Other people use alarm clocks to get up in the morning. Every morning (lately) I wake up naturally and simply lay there, until some thought sequence flashes into my head and propels me out of bed. This morning it was Dr. Xin Jie Wu, Miss Lucille Thomas, and the TV Show Quantum Leap.

Dr. Wu joined Professor John Markley's group in the Chemistry department in the early '80's, shortly after Red China had opened its doors to allow such exchanges. He was an older man in terms of lab residents - thirty-five years old - and he had been willing to leave his wife and young son in China for five years for the opportunity to come to the U.S. to study. In my view, the amount of courage and committment this must have taken was extraordinary. Xin Jie had grown up in an era when our two countires were hostile, when Red China trained its remarkable ping-pong teams by telling them to think of the ping-pong balls as head of Americans.

When he first arrived, he could speak very little English. And it was really obvious that he had alot of difficulty even being able to 'read' our culture, let alone feel comfortable and at home in it. I supposed there was a barrier or a blind there, imposed by years of conditioning and isolation of our two countries.

As time went on, he began to slowly adapt to us. I remember at one of the lab's famous international carry-in dinners at John's home, he shook his head sort of sadly and told my husband Benny and me that there were just too many people in his country.

Then one day John gave me a (confidential) letter to type informing Xin Jie that he was kicked out of the group and should return to Red China! I was shocked. In the first place such a letter was so uncharacteristic of our group that I had never even experienced one before. I went to Milo, John's lead postdoc. He saw the dismayed look on my face.

"What is it?"

"I can't tell you."

"Can I guess?"

The hide and seek game continued for a bit.

"It's about this terrible letter I have to type for John," I said finally.

"Is it about Xin Jie?"

Bingo.

"Look," I said. "It's been extremely difficult for Xin Jie here - he barely knew the language and he didn't even understand our money when he first arrived - and it's obvious he doesn't know what to make of our culture - look at how he probably grew up looking at us, and how much courage did it take to come over here in the first place? I don't know much about Xin Jie's customs, but I'm afraid he might be required to commit hari-kari or something when he gets this letter."

"I'll talk to him," Milo said. "I'll take Chris with me."

Well, I never heard what transpired from there, but I do know that a few days later that John retracted the letter, and that Xin Jie remained with our research group and eventually ended up in Med Chem after John accepted an attractive offer at University of Wisconsin and relocated most of the research group there.

In fact when John and Xin Jie co-authored a paper for publication, John gave it to me to extensively edit the English. Which was only fair, I suppose, but which was also a challenge because Chemistry research papers aren't written in real English anyway. They are in passive voice and full of terms like Fourier Transfomr, dipoles, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy, and chemicals/proteins with long, scary names that researchers do incomprehensible things to. John and Xin Jie did credit me in the acknowledgement section! :)

Anyway, I don't know if Xin Jie was a good scientist or not - I am not qualified to judge that. But when Benny and I got married, he presented me with a delicate silk scarf. It was brown and green and white.

"For your marriage," he said.

I think Xin Jie was eventually able to get his wife and his son to join him in the U.S.

Looking back, I never thought I'd share that much in common with a man five years older than me who grew up in Red China - 'my enemy' so to speak.

But since then, I have also come into cultures and situations sometimes so alien, so strange, so frightening even, and certainly so different from where I'd been before - that I wonder that in some way could I be standing in Dr. Xin Jie Wu's shoes?

And I didn't have to travel to a foreign country to find myself in those situations. Or even outside the university. Which points out how prejudice and discriminatory or unfair practices (whether based on gender, race, religion, gender-bias, age, national origin, or whatever else people have blinders to) throw up barriers and walls to communication, interaction, understanding, and in the end, synergy and productivity.

But I'd like to think, that if I ever do find myself standing in Dr. Xin Jie Wu's shoes, that I will have a Milo, a Chris, a John, and yes, even a Jeanne Renzetti Winstead among the people I work with who will effectively go to bat for me.

Miss Lucille Thomas was my beloved high school teacher. She taught business courses and I don't believe I ever took a class from her because I was on an academic track. But she was also the high school year book sponsor - and she had high ambitions for the high school yearbook, and for some reason she picked me out of the woodwork to be the 1968 yearbook editor! Simply accosted me in the hallway one day and asked.

Actually she picked both me and Trena Ward, but told me she wanted me to be the editor-in-chief. She sent us to Ball State that summer for yearbook training to raise the professionalism and competiveness of our product. Yearbook was an after school activity in those days. The yearbook staff ate many a meal together at the Mustang Room in Veedersburg our senior year of high school - sometimes it was just Miss Thomas and me, and sometimes, Trena, or other staff, depending on what section of the yearbook we were working on at the time. Since Miss Thomas was from Kingman and I was from Wallace, she delivered me to my grandparents' door many a late night. Around mid year she brought in next year's editors as apprentices - juniors Kathleen Landis and Janene Kummer. The four of us had a lot of fun working together.

By the time our yearbook received its rating, I had left for college. Even though we'd made many improvements, the judges thought the photography was a little weak and gave us a lower rating than we'd hoped for. But Miss Thomas wasn't satisfied. She appealed to the judges. She sent the book back and got us a higher rating! When I came home from college the next summer, I helped Janene and Kathy and Miss Thomas finish the 1969 yearbook. I kept touch with Miss Lucille Thomas all through college and after. Whenever I came back home, my grandmother and I would go visit her in her big two story house with a wrap around veranda in Kingman. She lived with her parents all her life.

