Barbara Summers: Open The Unusual Door

The Welcome Mat

Before the great writer James Baldwin knew he was a writer—and long before he became great—he had the good fortune to meet an artist, a painter, a man who saw something in his young brown face that made him want to open the door and invite Baldwin inside. Walking through that door changed Baldwin’s life, opened it up to all sorts of experiences he had never imagined. Baldwin recounts how this painter, Beauford Delaney, often sang Lord, open the unusual door.

Whether to let someone in or walk through it oneself, at some point in life we all face an unusual door. Even the people behind the famous names in this book.

The artists and athletes, the scientists and entrepreneurs, the thinkers and doers who speak in this collection all faced challenges and made choices. Many were very young at the time. Antwone Fisher was born in prison and spent his entire youth without a home to call his own. Dexter Scott King was only seven when his famous father was assassinated.

Russell Simmons was sixteen when he almost shot a man, not in a rap song but in real life. Of course, not all of the storytellers here were so young when they faced a door or a difficult passage or, simply, the blank unknown. And not all serious challenges must involve life or death. They don’t have to be loud and explosive to be dramatic or life- changing.

Sometimes the choice is a quiet one. Like the choice Neil deGrasse Tyson made at age nine to make the study of the stars his life’s work. After his first exciting visit to the Hayden Planetarium, his eyes were opened to the majestic night sky in a way that made him never stop wanting to learn more.

Sometimes the challenge comes from an argument with someone you can’t beat, someone like Mother Nature. Dangerous, stormy weather arose just when Michael Cottman, a scuba diver, tried to reach back through time to an ancient sunken slave ship.

But then sometimes the challenge comes from a debate you have with yourself. Like the understanding Whoopi Goldberg struggled to reach when her fourteen-year-old daughter announced that she was pregnant. What Whoopi wanted for her daughter was not what her daughter wanted for herself. And yet, the fundamental issue was choice—Who decides? And how? And what are the consequences?

What all of these people experienced—in one way or another—required them to look hard at the changes they wanted and needed to make in order to better their lives. They had to open up to new ways of thinking, doing, and living. That is why their stories are gathered here as examples of challenge and choice.

Each story is told in a different way, just as each life is lived in a unique way. But all the authors share something in common: a willingness to open the door to readers. They invite us in to tell us what happened to them and what they did to make things happen. They let us see who they are, what they think, and how they feel.

So consider this introduction a welcome mat, and open the unusual door. You might be letting in a stranger who becomes a good friend. Or you might be letting yourself out to face a brand-new world. Either way, you can’t lose.