The night I got to interview the Fonz opened a new world for me. I could see then how words spoken to children often define them for decades to come.As Henry Winkler walked into the back room in Beaverton’s Powell’s Books that night so many years ago, his warm, unguarded eyes signaled to me that we were about to go on a wild ride with no limits. We talked about his dyslexic childhood, and how he rode to stardom on the words of one teacher, “Henry, you’re going to be all right.”
I was still aglow, an hour after he hugged me for the cameras, after he said several times of my interviewing “you are really good at this,” after he said he’d had a lot of fun talking. Words that mattered to the child-me and to the professional me.
A Brand-New Me is the seventeenth book in the Hank Zipzer series — it could stand-alone and was as good a read for an adult as for a child. I loved it. It reawakened parts of me I’d forgotten — the lovely insecurities that drove me harder. Henry recalled for me those life-size blow-up clowns with sand in the bottom. You punch them, and they roll back, but never over. They never keel over and stay down. Just like Henry.
I asked Henry if he believed that the challenges that he was born with — the dyslexia — forced him to be the amazing entertainer with the golden heart. You know his heart as soon as he walks into the room. He agreed that as a kid he hated the dyslexia. If he could have scooped the offending gray matter out of his skull, he would have.
I was struck immediately by the feeling of that. I have that sense, too, but for me, it was wanting to carve out the damage that was done in my psychological being because of the physical trauma perpetrated by my stepfather from the tender age of three and-a-half. The same feeling. Cut. It. Out! But, one day, that turns to gold, and Henry realized, and I realized, in our individual cases, that these challenges are essentially gifts to our souls. Henry shares my beliefs that these challenges are planted in us, so they can become gifts, and that now he appreciates that flaw. He gets fan letters from thousands of kids who read his Hank Zipzer books and ask, “How did you know how I felt?”
One more thing. Henry’s big break — playing The Fonz — which, by the way, was supposed to be four lines — came when he was 28-years old. He smiled and said, “I was a late bloomer.”
And, you know what that means for all of us? If you have the will — as Henry Winkler did — you can make your dreams — and maybe dreams you never even imagined — you can make them all come true!