I shall always remember that smile. What world did it come from?
— Elie Wiesel, Night
More than anything else, I should like my life to have been defined by goodness. I consider goodness more valuable than pleasure, success, wealth or even a long life. And I am not thinking about saintly goodness like Mother Teresa’s or heroic goodness such as Private First Class Milton Olive’s throwing himself on a hand grenade to save his comrades from certain death in the Phu Cuong jungle. Though I immensely admire goodness of this magnitude, I have always known it to lie far beyond my willpower. No, I am thinking about a much less daunting kind of goodness, a goodness I have never seen defined but which every now and then I witness in a certain few others — and each time I am awed.
* * *
It has been 75 years since I last saw Luigi Albertini. He worked with my father at Manz printing plant not three blocks from our house. He and my father and two others made up a foursome for golf many weekends during the postwar years from 1946 to 1948. Before I knew their names, I knew their shapes: tall men who towered over me with broad shoulders, large heads and deep voices, their huge bodies moving about our small living room in baggy pants, loose shirts, floppy hats, talking, laughing, kidding. They leaned over me like gods. And then I watched them through the parted curtains of our living room window, driving off in the early morning light in our olive drab ’38 Pontiac with front fenders shaped like enormous question marks.
On one Saturday each of those summers, this foursome would bring their families with them to a course called Villa Olivia. It was a long drive to a far western suburb of Chicago. On one of those trips, a seemingly small thing happened that still lives a vivid life inside me. Traffic had slowed, and we were beside a hedge of lilac bushes. Luigi suddenly called out to my father to stop the car, jumped out, tore off a clump of lilacs, got back in the car, and with a face beaming like a Halloween pumpkin, put those lilacs into my mother’s hands. From the back seat of the car, my 7-year-old eyes were astonished to see how this small, spontaneous act rose into joy in my mother’s face.
For 75 years I have not passed a lilac bush without remembering that moment — because I never saw my mother happier the rest of her life. Such is the immense charm of a small act of goodness. Framed just right, all by itself, it can build a tabernacle in the heart — a tabernacle not subject to the deterioration of time. Though I am now 84 and Luigi is long gone from this earth, his face still beams behind my eyes as fresh as it did that morning in 1947 when he put a clump of lilacs into my mother’s hands.
* * *
For all the years I taught at Truman College, I never did know where Tom Mikula’s office was or if he even had an office. He was merely a tutor in biology and the social sciences — he had a master’s degree in both disciplines — and I would see him in the halls from time to time. Sometimes he would pay me a visit in my office. His visits were never long, 15 minutes or less, and every time he left, I was keenly aware of wishing he was still sitting with me.
Why did I wish that? What did he bring to those meetings in my office or in the hallways? It’s now more than 20 years since the last of those meetings, and I cannot tell you a single thing we talked about, except sometimes golf — he was a passionate student of the game and its history — but what I do remember with amazing clarity is the look of quiet joy yoked to wit and knowledge and humility in his face every time we spoke. Goodness, humility, kindness, meekness radiated from his being all the years I knew him. These little visits that he also paid to many other faculty members led me to realize that this unsung and uncelebrated tutor was in the quietest way possible the very soul of our school. At some level I believe everyone in the school knew this. Tom was a veritable Mr. Chips.
In the two decades since I retired, I only saw Tom once — at his own retirement party. But I have thought of him nearly every week, so much so that in July 2023, I went searching for his decades-old phone number. During our hourlong conversation, I offered to treat him to a round of golf on any course he liked. That’s when he told me his health was precarious. In 2001 he discovered he was a Type 2 diabetic and had to prick his finger twice a day to test his blood sugar and could no longer drink alcohol. He was 73 and facing the possibility of two very serious surgeries, one on his kidneys and one on his heart. Despite such an ominous near-future, I remember feeling just as I had during our visits at the college: that at the other end of the line was a humble man whose only goal in life was to bring joy and goodness. Even his voice on the phone had a smile in it. Though he could no longer golf, he ended our talk with a rave about Vokey Titleist Wedges. They were like “surgical instruments,” he said.
