Anthony Fatica is my hero.  I have learned more from him about simple compassion and love than from any spiritual or religious teacher I've ever studied.  His everyday life has humbled me more than Thich Nhat Hahn, the Bible, or even the earnest nuns of my childhood, armed with rosaries and rulers. Unlikely tutor he may seem, but I assure you he is Master of the Loving Moment.  Meister Anthony.

            At present he is a sixteen-year-old guy with a girlfriend named Holly, a mom named Mary and two doting sisters.  His basketball team just took the state championship, and the team was the last to know. Their coach, Ms. Nelson, doesn’t believe in giving results to the players in front of the other teams. (I guess she thinks it’s a little too show-offy to be winners, and she doesn’t want the other teams to go home feeling bad.)  So when the play-offs were over, with the press still milling about, she waited until most of the teams had left and then broke the news to the Shoreline Special Olympic Basketball team that they had, indeed, won the state championship.  Woo hoo!!  Until that moment they were pretty content to have won their game, have seen their teammates again and to have awarded high fives to each other with each basket.  But now!  Champions!  Wow.

            This is just the sort of team where Anthony feels at home.  Born with Down Syndrome, he has spent his life playing hard, trying hard, and excelling in remarkable ways. I have his picture posted next to my computer monitor.  I am considering putting up a little sign for myself next to it saying, “WWAD?” meaning “What Would Anthony Do?” to help me climb out of my crabbier moments.  Here are some of the reasons why...     

***

            Anthony’s mom is a coworker and friend, and has invited me to a number of family events where I have been able to get to see him in action.  Several weeks ago, Mary popped into my cubicle and said, “Wanna hear an ‘Anthony’? I nodded.   

Holly, his girlfriend, had recently had bilateral hip replacements for congenital malformations in her hip sockets.  Three years Anthony’s senior, she is a young woman with Down Syndrome, too, and they have been “going together” for the past two years.  Until very recently she was in a plaster cast and propped in a wheelchair at a 75-degree angle for proper healing.  She was the approximate shape of a boomerang, with a similar amount of flexibility.  She had been in quite a bit of pain from the surgery, so Anthony was going over every day after school to sit next to her wheelchair holding her hand and waiting on her.  He talked to her, distracted her and generally gave her mother a break from trying to make her comfortable.  Bowling, may I add, was not the first thing on anyone’s mind at that point in her recovery. 

With that context, Mary told me that Anthony had pulled her aside urgently the day before to announce, “Mom, Holly needs a new bowling ball.  Will you help me buy one for her?”

            “But Anthony, Honey, Holly won’t be able to bowl for quite awhile,” Mary pointed out.

“I know, Mom, but I have been watching how the kids in wheelchairs bowl, and they all have balls with more holes, so that they can hold the ball with two hands.  Holly loves to bowl, and if we get her a two-hand ball, she will be happy that she can bowl again later.  It will cheer her up!”

Then it hit Mary.  In all their careful explanations to Anthony of Holly’s procedure, no one had explained that the wheelchair would be temporary.  Anthony thought that Holly was now confined to a chair, and, naturally, would need adaptations to continue their shared sport of bowling.  He was planning ahead for their future, and for her happiness.

“Oh, Anth,” she hugged him, “you are the best boyfriend!”  She explained that Holly would be getting out of her chair, and that after physical therapy and some practice would be able to use her old bowling ball. 

“She’ll be good as new, Honey, wait and see.”  Anthony hugged her back, relieved that Holly wouldn’t need the new ball after all.  Anthony had been perfectly willing to adapt around her changing needs.   Guileless Forest Gump meets The English Patient.

***

 Anthony is a theater nut. At Christmas, we traditionally attend “A Christmas Carol” at a local Seattle theater. Anthony all but knows the play by heart.  He loves the trip downtown, watches every minute of the play with minute attention, and applauds louder and longer than any other audience member at the end.  One year, as we left the theater, he began discussing the play in his usual animated fashion, and, again as usual, at a decibel level of a portable P.A. system. 

This attracted the attention of a group of Middle Eastern men walking toward us on the sidewalk. Anthony raved on about Scrooge et al, and we continued walking.  Under their respective turbans the men scowled, disapproved, and murmured to each other about Anthony’s disruptive behavior.  I prepared to stare them down.  Anthony’s fun was none of their business.  Finally, as we came upon their group, Anthony noticed that they were regarding him carefully.  He did not seem to notice that they were nonverbally telling him to put a sock in it.  He smiled broadly, held his hand up in a joyous salutary sort of “high five” gesture.  He veered directly toward their group, smiled openly at each of their faces in turn and said in his loud voice, “Hi boys!” 

Well, what can one do in the face of such enthusiasm?  They all broke into smiles, looked sheepishly at each other and said “Hi!” in startled, delighted unison.  Anthony grinned at such a friendly reception and then turned back to us to talk about the play again.  His mom and I smiled at the men and shrugged.  Anthony, future ambassador to The United Arab Emirates.

***

Anthony is an old hand at thoughtfulness. Every summer he attends a summer camp in West Seattle for special needs kids.  The culmination of the week-long arts event is a talent show.  Lots of proud parents crowd into the lodge, where a stage is set up in front of the river rock fireplace, and the campers sing, dance, recite, or demonstrate some other talent that they have prepared throughout the week.  Not so different from every other summer camp.

The year he was twelve., when they asked for campers to form teams of four for the talent night, Anthony asked if he could be a group leader.  He chose two of his usual buddies, and Jacob for their group of four.  Jacob was, as we say in developmental circles, one of the lower functioning members of the camp.  He was completely nonverbal, confined to a wheelchair, and with limited movement.  What primitive communication he managed was by pointing spastically at large pictures on a communication board that served as a tray on his chair.  He sometimes rocked, and he occasionally smiled.  Anthony considered him a friend, and insisted that he be on the team. 

