning bush told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. As the nun read the story, I anticipated an ending in which Abraham would refuse to kill his child, and in return he would receive a deistic pat on the back for being a man of strong principle.

Of course I was disappointed by Abraham, and I voiced my opinion. That marked me as a skeptic – a doubter of accepted thought, cynical of popular belief. She ignored me for the next week. I was a free thinking threat to her and others – an iconoclast.

Twenty years later, during Peace Corps language training in Brazil, with 40 or 50 college grads and postgrads, I slipped up and voiced my ideas.

They were all pathetically normal people - idealistic in their perception of the U.S. and the American Way. They had joined the Peace Corps to show the Brazilians the proper approach to living and working – the way it was done in America.

One afternoon a dozen of us were participating in one of those inane groups, where people reveal their individual philosophies and minor secrets. It was a wretched experience, and I made it worse.

Every volunteer prefaced his or her little speech with, "I'm proud to be an American," and then went on with idiotic rambling of why they were in the Peace Corps, and what they wanted to accomplish with their gringo know-how.

They all had noble reasons for joining the Peace Corps. I had joined to escape pitching hay in forty-below blizzards for two-hundred dollars a month, so I couldn't compete with their altruism. And I had no ideals to profess.

When my turn came, I stated that I wasn't proud to be an American; I had nothing to do with the fact that I was an American. It was the luck of the natal odds that I was born in the U.S. I explained that I was proud that I had fed cattle in horrible weather, and had ridden a lot of bad horses, but saw no reason to be proud of something I didn't do.

So, like in Summer School twenty years before, I was marked as a cynic and made a pariah. Except for two other skeptics with whom I bonded for the rest of training, I was ostracized by the more self-assured in the group.

After I returned to the U.S., I spent a number of evenings locating the fellow who had been our Peace Corps director in the state of Mato Grosso. He was a hard man with a soft heart. His levels of disdain and contempt, for shallow and self-serving people, were enviable, and something I've never been able to attain, although I still try.

I've met and chatted with two Nobel Prize winners over the years, and during two summers, drank a lot of coffee with a member of the Nobel Committee. I also had the luck to get to know a holder of the Medal of Honor, but none of those people manifested the depth and strength of personality that my old director has shown me.

So I located the man, and we communicated occasionally over the years. We still do, but I respect him too much to force myself on him as much as I'd like.

About five years ago, he and his wife visited me in Missoula for a few days. As they were leaving, he took me aside, saying that he had something to tell me. He was crying a little, and I expected to hear that he had a serious illness.

Instead, he told me that, in his years as Peace Corps director, and of the hundreds of volunteers he handled, I was the best volunteer he had known. It's still hard for me to accept, but the man is physically incapable of either falsehoods or empty compliments.

If the statement had come from any other person, I would have considered it to be sentimental, vacuous tripe, but, coming from a man with his moral fiber, I cherish what he told me. In my bad times, it's what keeps me afloat.

It's been years, but even now, when petty and selfish people have my emotional back on the ropes, I remember what he said to me that morning.

It's not the compliment itself, it's the man who made it.