Four months later, in November, I received an email from the school informing me Tom had died. After attending his wake, I wrote to mutual friends that “Tom seemed to have made up his mind to live pretty much alone, and I believe he was doing that seemingly lonely thing better than anybody else I ever knew. But the thing I most want to say about Tom is that he was one of the ‘goodest’ human beings I ever knew. Wherever he went, joy sprang into the hearts of others, and he made that happen without even trying. Goodness and joy came into being simply because that’s what Tom was made of. Tom was the heart and soul of Truman College. I shall deeply miss him. A light of goodness has gone out of this world.”
* * *
I met Violetta Diaz when she was my student in 1980. She was 30 then and we became friends after the course was over. During these last 45 years I have been struck over and over by two qualities in her character. The first was an utterly open generosity to her mother and siblings living in Peru. Over the years she sent them more than $100,000 with no expectation of repayment.
The second quality was an ability to endure with kindness the many ill deeds done to her by family: a husband who refused to give her the child she longed for and older sisters who cheated her out of the home she had bought for her mother in Peru after their mother died. Never once did she express anger at those who hurt her — only love.
And then over dinner recently I noticed a third quality. She is now 75 and lives with multiple cancers and sciatic pain that makes it impossible for her to sit in comfort or to get more than five hours’ sleep at night. Despite such hellish pain, she said, slowly and through a quiet smile of humility, that these were the cards she was dealt, and she would play them without burdening others.
But I did not put all these qualities together until a few hours after she left my house following that dinner. Only then did I realize how wrapped in a quiet and humble smile this woman’s goodness had been for all the 45 years I had known her.
* * *
I was with Craig only once in my life, only for 20 minutes, and it was three years ago. It was a Saturday afternoon. I had left my son’s summer home on Indian Lake in southern Michigan and was driving north on U.S. 131. A heavy rain began. Then, five miles south of Big Rapids, my left rear tire blew out.
The sky was low and dark, the wind blowing stiffly, the rain coming down hard, and I knew what I had to do: Open the trunk packed to the lid with three weeks of things for my vacation, take everything out and set it beside the car to get soaked in the rain. Then I had to remove the spare tire and jack. I had not changed a tire in more than a decade and did not know where the jack had to go to lift this car. I would have to find that place in the rain.
I found it, and just as I was starting to lift the car from the ground, a truck pulled up behind it. A burly man got out and began walking my way. He was not rushing through the rain; he was walking deliberately toward me as if there were no rain. Then I noticed the thing I have not been able to forget. Though the rain was pouring down on him, he had a large smile on his face. Not a salesman’s smile or even a smile that tried to reassure me, but the smile I want to see in every face I look into and that I would like to be on my own face, but which I know very seldom is.
He said his name was Craig and he worked for the Michigan Department of Transportation, and he said he would help me. He powered the jack up the rest of the way, then used his strength and a baby sledge to loosen the rusted-on bolts, and he finished the job in a matter of minutes.
And then we both stood there ignoring the rain and wind and looking into each other’s faces. We both knew something quietly powerful was happening in those few seconds of silence.
I broke the silence by giving my name. And then I thanked him and asked a few questions about his life. He was near retirement, and though he liked his work, he was going to retire so he could be full time with his wife, who had cancer. I gave him the longest look of silence, my eyes on his the whole time, before I told him that I had spent 11 years of my retirement with my wife before she died of Alzheimer’s.
Craig said he knew he would soon lose his wife, and I knew it, too, and I knew what he would go through before he lost her and after he lost her. In that long look of silence we both knew each other better than many people do after decades of relationship. And then we said goodbye, and he walked through the rain to his truck and was gone. I have thought of that burly, beautiful man with a big, caring smile a hundred times since then. I will be thinking of him the rest of my life.
* * *
For seven years my only awareness of Paul Pryma was of a man sitting at the end of the coaches’ bench for my son Tom’s Loyola Academy basketball team. But it wasn’t his sitting there that made me notice him; it was the way he rose from that bench and put himself in front of players as they came off the floor and a replacement went in. He alone among the coaches did not give players a mere knuckle bump and pat on the back. He put himself directly in front of their faces and told them with words and a huge smile how well they were doing. He was present, deliberate and intentional with each player. Time and again I found myself thinking: This isn’t something this man is doing; it’s something he is. And I could see it was coming from a place of deep goodness. In 40 years of going to basketball, volleyball and football games, I had never witnessed another coach radiate such joy at players’ performances.
