Making the best lemonade

To make really good lemonade, you first gotta have some sour lemons.

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Travis was an inmate whom I was once honored to teach at the Bristol Jail. He had no real family (other than the gang he hung with when on the streets). No one really cared if he lived or died.

However I grew to love and respect Travis. Very much. Even after he earned his GED (high school equivalency) degree at the jail, I still called Travis out of his cell a couple of nights each week - to help me help my other student/inmates with math. Travis was a natural whiz at math.

When he was just a little baby, Travis had been stuffed into an oven by his mother while she was on a bad drug trip.

Indeed, Travis was dealt more than a few lemons in life - more than any one person should ever have to deal with.

Travis sometimes joked that his mother must have thought he was a ham. No, he didn’t always joke about it. In fact, he very well may have been the angriest person I think I have ever met. His body was entirely covered in tattoos, to cover the scars he still bore from the burned flesh of infancy.

Travis told me that he had somehow grown numb to the constant pain over time.

His was a fate deserved by no little baby. Ever.

Yet, as we shall see … Travis took his pain and turned it into something so beautiful that I lack the words to fully describe it.

But I will try.

For most of his life, Travis had fought his pain by constantly starting fights. He apparently paid no attention to physical pain. Ever. The other inmates told me he could take any punch without a flinch.

When Travis eventually went on to prison, we promised to write each other regularly - and we did. I could tell by each successive letter I received from Travis that he was experiencing some type of inner spiritual epiphany.

One miraculous day I received the following words from him. “Mr. T., I think I may have finally found my calling. They have a name for me here in prison now. Guess what it is, Mr. T? Peacemaker. How about that, my man? Whenever a fight breaks out, whether it be inmate on inmate, or inmate on guard, I run toward it and leap into the middle to break it up. Instead of starting fights now, I help end them. I have lots more scars on me now than when you last saw me. I’ve broke more bones and lost more teeth, too. Yet it makes me feel good to help others stop their pain.”

Of course, Travis didn’t live a long life. A very kind guard at the federal prison where Travis died eventually wrote me of his ultimate fate. He died jumping in to stop a very violent fight that broke out between two rival gangs. The Crips were a Black gang. The Aryans were all White. The Peacemaker leaped between them.