Now I must backtrack a little. I had an older first cousin (twice-removed) Ruth Cates who got me into the DAR when I was fourteen or fifteen. Fountain Country where I spent my high school years was a conservative area - and everyone thought Ruth was giving me a wonderful gift. She used to take me to the meetings, and I remember enjoying those gatherings with a group of such eloquent and intelligent ladies. I quit participating when I went away to college, but my grandparents kept paying my dues.When I relocated back in Indiana, this time in Lafayette, after graduating college and working three and a half years in inner-city Philadelphia, I finally started paying my own dues.

Miss Thomas who was very close to retirement, if not actually retired, was now very active in the D.A.R. She wanted me to attend the monthly meetings at Veedersburg. She was quite determined about it as only Miss Thomas could be. I did go a couple of times, but I didn't really have the time and interest to make that 100 mile round trip every month, especially after Benny and I got married. Besides, I had quit agreeing with the D.A.R philosophically for quite some time - possibly when I was doing youth work in the Philadelphia inner city and learned that they had blocked the great singer Marian Anderson from giving a concert at Constitution Hall in Washington D.C. because she was black. So when the D.A.R. raised its national dues, I decided to drop my membership.

A few years passed. Then one night I got a distraught long distance phone call. It was Miss Lucille Thomas. She told me she didn't know I'd quit paying the national dues and that she had been quietly paying my local dues for several years until the D.A.R. people finally told her. You see, I hadn't thought to notify the local organization when I dropped my membership. It's like I had done the ultimate thing to hurt or humiliate her. I bit back my initial defensive response at the unexpected tongue-lashing, and I apologized all over the place for being so thoughtless. She sounded a bit more mollified.

"Well, I guess if you don't care about your country's history ..."

Anyway, we didn't keep in touch as much after that. Since many of my own family members had passed on, I no longer had occasion to visit the Fountain County area - but I sent the usual Christmas cards and Mother's day cards, with a great degree of guilt. However Miss Thomas was getting older and no longer wrote as much - and I figured I had really screwed up. And yet - I couldn't be part of that life that she wanted me to be part of - and besides my life and family in Lafayette demanded my time and energies. But it was as if I had broken some reality that firmly existed in her mind at least - or I had broken her heart. Perhaps it was because while she had nieces and nephews, she did not have any children of her own and her students were her children. I remember her telling me that in the seventies, when teachers first started going on strike that she simply could not do that. She didn't feel it was right.

A couple more years passed. Then one Christmas I got a Christmas card from her in the nursing home at Crawfordsville. It simply said, "I'll always treasure those times we had. Oh, yes."

I intended to get to Crawfordsville to visit her, but perhaps I was a bit gun shy or perhaps time flew by too fast. The next Christmas when I sent a card, it came back with 'addressee deceased' stamped on the envelope.

But I'm so glad I made peace with her - or rather she with me. Today whenever I remember Miss Lucille Thomas, I always smile. By plucking me out of the woodwork and giving me the opportunity to be high school yearbook editor, she gave lil ol' me the most valuable gift. It has been foundational to my life. I remember when I first agreed to take on the year book, it seemed like such a huge undertaking to me that I couldn't see the end of it or even imagine how we'd ever get it all done. It was the first experience I had helping oversee a project of that magnitude. I didn't know it - and probably Miss Thomas didn't know it - at the time, but that experience laid the foundation for me as a career person and I climbed my career ladder on that foundation of confidence and experience. Before any college institution ever trained me, or any employer ever gave me opportunity, Miss Lucille Thomas gave me the year book - one of the best gifts a woman could ever give another woman. She was my mentor, and she probably never even realized the long-reaching influence she had on my life - and I never had opportunity to tell her - because it has taken me so many years, into my fifties, to realize the value of what she gave.

Which brings the saying to mind, "Sow in gardens that you never expect to harvest." That in a nutshell was Lucille - a dedicated and loving teacher and friend. I'll always remember her. I hope to honor her memory by following her example.

Quantum Leap is the name of a television show I used to watch. The premise was about some experiment gone awry - or "ca-ca" - as the intro went, and this quantum physicist named Sam was sort of trapped in perpetual time travel - only Sam leapt from body to body throughout history, actually becoming that individual. Sam could leap into a body at the most inconvenient moments - like ... when the person was getting beat up ... or giving a concert on stage ... or being kissed, or ... you name it. Sometimes the "person" wasn't even human. That was always part of the fun - and the next week's preview. Sam would try to get his bearings and then he'd say, "Huho, boy." Of course there was always some higher reason or purpose for wherever Sam ended up, and when that reason or plan was fulfilled - he'd leap again, "hoping that his next leap would be the journey home," as the intro went. Sam had a friend and colleague named Al who kept in touch by hologram or holograph. Al, along with Ziggy (the experiment's handheld quantum computer - yes the series was way ahead of its time), would help Sam figure out why he was there. I remember many a show with both Al and Sam puzzling over why Sam hadn't leaped yet - because they thought they had figured out the purpose and accomplished it.

And that's what I think sometimes when I feel trapped in a life situation. Lord, why haven't I leaped yet? What more is there for me to do here? Or to learn?

How about you? :)