        Our simplest actions can have a profound (and often unknown)
     effect on those around us. This article, related here courtesy of
      the Associated Press, is based on a story which has circled the
      world countless times via the Internet and has been published in
                              Readers Digest.
      I, too, read this story on the Internet long ago and wondered if
                               it were true.
                                  It is.

      If you're not familiar with the story (and even if you are), do
                                 read on.

                 Learn. Reflect. It will touch your heart.

      NOTE: The following text is 1999, Associated Press, and is not
                    to be attributed to me in any way.

                           Enjoy! - Bob Startzel

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                   Nun's touching tale spread via e-mail

          MORRIS, Minn. (AP) - With a stroke on a keyboard, the
          electronic letter snaked through cyberspace, bouncing
          from one corner of the globe to another before reaching
          Sandy Kudenov's computer.

          It was a chain e-mail promising good fortune to
          recipients who passed it on - and Mrs. Kudenov almost
          dismissed it as junk mail.

          But it had come from a friend who encouraged her to
          read this tale about a nun, a soldier and a piece of
          paper.

          So she did, and when finished she thought: Everybody
          should read this.

          Hitting the send button in her Livermore, Calif., home
          she forwarded it along and became one more link in the
          Internet chain of thousands - perhaps millions -
          sharing this recounting of a transforming act of
          kindness.

          Yet even as she sent it she wondered: Is the story
          true?

          The same question has been asked again and again in
          letters reaching this Minnesota farming town of 5,500
          from around the United States and far away. From
          Bombay, India. From the USS Kitty Hawk in the Pacific.

          Is it true?

          The reply from Sister Helen Mrosla, the local
          Franciscan nun and teacher at the center of the
          chain-letter story: Yes, it is.

          "After teaching for 35 years ... I know that I'll never
          have another Mark Eklund in any of my classes," begins
          Sister Mrosla's story, words she wrote a decade ago
          that someone unknown had since put on the Internet.

          Mark was the kind of student teachers never forget - a
          precocious, polite kid who was always drawing attention
          without really trying.

          Mark met Sister Mrosla (pronounced Mer-oh-sluh) in 1959
          in her third-grade classroom at St. Mary's School.

          He tested her with his shenanigans. Once she sent him
          to the cloakroom for misbehaving and he climbed out the
          window of the two-story school, up the fire escape and
          onto the roof.

          Then there was the chatter.

          "Mark talked incessantly," she wrote. "I had to remind
          him again and again of the classroom rule that talking
          without permission was not acceptable. What impressed
          me so much was his sincere response every time I had to
          correct him for misbehaving: 'Thank you for correcting
          me, Sister.'

          "One day my patience was growing quite thin when Mark
          talked once too often, and that was when I made the
          mistake most novice teachers make. ... I looked at Mark
          and said, 'Mark, if you say one more word, I am going
          to tape your mouth shut.' It wasn't 10 seconds later
          when Chuck (Lesmeister, a classmate) blurted out, 'Mark
          is talking again."'

          She was forced to follow through on her threat.

          "The only way I could make it stick was by putting the
          tape on so that it looked as if Mark had a big X over
          his mouth. ... I picked up the reading book and glanced
          at Mark to see how he was doing. At that moment he
          winked at me. That did it. I melted and started
          laughing. The entire class cheered as I walked back to
          Mark's desk, removed the tape and shrugged my
          shoulders."

          No matter the punishment, at the end of every day Mark
          stopped at the teacher's desk. "Good night, Sister.
          Thank you for teaching me," he would say.

          Sister Mrosla moved to junior high and she and Mark met
          again, in eighth grade math class. "The same ol' Mark,"
          she recalls fondly.

          One Friday after a tough week of algebra, she sensed
          her students were struggling and feeling dejected.

          Put the math books away, she told them, and pull out a
          sheet of paper. On every other line, she said, write
          the name of each student in class and next to the name
          write a kind word - a sincere compliment.

          That weekend she compiled the lists for each student on
          yellow legal-size paper, adding her own compliment at
          the end.

          She handed the papers back during the next class.

          On Mark's paper, among other simple compliments,
          somebody had written, "A great friend." His best
          friend, Chuck Lesmeister, was "fun to be around." On
          Judy Holmes Swanson's list, someone noted she "smiles
          all the time."

