Friends Reunited

In 2011, retired bricklayer(砖瓦工)Joao, 71, found a South American penguin lying on the rocks and close to death on his local beach, just outside Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Joao cleaned the oil off the penguin’s feathers, fed him a daily diet of fish to get his strength up and named him Dindim.

A week later, Joao tried to release the penguin back into the sea, but he just wouldn’t leave. Joao took him out in his boat, went to a nearby island and released him. Later that day, the penguin was back in Joao’s backyard. In the end, Dindim stayed with Joao for 11 months and then, “ just after he changed his coat for new feathers, he disappeared,” Joao explains.

In fact, Dindim returns to Joao’s little beach in the summer every year-it’s believed that the penguin prefers to visit the elderly man rather than migrate(迁徙)to the feeding areas of his species.

Joao recalls how the penguin continued to follow him home. “Everyone said he wouldn’t return, but he has been coming back to visit me for the past four years,” he says. “He arrives in June and leaves to go home in February and every year he becomes more affectionate (表示关爱的)as he appears even happier to see me.” Now new pictures have emerged of Dindim visiting Joao in his village earlier this month.

When Dindim is staying with Joao, the two friends sometimes like to take a walk together down the beach-or sometimes Joao walks and Dindim swims alongside him. “I love the penguin like it’s my own child and I believe the penguin loves me,” Joao says. “No one else is allowed to touch him. He pecks(啄)them if they do. He lies on my lap, lets me give him showers and allows me to feed him sardines and to pick him up.”

Who said there wasn’t still some good news left in the world ?

If our kids don’t fall down, they don’t learn to get up. I still remember the day in high school when my mom forgot to pick me up from school. I’m the oldest of the four children. No doubt she’d had a long day with the other kids and it’d slipped her mind. After waiting at school for an hour, I walked the three miles home, and when I got to my house, I shut our front door with anger, stormed into the kitchen and screamed to my mom’s face that she’d forgotten me.

Later that night, my dad told me I no longer had a ride to school the next day. I figured my mom would still take me, but when the morning came she refused. It was midterm, and as a straight-A student ready to start college applications, being late wasn’t an option. In my mind, missing these tests would have been the end of my academic career. I begged my mom. I told her she was ruining my future and everything I’d worked for. But she held her ground, and that day I walked to school. And I missed my tests.

My mom didn’t rescue me from failure. She let me suffer from it. She let me figure it out. She let me learn. Now, as a mom myself, I’ve realized that I want my kids to experience failure because failure is how we grow, learn and think. It’s how we educate ourselves to learn what’s right and respectable, and what’s not. It’s how we become responsible and enthusiastic. Falling down makes us better because we learn how to get up.