This past autumn I realized I didn’t want merely to witness such goodness from the stands; I wanted to meet it in person, one on one, just him and me. So I took a step that made me very nervous. I called my son (who is the head coach of this team and therefore Paul’s boss) and asked for Paul’s phone number.
A week later he came over and we sat on recliner chairs in my sunroom facing each other only four feet apart, and I began asking him about his life. We talked nonstop for over five hours.
It was so good that over the next four weeks we talked on the phone five times, once for nearly two hours. At the end of those four weeks he came over for dinner, and we talked for another four hours. Nine days later he came to dinner again, and this time we broke all records: six hours and 50 minutes of nonstop conversation, both of us as fully engaged as it’s possible to be. I make a point of reporting the times — nearly 20 hours altogether — because it’s a measure of how rich and extended is the goodness of Paul’s presence.
During those conversations we ranged over the whole blazing shebang of our lives. Space does not permit me to pour that whole shebang onto this page, only to look at how Paul came to radiate such goodness.
Not surprisingly, things began with his father, 48 years old when Paul was born, so that by the time Paul and he could talk about matters of substance, his father was in his 60s and a man of quiet wisdom and humility. “He always placed himself on the periphery and never let light shine upon him. He was a meek man in the beatitudes sense of that term. And he was a kind man.” All of this quietly soaked into the boy and the young man Paul was becoming.
As a freshman at St. Patrick High School on the northwest side of Chicago, Paul encountered a brilliant Christian Brother with Einstein-like hair, an unlit pipe in his mouth, and a voice and manner like Jack Nicholson’s. One day this Brother Jude was watching as the boys flowed into his religion class after nearly all of them had failed a geometry exam in the previous period. “Geometry sucks!” Brother Jude heard them grousing. “I hate St. Pat’s. This place is awful. It sucks!” Once everyone was seated, Brother Jude told them — and here Paul gives a perfect imitation of Jack Nicholson — “You know, guys, if geometry sucks, you suck. If the school you go to sucks, you suck.”
“His whole point,” Paul saw, “was that if life sucks, you suck because you are the architect of your own fate.” That thought marinated inside Paul for the rest of his high school years.
During those years Paul was a very good baseball player with a rocket arm. But when graduation came he chose not to go to college; instead, he went to work loading trucks for United Parcel Service. He loved the job and the money and thought he might do it for the rest of his life. But one day that summer of 1976 Paul got a call from his baseball coach, Rudy Presslak, a mountain of a man at 6-foot-7, 300 pounds, who Paul says was as kindly as he was large. Presslak used to take his players out for pizza and even bought Paul a bid to the prom because Paul couldn’t afford it. One day Presslak asked if he could take Paul to breakfast. After breakfast he asked if Paul would mind if they stopped at Northeastern Illinois University so he could “see a buddy for a few minutes.”
“Once there, we walked into a room with three adults sitting there,” Paul said. “The baseball coach was one of them. ‘Is this the guy, Rudy?’ the coach asked. The admissions officer was also there with all the forms necessary to register Paul for the fall semester.” Perhaps then but certainly in the years to come, Paul realized kindly forces were looking out for him, and in time he realized he wanted to do that with the rest of his life: pass along those kindly forces to others.
He has done so in a more extraordinary way than I have let on so far. Paul wasn’t always an assistant coach. In fact, at 26 he became the head coach of St. Ignatius College Prep’s basketball team and took the team from horrible to quite good before being recruited to become the head coach of the Evanston Township High School team.
“My first day on the job I walked into the gym and all I heard were players screaming curses and insults at each other. ‘STOP!’ I roared at them. I’m the new head coach here, and that is the last time you will ever use a foul word or blame anyone else in this room. Am I clear?” He never heard such words or blame again.
But he did something even more unusual. “I never once used the word win with my players or assistant coaches. It was a word foreign to my vocabulary. We weren’t there to win; we were there to play the best game we could possibly play. The scoreboard was a distraction. By the way,” he said to me, “what do you win when you win?”
