The old waiter in the New York restaurant in 1944 could not have known that the young dishwasher he was teaching to read would be standing in that room twenty years later. He gave what he gave without any knowledge of what it would become. That is what makes it, in the end, the purest form of the gift.
Not an investment. Not a gamble. Just a generous act, given in the full uncertainty of what the future would bring, by a man whose name was never known and is not known now, to a man who went on to make it matter for the rest of a very long and very significant life.
## The Night Before the Next Audition
It is useful to imagine, even if it cannot be confirmed, the specific texture of Poitier’s evenings in that six-month period of reading lessons — not the lessons themselves but the hours after, when he had left the restaurant and was making his way back to wherever he was living.
He would have been walking in the New York night, through the streets of whatever neighborhood he was in, carrying the newspaper or having left it behind at the table. He would have been going over, probably without quite meaning to, what they had worked through that session — the punctuation rules, the syllable breaks, the specific words that had given him trouble and the way the waiter had helped him work through them.
He had an accent that was slowly changing through the radio listening he was doing by day. He had a reading fluency that was slowly building through the newspaper sessions by night. He had, somewhere in his mind, the refusal he had received at the ANT and the specific information that refusal contained — that what he needed to change was real and identifiable and not beyond changing.