Part 3 — Who Marias Mother Was
I read the letter at my kitchen table on Saturday morning with my reading glasses on and a cup of coffee going cold. It was written in a young womans neat, steady print on lined notebook paper, and it began, Dear Coach Walt, you do not know me, but you know my mother.
Maria wrote that her mothers name was Angela Reyes, class of 1998. She was the fifth name on my list, a quiet girl who wrestled in the girls exhibition bracket when the school did not yet have a girls team, and who worked nights at a grocery store to help her family.
I remembered Angela. She had a way of looking at the mat as though she meant to read it. In 1998 she came to my office one afternoon with her application fees unpaid, and I wrote the check out of my own pocket without telling anyone. She became the second girl on that list.
Maria wrote that her mother is now a charge nurse at Nebraska Medicine. She had kept a copy of the scholarship letter in her jewelry box for twenty six years. Every time Maria was discouraged, her mother took it out and read it to her.
Then Maria wrote the line that made me put the letter down. She said, My mother told me that a man gave her a chance and never asked for anything. She said that is what a scholarship should be. I wanted you to know that when I won it this year, I did not feel like a charity. I felt like family.
I never kept a ledger of favors, but twenty six years later it turned out that every kindness had been quietly keeping its own.
I called Brent Halvorsen on Monday. He was sitting in his office at the dealership, and I could hear the embarrassment in his voice. He said, Coach, I owe you an apology and a thank you in the same breath. I said he owed me neither, and that I would like to buy him lunch.
At lunch, an idea came out of him that I had never considered. He wanted to turn the scholarship into a permanent fund, so it would last long after the two of us were gone. He would match every dollar I had ever given, and every former recipient would be invited to contribute.
We started calling people that week, thirty one names from my envelope. Angela Reyes was the first to say yes. She gave two hundred dollars and a nurses uniform pin for the trophy case. Another recipient, now a high school principal in Lincoln, gave five hundred.
By the spring banquet, the fund had passed a hundred and ten thousand dollars. The school board voted to call it the First Name Fund, because every one of us began as somebody else first. The scholarship carries both our names, Walt and Brent, in alphabetical order.
Maria wrestles at the state meet this winter. She told me she was nervous, and I told her what I used to tell every nervous kid in a singlet. I said, Do not look at the other girl. Look at the mat, and breathe.
My wife and I still drive the same Buick, now twenty years old. Brent offered to put me in a new one. I thanked him and said I would rather keep the old one, since it carries a lot of good memories, and he laughed and shook my hand.