What do you win when you win? Paul’s words have hung in my head ever since he uttered them that day in my sunroom. Four years after he took the Evanston job, the team went to the state tournament and took fourth place. Fourth place out of more than 200 high schools at that level in the state of Illinois. But what they really won, Paul believes, was the knowledge that they could be excellent at whatever they set their minds to for the rest of their lives.
Somewhere in all our hours together I asked Paul if he didn’t get angry with people who did him wrong. “Oh, yes,” he said. “But what’s the upside to treating them badly in return?”
* * *
Twenty-five years ago a knock came on my office door and a woman with a gentle voice stood there asking if I was Professor Livatino. She wanted to know if she could register for my creative writing course. During the next 15 minutes I learned she was herself a professor of English at Moody Bible Institute and had a doctorate from the University of Illinois Chicago. Over the next four years she took my course three more times, the last time bringing with her half a dozen Moody colleagues. So I thought I knew Rosie de Rosset.
After I retired in 2004, we began having dinners together three or four times a year. A few years into those dinners I learned something Rosie never mentioned in the stories she wrote for me, nor in any of our conversations up to that time: that she had been tithing to her church for more than half a century. I didn’t know a single other person who gave so generously and so regularly without a single thought of all the hundreds of thousands of dollars she was giving away — on a teacher’s salary.
For two decades I was more than impressed; I was humbled. By her generosity, to be sure, but also by the near-secretness of her generosity. And then one evening two years ago I learned one more thing: that for many years she had also been sending a thousand dollars each month to a former employee of her family who had returned to Peru but could find no work. Though she hadn’t seen this woman in many years, they spoke on the phone each month. We were sitting in a restaurant when she told me this, and I remember feeling that her goodness had turned the air around us into pure oxygen, and then that oxygen had been sucked out of the room. What world did such repeated, deeply sacrificing but almost secretive goodness come from? It was a world I did not know, and I sat astounded and humbled the rest of the evening in that restaurant. I am still astounded and humbled as I write these words years later.
* * *
I remember with amazing clarity the first time I became conscious of Jed Curtis. It was about 15 years ago, and we were in a bar where my son Tom had organized a cornhole contest with two-man teams. Somehow Jed, a good friend of my sons, had the ill luck of drawing me as a partner. Instead of bemoaning the fact, he treated me like a dear friend and made gentle suggestions for how I might improve my throwing the beanbags with the back of my hand up instead of my palm, and how the throw would be more consistent if I kept my arm straight and moved as few body parts as possible. His suggestions were excellent — but what I valued much more were his gentle spirit and the kindness in his face as he spoke to me. These sound like very small things, but they linger inside me 15 years later.
As does a certain Fourth of July several years ago when I joined my sons and their friends for a morning of games in the neighborhood park. The moment I came among them, Jed was saying to my sons, “Let’s get your Dad a chair.” Small perhaps, but unforgettable.
At the end of last summer I joined my sons Tom and Chris and their partners as they competed in the quarterfinals of an all-summer golf tournament. Chris’s partner was Jed. The course had kindly let me borrow a golf cart to ride along and shoot photos. When the ranger came alongside us to tell me the course needed me to return the golf cart, Jed immediately volunteered to walk the rest of the round while I rode in his cart. I declined, but his gesture still lives in me.
These moments and others had been gathering inside me a long time when I decided to write about how goodness is sometimes a grace that lingers the rest of our lives. That’s when I knew I wanted Jed to be the last person to speak in this essay — which is how he came to be sitting in my sunroom several mornings this past autumn.
The first thing Jed told me is that when he remembers things close to his heart and talks about them, he gets moved to tears. He told me not to worry, the tears are good. And then he began telling me about his early years with family and about being a Christian. “As a Christian at a young age I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude. We can do good, but only through Christ,” he said, with tears in his eyes.
Such words and tears need context. None of my sons or their other friends speak in such a way. Christ never comes up in conversation. Nor do tears. Jed is that very rare being that late in 18th-century England became known as “a man of feeling.” But he has also been a man of action all his life. During his Evanston Township High School days with my sons he was quarterback of the varsity football team, and for 12 years he was an assistant coach of that football team. He is also a superb golfer who for 16 years has been the head coach of the ETHS golf team that he guided in 2024 and again in 2025 to second place in Illinois. Until his retirement from teaching in May 2024, he taught math at ETHS for more than three decades.
