Quotes from Julie Checkoway

She appreciated life, it seemed, appreciated being alive, as if it were some extra gift she hadn't ever expected to receive, as if, perhaps, she wasn't quite worthy of the magnitude of it; and because she appreciated life, he began to do so, too.

Still, who, I wondered, owns the disappearing story that, in, part, they tell? The story of the teacher and the children lives now in so few places: on that weather-beaten wall, in scrapbooks filled with photographs. History isn't a sculptured cup; it's more like a sieve through which so many stories pass and disappear.

in 1937, a schoolteacher in Pu'unene taught impoverished Japanese-American camp kids how to swim in the plantation's filthy irrigation ditches, and he challenged them to transform themselves into Olympians. That