For four months, there were Little League games, ballet lessons, camping trips and lively conversations around the dinner table. Then, suddenly, it was time to say goodbye.
"Packing them up and sending them off to an unknown future was about the most painful thing I've ever done," recalls Stacey Bess. "After letting them go, it was tough to move on."
For 15 years, Stacey and her husband, Greg, wondered and worried about the three siblings they took into their home while their mother received treatment for drug and alcohol addiction.
Stacey, then a teacher at Salt Lake City's former school for homeless children, "The School With No Name," had moved the kids in with her family after learning the children would likely be sent to different foster homes.
When the children were eventually reunited with their mother, Stacey was happy but also heartbroken. Would she ever see them again? Had anything she and Greg done made a difference? "Over the years, I lost a lot of sleep thinking about it," she says.
Then, four weeks ago, the phone rang.
"Stacey Bess? This is Marcus Johnson. Remember me? I just wanted to say 'thank you.' You were the best teacher, ever."
"It was like a miracle, getting that call," says Stacey, who learned that Marcus and his siblings had moved years ago to Kansas City and were leading productive lives. She has a message for any parent or teacher who wonders whether the little things they do add up to changing somebody's life: The answer is yes.
"Greg and I are just average people — we didn't feel we had anything incredible to offer," says Stacey, now 41 and a mother of six. "But these kids remembered the smallest things we'd done in great detail. They knew that we'd cared and that's all that mattered."
Hoping that others might learn from her story, Stacey invited me to join her for a Free Lunch of takeout chicken salad at her Holladay home, where she works part time training teachers in the art of classroom compassion.
She was 23 when she went to work at Salt Lake City's shelter school, one of the nation's first schools for homeless children. (Today, the city's homeless kids are bused to public schools.) Although she never knew who she'd find in her classroom each day, Stacey grew attached to her students, especially the Johnson children — Marcus, Angel and David — then 10, 11 and 12.
Touched by the kids' plight, she and Greg received permission to care for them while their mother went into counseling and treatment. Stacey, who had two children at the time, enrolled the Johnson kids at her neighborhood elementary and junior high school and cared for them as if they were her own.
There were bedtime stories and baseball games, backyard water fights and weekend chores. "We always required that they eat dinner with us and talk to us if something was bothering them," says Stacey. "They'd come from a place where rules weren't enforced, so they weren't the easiest children. But we loved them."
After she published her experiences in the book "Nobody Don't Love Nobody — Lessons on Love From the School With No Name," people started asking Stacey about the Johnson children. Was it fair to the kids to have given them everything for four months, then sent them back to a life of poverty?
For years, Stacey wondered if she'd done the right thing. Did those few months have an impact?
She wept over the phone as Marcus and his sister talked about going with her to the grocery store, picking out new shoes and sitting by her side as she helped them finish homework.
"They remembered making up silly rhymes and goofing off at bedtime," says Stacey. "It was the little things that mattered. There's a big lesson in that for all of us."
Have a story? Let's hear it over lunch. E-mail your name, phone number and what you'd like to talk about to freelunch@desnews.com. You can also write me at the Deseret Morning News, P.O. Box 1257, Salt Lake City, UT 84110.