Each time he speaks of his father — who is about my age — he is moved to tears and tells me that he is the best father in the world. He speaks just as warmly of his mother. So it’s clear that his Christian faith and his loving family are the deepest sources of Jed’s caring for others.
But he was also a boy with an immense curiosity. “I distinctly remember being fascinated by adults. I wanted to know why they behaved as they did. I found myself observing adults and asking them, ‘What do you do?’”
The person he was most curious about — and fascinated by — was a Dominican priest, Father Michael Burke, a close childhood friend of his mother, a Presbyterian. “He had something in his life I wanted in my life,” Jed said. “His spirit radiated from him. I wanted that spirit even when I was 8 years old.”
When he and his brothers each turned 14, their parents told them, “You don’t have to continue going to church. It’s your time to decide.”
“But I wanted to go to church,” Jed tells me. “It was the least I could do. I had been given so much.”
A year or two later, when he was a freshman or sophomore in high school, he experienced a mystical moment. “We lived next door to Walker School. It was a clear night, and I was walking across the field beside the school. The sky was full of stars . . . and I heard God saying to me, ‘You are mine,’ and a peace washed over me. ‘In this life there’s going to be trouble, but I am going to be with you.’”
Jed had several mystical experiences, the last of which happened about eight years ago. “At about 11 one autumn night I was lying in bed when I had an ‘other side’ experience. I don’t have the words to tell you. I just don’t have the words. I will never be able to find the words. What I experienced doesn’t fit the five senses we have. But it was very clear. God was there, and all the souls there were in praise of him. There was utter contentment from every soul there — joy, peace, praise of God. It was musical, lyrical. I felt like I was removed from this world, then brought back.”
Long before the end of our time together in my sunroom, it was clear to me that Jed’s deep, abiding goodness springs from his loving family, his long and deep connection to Father Mike and his overwhelming experiences of God. Inside Jed it is all one thing: love and family and God and goodness.
I said Jed Curtis was what in the 18th century became known as a man of feeling. In one definition, such a man is “highly sensitive and empathic, deeply affected by the emotions and situations of others.” According to the 18th-century Scottish minister Hugh Blair, such a man “lives in a different sort of world from what the selfish man inhabits. He possesses a new sense, which enables him to behold objects which the selfish man cannot see.”
He beholds objects which the selfish man cannot see. I believe that is why Jed saw me as a friend when we were playing bags, why he wanted to get me a chair at the Fourth of July gathering, why he wanted to give up his cart at the golf outing. He wasn’t being merely courteous. He was seeing in a way the selfish man cannot see.
* * *
All these people were seeing in a way the selfish man cannot see.
When I started writing, I was setting down these moments only for myself. I just wanted to live in them again. But after a while, I realized they could reach beyond me to anyone who read them. In that moment I realized how timeless and far-reaching is the grace of goodness.
The epigraph from Elie Wiesel comes to mind: “I shall always remember that smile. What world did it come from?” Wiesel was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp when he saw that smile on the face of his father, a fellow prisoner, and his question — What world did it come from? — is worth a lifetime of pondering. Because Wiesel shared it with me, I am still pondering that smile 80 years after he witnessed it. What world did it come from? I should very much like to live in it.
I expect we should all like to live in it. And that is why I have spent so much time setting down my vignettes: so these moments might live again inside me and inside my readers; so that readers might be inspired to find their own memories; so these moments would be with us in the same way people carry prayer beads in their pockets and finger them throughout their days.
I would like my vignettes to move us all toward the goodness I so deeply value but fail to achieve most of the time. Yes, I will continue to fail at such goodness, but these stories will guide me where I want to go. And when I fail, I will fail in the light of goodness, not in mere darkness.
Mel Livatino lives in Evanston, Illinois. A regular contributor to this magazine, he has published in numerous literary journals. Since 2004, 13 of his pieces have been named notable essays of the year by the series Best American Essays, and he has recorded more than 75 of them for Recorded Recreational Reading for the Blind in Sun City, Arizona.