Anthony, it should be noted, has never let a little thing like muteness define his friendships.  He had a dear friend in special education class named Shawna Ree who died when he was eight.  He used to spend long hours with her, talking to her about whatever he was doing – coloring, playing cowboy, etc.  Every evaluation of her level of function deemed her “profoundly nonverbal” and she did not have even a communication board, so delayed was her language ability.  But Anthony insisted that she spoke to him. He translated for her to teachers, parents, other students and anyone who would listen.  He would look at her meaningfully, paused to listen, answer her, laugh at her jokes.  You know, conversation.

So when Jacob rolled into Camp Long, Anthony naturally included him as he would anyone else.  Frankly, compared to Shawna Ree, Jacob was a regular Demosthenes – showing a lot of promise if you could get by the initial little impediment.  Heck, this guy could smile and point.  What a chatterbox!  So Anthony looked over the list of songs allowed for the singing groups and got to work.  He and his team labored tirelessly with their big production number.  Lyrics, costumes, technical support. 

When the big night came, Mary was packed in with all the other proud parents, patiently waiting for her son, politely clapping for all the other kids.  One group of four after another.  Line dancing to Achy Breaky Heart.  Unintelligible renditions of “Woe Woe Woe your Boat.”  And then Anthony’s crew.  Proudly they pushed poor Jacob out into the middle of the stage, complete with communicator board across his lap.  He was completely covered with all things yellow.  Yellow construction paper covered his chair, he was wearing a yellow shirt that one of the team had brought in (“where did he get that shirt?” Jacob’s mother wondered out loud), a yellow hat, yellow crepe paper over the wheels of his chair.  “Was he the sun?  A yellow daisy?”  The crowd conjectured.

Anthony, paused for the crowd to get quiet.  Then, with two back-up singers, belted out a blaring and essentially on-key version of “We All Live in a Yellow Submarine.”  It brought the house down.  Jacob, resident submarine, smiled throughout, rocking to the noisy tune, pointing at his board.  The four of them looked out at the audience like the seasoned entertainers they had become.  The applause was thunderous. 

“I’ve never seen him so happy.”  Jacob’s mom dabbed at her eyes.

            Anthony showed his group how to take their bows, then, like the statue of the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima, they all leaned into Jacob, and pushed him offstage.

***

Then there was that Back Street Boys concert.  When Anthony was ten, Mary invited my daughter and me to see the Back Street Boys with them at the Tacoma Dome.  Armed with earplugs, I agreed to go.  Spending an evening with tens of thousands of screaming girls was not really my idea of a hot date.  But my 16-year-old daughter was game, and Mary wanted the company.  She had scored excellent seats, thanks to Anthony’s status as handicapped.  We were in the first balcony, with an unobstructed view of the iconic Boys. 

In contrast to my own ambivalence about “The Boys,” Anthony worshipped them.  He had all their records, had memorized their dance moves and had practiced with his karaoke mic until he could do a dead-on version of every one of their songs.  With the wider aisle allowed in the disabled section, he had plenty of room to sing, dip and swirl in unison with the music.  It was quite a show, on stage and near at hand.  I can’t tell you whether he was in tune, of course, since between the level of the music and wave after wave of female screaming, it would have been impossible to know.  I now understood why our parents had had such worn, distant looks when we watched The Beatles. 

Mary was standing next to a woman our age in a wheelchair.  I heard them yelling with each other about the average age of the concert goers.  The woman laughed and shouted that she just loved “The Boys” and didn’t care if she seemed an out-of-place aging groupie.  She was determined to see them in person.  Mary smiled, and pointed to Anthony, as he followed the songs with identical choreography.  Everyone’s obvious enchantment in being in the presence of such greatness was contagious.

Later in the show we moved from a rocking number to a slow, quieter tune.  (I hesitate to say “quiet” since the girl-crowd at no moment in the entire two and a half hour show stopped screaming, although some moments were a lower roar than others.  It baffled my understanding of human laryngeal limitations.)  When the music slowed, Anthony didn’t miss a beat, turned to the woman in the wheelchair and asked, “Do you want to dance?” 

Then, not waiting for a response, took her arms in formal foxtrot position and leaned over/into her, his cheek on top of her head, closing his eyes and swaying to the music.  What could she do?  Mary and I watched as Anthony held the woman, happily, respectfully, rocking slowly to the rhythm.  His face was pure bliss, and hers was a mixture of disbelief, joy, amusement and sadness.  Dancing!  Probably for the first time in many years.  Or ever?  We didn’t know.  Dancing. 

Tears streamed down her face as she absorbed the reality that she was dancing.  To her favorite group.  Live, no less.  She closed her eyes.  He leaned, smiling.  She leaned, crying.  Eyes closed.  Six minutes.

 Seemingly unaware of his gift, Anthony held her until the end of the song, stood back grinning widely and said, “Thank you for the dance.”  Grabbing his air microphone, he looked to the stage for the next song. Onward. 

His dance partner sat in stunned silence, wiping her eyes.  Mary put

a hand on her shoulder. We watched the Boys sing “Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely.”  Three older women crying in a sea of screams.  Anthony twirled on cue.

***

           I think about Anthony's kindnesses and compare them to my Catholic upbringing. If the nuns had realized that we all live in a yellow submarine, or that shopping for a bowling ball could be a supremely Christian act, I might have hung in a little better.  As it is, I’ll just stay here on Anthony’s team.  I never know where he might push me.