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EASTPORT – Sometimes, as we go about our lives, we have no idea that some small, simple action, like a snowball rolling down a hill, can take on significance far beyond itself.
Such is the story of the Spin Skater of Pinpoint Pond – who in real life is a young Bangor man named Joshua Barker – and the possibility of the greatness of smallness.
This tale begins in 1996 with a winter pastime, winds through the imagination of a children’s writer, and ends with a community outpouring of love this past New Year’s Day that perhaps triggered a miracle.
Once upon a time – 10 years ago, to be precise – a teenager living in Trescott named Joshua Barker simply loved to ice skate. While other teens his age focused on video games and cell phone calls, 14-year-old Joshua’s passion was the ice.
“He used to beg me every day to take him to St. Stephen [New Brunswick] to skate,” his mother, Brenda Gay-Barker, recalled last week. “I told him ‘Skate on the frog pond in the front yard,’ which really wasn’t much more than a ditch.”
From his assisted-living apartment in Bangor – where he can get the care he needs with his condition – Joshua said the pond was just big enough to do what he wanted. “It was all about personal freedom,” he said. “I’ve never been athletic, but on that ice, I was free.”
So Joshua skated on the frog pond. But with such limited space, what he really did best was spin. On that tiny patch of ice, he became very, very good at spinning.
Quite frequently, as Joshua was passionately spinning along, Linda Godfrey from Eastport happened to be passing by the East Stream Bridge on Route 189 and the tiny frog pond.
Godfrey for 50 years has been writing children’s stories starring a fictional group of children she calls the Quoddy Kids.
“I never actually saw Joshua’s face,” Godfrey said recently. “He was always just spinning.”
The sight of the teenager spinning away on that tiny spot of ice breathed life into another Quoddy Kids adventure – there are now 11 – which Godfrey titled “The Spin Skater of Pinpoint Pond.”
“The idea is that a young man with such a small space spins because that’s all he can really do,” she said. “In the story, the Spin Skater goes to the big city and of course wins first prize in a skating contest by spinning frontwards, spinning backwards, spinning upside down, on his head and to the side.”
He simply spins and spins, the story says, going on to teach the lesson that even if you are from a really small place and have only a really small space, if you focus on what you do well, you too can be a winner.
For the next five years, the skater, his mom and the writer all went about their lives. Godfrey never met the Barkers; she never learned the spinning skater’s name. The Barkers never knew of her stories.
But sometimes, the farther you go, the closer you come to the beginning.
In 2001, Joshua, then 19, suddenly became ill while attending the chef’s program at the University of Southern Maine and was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, a massive enlargement of the heart.
For five years, Joshua survived on a strict regimen of medications. “It was a fairly normal life,” his mother said.
In Maine, it is joked, there are only two degrees of separation between all of its 1 million people. Gay-Barker and Godfrey proved that true when one winter, in the middle of Joshua’s treatment, they both ended up in a leadership course in Machias.
Gay-Barker recently had learned that Godfrey had written a story about her son, but the two women had never met.
At the final session of the institute, Godfrey read “The Spin Skater of Pinpoint Pond” to the entire class, reinforcing what they had been learning about positive energy and focus, but recognizing at the same time that the real skater – Joshua – was failing.
Last February, midway through his mother’s leadership class, Joshua had a massive heart attack. It was clear that he would not survive without a heart transplant.
“The doctors didn’t give us a whole lot of hope that they would grant us a heart,” Gay-Barker recalled. “They actually told me they didn’t know if he was worthy of a new heart. They used that actual word – worthy. The callousness of that language was too heavy a blow. This is all wrong, I felt.”
Broken by the prospect of trying to prove her son “worthy” of life, Gay-Barker turned his patient advocacy over to her father and focused her attention on daily care of her son.
Just then, at the family’s lowest point, Gay-Barker’s father remembered Godfrey’s story and brought a copy to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where his grandson was receiving treatment.
“We could use this to show the doctors who Joshua is, how focused and strong he can really be,” Gay-Barker said. “We showed them the story in an attempt to prove that my son was worthy of a new heart.”
While Joshua and his family were fighting for his life in Boston, Godfrey maintained contact from Eastport, following his battle and praying for Joshua’s welfare.
As she prepared for her 60th birthday party on Jan. 1, New Year’s Day, Godfrey decided it would become a support celebration for Joshua.
She wrote “The Very Good Neighbors,” in which the Quoddy Kids put on a show to lend a hand to someone who is in need.
“Our hearts knew that something needed to be done, so we put on a show,” Godfrey said. “The Spin Skater had forgotten he was a champion, and we needed to remind him.”
She rounded up friends and neighbors and, despite an ice storm, more than 70 people turned up to show their support. “So many of the people that came remembered seeing that young boy spinning on his small frog pond,” Godfrey said.
Fresh from the hospital visit in Boston, Joshua and his mother came too. When he was too weak to walk up the stairs in the Eastport Arts Center, the entire play was moved downstairs.
There was a juggler, a harmonica player, a paper-cutting artist, a children’s band and even a humanitone – a nose flute. Joshua sat in a soft, stuffed chair and took it all in.
“We brought the story to life,” Godfrey said. The community members played the parts of the Quoddy Kids – Shellbert, Shellzee, Shellie, Shelldon, Roshell, and Solit, or shell in Passamaquoddy. They sang and clapped and blew kisses to Joshua, who sang and clapped and blew kisses back.
“The whole room recognized that we were in the midst of a prayer,” Godfrey says. A 16-foot-long banner of get-well cards and messages was created after the play, and all who attended believed their energy and prayers would help Joshua get a new heart.
But despite the Eastporters’ good intentions, Gay-Barker wasn’t convinced.
“We weren’t being given much hope,” she said. “The transplant team had not approved it.”
So on that cold winter’s night, everyone helped Joshua to his car and they headed home, not knowing what would come next.
But remember that snowball rolling down the hill – and the tenacity of the Spin Skater?
The very day after Joshua’s celebration of life in Eastport, his phone rang at his Bangor apartment.
“I knew, I just knew that call was the one,” he said.
On the other end of the phone was a second transplant team from Boston that wanted to evaluate Joshua for a possible new heart.
“Before the party in Eastport, I had been wondering about possibly just giving up,” Joshua said. “I felt really, really alone going into all of this. The doctors made me feel like I wasn’t good enough for a heart.”
He has been spending his days reading, listening to music, playing the keyboard and writing poetry. “I’m weak,” he said this week, “but now I’m very optimistic.”
On Jan. 29, Joshua Barker will meet with the new transplant team. The real Quoddy kid will embark on a new adventure, shining with a light he kindled more than 14 years ago while spinning on a tiny frog pond.
“When I get this new heart, I should be able to live 90 percent of a normal life, and that means returning to skating,” Joshua said.
“Hope, possibilities and dreams. Nothing is impossible.”
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