Am I helping you, or vice versa?

I have had the pleasure of getting to know and become friends with a wonderful woman named Cobra over the past 3 years. Cobra and I met through the Tarrant Literacy Program when I was assigned to be her tutor. I'd only had one student before her, and the guy ended up quitting after a couple of months because he was too busy trying to earn a living to really give reading the time he wanted to. I didn't know what to expect when the director of the program told me my new student was named Cobra. It's not like you meet a Cobra very often in life.

Little did I know that a very unique person was about to come into my life.

Cobra was 59 years old when we started working together. She had already been through at least a couple of tutors, and had decided this was her last try. We liked each other immediately. She told me right up front that she had dyslexia. I read up on it, and learned that I had to lean heavy on phonics in order to help her really learn.

She was this lively, creative, intelligent and charismatic person. NOT what I had expected at all. We met at the library near her house most Saturday mornings for an hour and a half. We probably spent an hour on the lessons, and 30 minutes talking about our lives. She told me she felt really comfortable around me, and I told her I was having so much fun teaching her. Halfway through the first book (there are four books total), she asked if I would mind coming to her house instead of the library, because sometimes we had trouble concentrating because of other people milling about. Teachers are really never supposed to go to their student's home, but something told me that it was ok to bend that rule a little. So that's where we've been meeting through our current book, the third in the series. (We move slow, but that's ok with us).

Cobra is always making or doing things for other people. She has the most generous spirit of anyone I know. I never leave her house empty-handed. At first I thought she sort of considered it "paying" me for my time every Saturday morning. Some homemade fig jam from the figs trees in her yard, some wine she and her husband had tried and liked, homemade fudge, jewelry she saw somewhere and thought of me. But then I realized that she does these little things for everyone in her life. She made flower arrangements for all the girls that work at the bank, after finding out what their favorite colors were. The mailman, the women in her swim aerobics class, her neighbors, her co-workers - every person in her life is significant enough to her to deserve a hand-made gift, a trinket, or a cutting from her garden. She made all of the centerpieces for our out-of town wedding reception, set up several tables, and did a million other wonderful things for me throughout the whole ordeal.

She recently went home to Michigan to bring her four grown children together and explain to them about her dyslexia and inability to read until recently. She never told them about it while they were growing up, partly because of pride, and partly because she was afraid they might use it as an exuse for their own setbacks while they were growing up. She didn't know about the dyslexia until recently, and realizes now that some of her kids probably have it and don't know it. Now they understand so much more about their Mom, and her relationship with each one of them is growing by the day.

Cobra tells me that she could never have imagined these things happening, and says she owes alot of it to me. Maybe she could have come this far with someone else, but to me it was fate that brought us together. She doesn't seem to realize what I owe to her. She has taught me SO many life lessons, which mean just as much to me as her reading does to her. She has taught me kindness, not just to friends and family, but to everyone in your life. She has taught me to laugh and have fun, when it's so easy to take life too seriously sometimes. But most of all, she's taught me about never giving up on a goal. I can't imagine how frustrating it was for her before she learned to read. But she was determined, and now so many things in her life are better than she ever expected them to be.

I'm so proud of her, and so happy to have her in my life.