The Kindness Club
The best thing about being a major college basketball coach for a quarter of a century is the people that the platform allows you to meet. Because I was the coach at Oklahoma, I had the opportunity to meet billionaires and world- renowned musicians and Hollywood movie stars and Oprah. (Yeah, she gets a category all her own). I’ve met incredibly intelligent people and side stitch funny people and eccentric interesting people and crazy artistic people, but I’ve never met anybody more impressive than the children and the families who I met at 1200 Children’s Avenue in Oklahoma City, the place where little people go to get well.
Through the years, my team and I had the privilege of hanging out with Batman and Superman and Queens in various stages of their regalia. We had races down the hallways and puppet shows in the lobby, and we played monumental games of Duck Duck Goose. We painted fingernails and toenails and played video games and shared our favorite songs. We named stuffed animals and played Hide and Seek with little green army men, while painting lots and lots of pictures, and making lots and lots of crafts.
And every time we walked out of Children’s Hospital, we walked out better than we were when we walked in.
Giving is tricky slick like that. It can make a U turn in mid air. Newton’s Third Law says for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Well…not really. Not at a Children's Hospital anyway. There, when you empty the contents of a thimble, a 5 gallon bucket comes back in return. We’d walk from the hospital to our cars every time with hearts so full we could barely shut the doors. Those tiny giants doled out perspective like Walmart greeters do hellos. And unconditional love got slopped all over every single thing they touched. It dripped from us on our drives back down I35.
And every time we walked out of Children’s Hospital, we walked out better than we were when we walked in.
We learned a lot, my team and me, from the miniature superheroes at Children’s Hospital. Things like patience and courage and honesty and strength. They taught us about kindness and gratitude and resilience and faith…the power of prayer, and the kind of peace that can only be found when we turn absolutely everything over to God. We learned a lot of things from a lot of different kids at a lot of different times throughout the years, but the one pervasive sort of non-negotiable that showed up without fail was how to be purely present wherever it is you are. Those kids sit in it. However ugly the “it” might be. And they wring the minutes dry. They don’t wallow-- I’ve never met one who felt sorry for himself or whined about “why me.” Not one. And they fight—Lord, do they fight-- with the kind of grit bound by sinew that we all wish our teams could have. But these children are always exactly where they are. Planted. Present. Not scattered, as most of us visitors tend to be. It’s like these little angels got a fast pass to wisdom with their admission bracelet to the 10th floor, a coupon that allows them to just let it be.
We can learn a lot, it seems, when we let ourselves be present. Even in –and perhaps especially in—the really tough places where it’s scary and painful and impossible to understand.
It’s a truth commonly acknowledged by those in the problem solving business that the people who have the problem know the most about what they need to solve it. Context matters. And the people living in the muck have it in spades. Kids with cancer are no exception. They can’t cure their own illnesses, but they often have some answers to some even bigger stuff. Bigger than childhood cancer? We can’t even imagine. But tiny humans sometimes wear x-ray glasses that cut through all the crap. The heart of the matter tends to be where they like to strike.
Like my friend Keaton, for example. He was 7 when he founded “The K Club”, 5 years after they found his leukemia. Going to the hospital was all this little man knew. So, in turn, he found going there quite grand. At Children’s, he ruthlessly charmed the nurses and entertained his peers, while encouraging his parents and making the rounds to see all the patients who were new. At the Jimmy Everest Cancer Center at Children’s Hospital, Keaton Barron was a spreader of joy.
In January of 2018, on the heels of 5 years of chemotherapy, radiation, t cell therapy, and medication and doctor’s orders that made ant trails across his days, Keaton was admitted to the hospital for the flu. That’s when “The K Club” was born.
“The K Club” was the brainchild of Keaton and God’s personal angel, Kay Tangner, who spends her days loving kids who are fighting for their lives. Together she and Keaton carefully laid out all the rules. The membership fee would be $1 (or “whatever a person can afford”) and the money would go to charity. Keaton designed and drew an official logo, named Strawberry Cereal Bars as the Club snack, appointed therapy dogs as the Club mascot, and designated the hospital chapel as the Clubhouse home. Together, he and Kay made membership cards to be used as kindness batons, complete with his trademark striped “K” on the front and the club’s Bible verse on the back. As the founder Keaton signed them, too.
The original goal of “The K Club” was 1,000 members. Turns out that bar was kind of low. Within 5 months, the club had paid for a well in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, bought part of a cow through Heifer International, provided balloons and gift cards for families and patients in the NICU and it had members from all 50 states of the union, and several countries to boot. Keaton chaired the mission from his hospital bed and then from his home before he went to meet his maker on May 11, 2018. His star shot quickly across the Oklahoma sky, but it left an indelible trail.
Last month, “The K Club”, which became an official corporation in 2018 and then a full-fledged non-profit after that, raised $109,000 at its annual fundraiser. Keaton’s parents, Luke and Holly, live his mission every day. “The K Club” is their kindness car, the vehicle that enables them to impact families who are sitting where they sat. Keaton knew, as do they, what sick kids need and what sick kids’ families have to have. So there are Legos—lots and lots of Legos. And there are “K Club” hats and t-shirts because teams have to have team gear. There are also balloons and care packages, and scholarship funds for the ones who make it, and funeral funds for the ones who don’t.
This is just some of the stuff that you can see. The stuff that you can’t is impossible to list. Kindness, courage, compassion, and caring, those are the words of “The K Club’s” mission statement. That’s the pixie dust that keeps on falling from Keaton’s trail across the sky. He had no clue about how to hide from cancer or out run it or how to keep it from doing whatever it is it wants to do. But it appears he knew a thing or two about the world. And he was here long enough, it seems, to know that kindness can be the answer to all sorts of messed up things. So he created a system that would help him spread the word long after he was gone.
I keep a stack of “K Club” cards wrapped by a rubber band inside my purse. It’s my random acts reminder to be kinder than I might be inclined. And to pass it on, just as Keaton intended when he burst across the sky.
Sherri Coale