What Difference Do It Make? (11 page)

Don went on to become a principal at a prominent Saint Paul commercial architectural firm while also pursuing fine art as an avocation. Every year around Thanksgiving, his firm would pass the hat among the employees for donations to the mission; then management would match those donations and write the mission a check.

But something about the way all that was handled bothered Don. “In the end, I thought it was a little disrespectful,” he says. “It was like we were saying, ‘We'll give you the money, but we don't want to see your people or hear about what you do.'”

So, in 2008, Don toured the mission and found himself amazed at the dedication of the staff, at the work being done.

There were addiction recovery classes and classes on life skills such as parenting, budgeting, and computers. There were job skills training programs and connections to agencies that could help with transitional housing.

After his tour, Don knew without a doubt that writing a check just wasn't going to be good enough for him anymore. He had to share with these men, give of himself, make a difference.

That's when he piped up and offered to teach a class on art.

Now he found himself in a roomful of homeless men, sharing a little about his own tarnished past and how art helped him cope with the pain and heartache of his mom's early death.

“I have no clue why art works, why it helps,” he told his world-weary audience. “I'm not a therapist. All I know is that it's powerful for me. And if I can give any of that to you, to be able maybe just to see the world a little differently, it will be worth it.”

The following week, about a dozen men returned. One guy in the program, Dave, was a real talker. Dave liked to draw, but he liked to talk even more. He came for a couple of sessions, but after the third, he walked up to Don and said, “I really appreciate what you're doing, but I'm not going to come in anymore. I've decided to focus on another part of the program.”

“Thank you for telling me,” Don said, wondering whether he hadn't made the class interesting enough.

Later that day, though, one of the mission counselors told Don, “Dave's an addict. It was an enormous step for him to come and let you know his plans. Most guys in recovery just drift away.”

Somehow, Don's commitment to teaching the men art had inspired Dave to honor that commitment by taking responsibility—something addicts rarely do.

Don remembers another man, Alex, an alcoholic who was extremely talented at a particular style of drawing.

After Don complimented his work one day, Alex asked him, “Do you think I could make money at it?”

“Well, your stuff looks like tattoo art,” Don said. “I know a guy who gets eight hundred bucks anytime someone uses one of his drawings for a tattoo.”

“Maybe I could do something like that,” Alex said, adding shading to a dragon figure he was drawing.

Alex didn't come back the next week . . . or the next Later, Don heard he'd started drinking again. Still, their conversation suggested a glimmer of hope. “Alex was looking beyond the next hour, the next drink, at what the future might hold.

When he first started teaching at the mission, Don had hoped to uncover some hidden talent—the next Picasso or Remington, undiscovered, wrapped in rags instead of a fancy art degree. Perhaps inside one of these broken men lay an artist who had only been waiting for the right nurturing.

Soon though, Don realized that it wasn't the art itself that was making a difference to these men but “the doing of the art, the stories surrounding the art.”

Drawing and painting calmed the men down, helped them express themselves in a different way. “You don't have to put everything into words,” Don says. “Sometimes you don't have words.”

Beautiful gardens surrounded the mission—flowers, vines, and trellises sheltered in leafy canopies of shade. One day, Don took a handful of men outside and told them, “Pick anything you want to draw. But whatever you pick, you're going to draw it eight times.”

It was an exercise in commitment. “Commitment and follow-through is hard for addicts,” Don said. “They want something that's immediate. When something doesn't work quickly, they move on to something else.”

One man picked a vine-covered trellis. But as he sketched and sketched, he focused on the trellis itself, struggling over and over to render the spots where the thin, white wood crossed. It was as though he didn't see the vines or the leaves or the flowers at all. Meanwhile, he became more and more frustrated and impatient.

“Slow down a little,” Don coached him. “What else do you see here? Do you see leaves? Shadows? Colors?”

The man tried again, this time relaxing a little, sinking into the moment, less intent on the hard detail and more open to the total picture. After a few more tries, he showed his piece to Don, who was impressed with what the man had achieved in the end.

Art, said Don, teaches something we all need to learn, especially about people who are different from ourselves: “To see things the way they truly are, sometimes you have to look more deeply.”

15

Ron

W
hen
Same Kind of Different as Me
finally came out, I took Mama and Daddy a copy and wrote inside: “Thanks for being who you are. If it hadn't been for you, there would have never been me! Love, Ronnie.”

Mom read the book first and declared it a literary masterpiece. Of course, my mama had also declared me handsome that time she sewed me a matching shirt and short set from blue and black plaid, a new outfit she made special for my first date with a sorority girl from Texas Christian University.

Dad started reading the book a few days later and stopped on page 18 after reading, “Somewhere during my childhood, he crawled into a whiskey bottle and didn't come out till I was grown.”

A couple of days later, I pulled into their driveway. They were sitting on the porch in their wrought-iron rockers, and Mama was working a crossword puzzle.

“Why did you say what you did about me?” Daddy asked the instant I walked up.

“What did I say?” I said, knowing without asking which part he was referring to since it was about the only time I referred to him in the book.

“About me crawling in a whiskey bottle,” he said, taking a sip from his Jim Beam and Coke.

From out of nowhere, my Mama cut in like a linebacker intercepting a pass. “Because it's the damn truth, Earl!”

My mouth fell open. I think it was the first time I'd heard her cuss.

Earl stuck out his chin, defiant. “Is that what you think of your old man?”

“Daddy, I've forgiven you for that,” I said, without really meaning it.

“Well, I'm not gonna be reading the rest of your book,” he said.

Neither, it seemed, was anybody else. When
Same Kind of Different as Me
appeared in bookstores, we thought it had
Oprah
written all over it—or at least the
Today
show
, Good Morning America,
or, as a backup,
Jerry Springer.
We thought if no one wanted to talk literature, maybe Denver could slug it out with a preacher caught in a sex sting.

