【推荐3】The morning after an evening struggle to care for my three-year-old daughter, I couldn’t wait to set her to school. I, as a mother, was tired from the anger and her inability to communicate because of her slowed language development.

As I accompanied her into the car, I felt desperate. Nothing was right with our world. She’d been born around the same time when the nation was witnessing the birth of another Great Recession. My job and my house had been victims(牺牲品). Then this happened. My child’s language delay(语言发育迟缓)was identified, but doctors struggled to properly help her. I felt like we both needed to be rescued.

I returned that afternoon as disenchanted with my little girl as when I left. Walking slowly toward the school’s playground gate, I found her preschool teacher racing to greet me. “You should have seen her today!” His breathy words were supported by excitement. I didn’t interrupt. “See that climber.” He pointed to a wooden piece of playground equipment that looked like a rock wall. I nodded. “Well, every day since she started school, she’s tried and failed to make it to the top.” He took a breath. “And today she did it!”

He expressed his joy just as he’d witnessed her conquering Mount Everest! “She cheered and celebrated! I wish I’d recorded it!” His words comforted me. My daughter had conquered her mountain.

As she ran toward me. I recognized something I hadn’t before. I saw her perseverance(毅力). I saw her strength. I saw a Hero.

Everyday greatness celebrates ordinary people who do unusual things in big and small ways, showing courage, kindness, love and selflessness. We encourage you to click these brief accounts and invite you to share your own story.

【推荐1】I used to be really frustrated when I got “trapped” in the train station in New York. When this happened, I spent time “observing” people and found that New York City trains formed “an underground NYC”.

I met with all kinds of people there. Sitting in trains coming from suburban boroughs (区) like Queens and Brooklyn, I saw babysitters and housekeepers, in white or pink uniforms, carrying a shopping bag with lunch and another prettier bag for their makeup. Some gentlemen in suits got squeezed (挤) in between ladies, reading the New York Times, holding Starbucks coffees and a piece of napkin.

The passengers’ skin color would get lighter as the train went from suburban areas to uptown NYC. Clothes brands changed from “Nike” and “Babyphat” to “Armani” and “Prada”.

Getting lost is not embarrassing at all. Even New Yorkers who have lived in the city for 20 years need to check out the map before going to a new place by train. People from other states are just as confused as foreigners when they are “thrown” underground.

It was funny when people carrying big backpacks and holding maps, asked me where they could transfer while I was trying to find an exit. I often said, “I’m sorry. I am trying to find my way out, too.” I felt really bad about not being able to help them. To my surprise, the two guys with blue eyes didn’t look disappointed at all. They laughed and told me, “Oh, we are wondering if there’s really an exit because we have been walking around here for 10 minutes and we still don’t know where to transfer to the uptown train!”

NYC trains are just like doors rotating (旋转) on and on. If I hadn’t got lost several times, I might not have had the chance to stop and see what was happening outside my block.

【推荐3】Ensley made me a poet.

When I was one, my parents and I moved into a tiny apartment off 20th Street. I wrote my first poem sitting in the corner of my bedroom, surrounded by toys. I was 7 or 8 and the poem was for my best friend who had moved away. I was angry with him for being willing to leave me, and when I get angry, I get mean. I figured his leaving would be easier to face, if I pushed him away first. But as soon as the moving truck pulled away, I realized how foolish I’d been.

So I wrote him a poem to apologize. The poem was terrible, of course, but with it, a lifelong love affair began --- not with the boy who moved away, but with the written word. As an adult, I’d write poems about playing kickball in the parking lot of those Ensley apartment blocks, and poems about trips to see the candy lady and to the corner store.

When people ask me where in Birmingham I grew up, I sometimes say “Everywhere”. We moved around a lot and the neighborhoods of Birmingham find their way into so much of what I write.

I had to leave Birmingham to learn how to tell true stories in prose (散文). After college in Alabama and graduate school in Berkeley, California, I moved to Kentucky to be a newspaper reporter. My skill at writing personal essays landed me my own column(专栏) and the chance to be included in a collection of essays published by Seal Press.

Then I came home.

In her book Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg writes, “It is very important to go home if you want your work to be whole...you must claim where you come from and look deep into it. Come to honor and embrace it, or at the least, accept it.”

Now in Birmingham, I get to share my story in local magazines and on my blog. And I build my story through every friendship formed in this city of steel, sweat, and sweet tea.