          "No one ever said anything about the exercise after
          that class period," Sister Mrosla wrote in the letter
          on the Internet. "I never knew if they discussed it
          with one another after class or if they mentioned it to
          their parents. It didn't matter. The exercise
          accomplished what I hoped it would - the students were
          happy with themselves and one another again."

          Years passed. The schoolkids grew up. Life went on.
          Returning from a vacation in August 1971, Sister Mrosla
          was met by her parents at the Minneapolis-St. Paul
          airport. They were barely onto the highway when her
          father cleared his throat, "as he usually did before
          saying something important," she wrote.

          "Mark was killed in Vietnam," he told her. "The funeral
          is tomorrow."

          He had died in his sleep of a pulmonary and cerebral
          edema. He was 20.

          Four months earlier, Mark had been sent to Vietnam,
          assigned to the 585th Transportation Company in Phu
          Bai, delivering supplies to firebases.

          His letters to family painted a safe picture,
          describing his work as a clerk at a truck parts depot
          far from the shooting. But to friends, including Sister
          Mrosla, he revealed fears of dying and frustration over
          what he perceived as a fruitless war effort. He told
          his former teacher about lying in his bunk listening to
          a firefight one night.

          "He was scared to death from the shooting," Sister
          Mrosla said. "He'd have nightmares about it. I remember
          telling him I was praying for him." She filled her
          letters with stories about her students and how much
          they were like his class.

          Mourners at Mark's funeral lined the block around the
          red-brick Assumption Church, second only to the town's
          grain elevator in height. They filed up the stairs,
          into the sanctuary and past the open black casket.
          Sister Mrosla was the last in line.

          "The only thing I could think of or wanted to say at
          that moment was, 'Mark, I would give all of the masking
          tape in the world if only you would talk to me,"' she
          wrote.

          Lesmeister helped bear the casket, draped in a flag, to
          a hearse for the five-block ride to the cemetery, where
          a soldier played "Taps." As it was lowered into the
          ground, a soldier approached Sister Mrosla.

          "Are you Mark's math teacher?" he asked. "He talked
          about you. You may want to talk to his parents about
          his personal effects."

          The Eklunds were waiting for the nun when she arrived
          at a reception at the Lesmeister family farmhouse.
          Standing in the sunny kitchen, James Eklund pulled out
          a wallet.

          "We want to show you something. They found this on Mark
          when he was killed. We thought you might recognize it,"
          he said, gently taking out a worn piece of paper that
          had been refolded many times and taped together.

          "I knew without looking at the writing," Sister Mrosla
          wrote, "that the papers were the ones I had listed all
          of the good things each of his classmates had said
          about Mark."

          A few of Mark's school friends who were gathered around
          also recognized the paper, and one by one they told her
          they still had theirs.

          Lesmeister preserved his in his wedding album. Marilyn
          Lohr kept hers in her diary. And like Mark, Jim Halbe
          had his with him in his wallet.

          "That's when I finally sat down and cried ...," Sister
          Mrosla's e-mailed letter continued. "He gave so much to
          all of us."

          Nearly a decade ago, Sister Mrosla wrote about Mark and
          the list of compliments for Proteus magazine, which had
          published a notice seeking stories about education. It
          was reprinted by Reader's Digest.

          But it wasn't until her words were put on the Internet
          that they gained a global readership. Sister Mrosla is
          happy people are reading the story, but unhappy it has
          become a chain letter promising good luck to recipients
          who pass it on.

          "It cheapens it somehow," she said, sipping hot
          chocolate during an interview on a bitterly cold
          Minnesota day.

          At 63, she still teaches. Now, it's college students
          who will one day be teachers themselves. She tells them
          about the compliment list and the reassurance it seemed
          to give to the once-impish pupil she'll never forget.

          As the chain letter circulates, letters and telephone
          calls continue to come in from folks wanting to know
          more. A pastor gave a sermon using the story as a
          lesson about kindness.

          And three strangers have sent the nun rubbings of
          Mark's name from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in
          Washington D.C.

          "... As thousands and thousands visit the Vietnam
          memorial each year, I hope they will know that Mark
          Eklund is not just another name on the wall," she wrote
          in the Internet letter.

          And she concluded: "Good night, Mark. Thank you for
          letting me teach you."

                          1999, Associated Press

     -----------------------------------------------------------------

     CLOSING NOTE: If you visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in
     Washington, DC, you will find Mark Eklund's name on Panel 03W,
     Line 124. - Bob Startzel

                                  [Image]

http://homepages.go.com/~qiklinx/thelist.htm