But nothing happened. We sold a few copies here and there, but Oprah never did call. In fact, we dedicated a line to her from that old Randy Travis song, which said something like, I guess if my phone's not ringing, it's probably not you.

After a big Texas book fair chaired by relatives of mine refused to feature
Same Kind
, I got seriously discouraged. If you can't count on some good old-fashioned nepotism to help sell your book, what can you count on?

“Denver, what are we going to
do
?” I fumed one night as we sat on the deck at Rocky Top, watching fish pop from the Brazos River under a silver moon.

“I'll tell you what we gon' do,” he said. “We gon' stop right here and bless all them folks that turned us down. They done did us a big favor. Mr. Ron, we didn't write this book for no book fair or no TV show. We wrote it for Miss Debbie, and we wrote it for God.”

Then Denver pinned me with his drill-bit squint, his eyes catching moonlight. “Now, you listen to me
real good.
You hear me?”

“Yes . . .”

“Don't you never ask nobody to do nothin for this book ever again. This is
God's
book! You let Him take care a' His business, and you and me will be doin just fine. Did you hear what I said?”

In that second, I wished I had his faith—faith like I used to have. But I was afraid he might cut me with his eyes if I expressed any doubt.

“Yes, I heard you,” I said.

“Then stop your complainin,” Denver said. Then he turned back to watch the fish.

About a month later, we got a call asking us to appear on a morning television show in Boston. The host had read our book and taken a shine to it. A few days later at five in the morning, we sat in the studio, listening to the lead-in.

“Live in Boston, good morning!” the host said. “Today we have with us two men from Dallas, Texas, with a beautiful story about friendship.”

Then he turned to Denver, who suddenly looked exactly like a rabbit frozen in the path of an oncoming semitruck.

“Mr. Moore,” the host said, “can you tell us a little bit about your book?”

Stone silence.

Tick.

Tock.

Tick.

Tock.

I was about to jump in and answer when Denver spoke up. “Now, sir, I'm gon' tell you the truth. I don't read, and I don't write, so I didn't write that book, and I ain't never read it. Now, what is your next question?”

On the outside, I grinned like an idiot. Inwardly, I crumpled. My mind flashed back to Denver telling me, “This is
God's
book!”

That's a good thing,
I thought,
because God help us if we ever get invited to another TV show
.

16

Ron

G
od did help us. In late 2006, as Denver and I traveled from city to city, we began to hear stories of people whom we considered our “ground zero” readers, people who picked up
Same Kind of Different as Me
and instantly grasped the simple arithmetic of Deborah's life: loving God means loving people, and loving people means making a difference for God.

Take Jill Bee from Dallas, for example. She sent the book to her friend David Smith, who lives in Atlanta. Over the next nine months, he bought sixty-five hundred copies of
Same Kind of Different as Me
and passed them out for free—seeds planted that would later yield an incredible crop. In the tenth month after reading our book, David hosted a fund-raiser that became the largest ever held in Atlanta. That gathering in the Georgia World Congress Center raised nearly a million dollars that benefited several homeless missions in the city.

Or how about the woman who checked
Same Kind
out of a public library in Syracuse, New York, because she saw it on the new-release table and liked the cover? It was a seemingly random act. But it would radically change lives thousands of miles away in the Pacific Northwest.

After reading Deborah's tale
,
this woman called her brother, Don, in Pasco, Washington, and told him that though she didn't go in for religion the way he did, she really enjoyed our little “God story.”

Don found a copy of the book in his local bookstore and, after reading it, passed it along to his pastor, Dave, at Bethel Baptist Church. Within a week of receiving it, Dave read
Same Kind of Different as Me
two and a half times, then began writing a sermon series on compassion, forgiveness, and loving the unlovable.

Now, don't give up on this story because this next part is going to look like I'm bragging about selling a truckload of books. That's not what it's about at all, so just hang in there.

On the last Sunday of September 2006, Pastor Dave preached the first of his six sermons, telling his congregation of more than twenty-five hundred that he wanted every one of them to read his book. Within hours, his phone rang. On the other end of the line, the manager of the local Barnes & Noble said, “What did you tell all these folks about this book we've never heard of? We've taken orders for nearly a thousand copies!”

Later, Pastor Dave had another idea. He'd invite Denver and me up to Washington state to speak at his church. In a leap of faith, Pastor Dave picked up the phone again and, somehow, got hold of my cell-phone number. Fifteen hundred miles away, in a rat-shack relic of an ancient log cabin high atop a mountain near Angel Fire, New Mexico, I heard two things in rapid succession:

Ding-a-ling-ling! Ding-a-ling-ling! . . .

. . . and . . .

“Turn that thing off!”

The first was my cell phone ringing. The second was my hunting partner, Rob Farrell, who was hopping mad that I had probably just scared off the
muy grande
bull elk we'd been tracking for two days.

Embarrassed but hoping it was good news about our book, I whispered furtively into the phone. “Hello?”

“Is this Ron Hall, the author of
Same Kind of Different as Me
?” Pastor Dave said.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Praise God!” said Pastor Dave. Then, “Why are you whispering?”

“Because I'm hunting elk on top of a mountain in New Mexico,” I whispered, “and we've been sitting here for days waiting to see an elk.”

Not seeming to grasp my dilemma, Pastor Dave launched into a bubbly tale of what was going on at his church and invited Denver and me to come up and speak. After a ten-minute call—punctuated by Rob's angry glares and me whispering single syllables to let Pastor Dave know that Rob hadn't shot me yet—I hung up.

Rob shot me a final frown. “You just ruined our whole hunt,” he said.

Five minutes later, I shot an elk worthy of the Boone and Crockett record book.