My husband has a gift. I'm not sure what to call it; it's part curiosity, part smarts, and part self-confidence. If that sounds confusing, here's an example.

Our daughter bought a row house in Richmond, Virginia, and of course we motored down to see it. As she showed us the unique setup, rooms set one after another in a space 90' x 20', she mentioned that most of the houses on the block had pocket doors between the front parlor and the second. She was slightly disappointed that hers had a solid wall. She and I went upstairs to do some computer stuff. About an hour later, my husband came up and said, "Come and see."

He'd knocked out the wall between her two front rooms and uncovered pocket doors that someone had dry-walled over. Our daughter was thrilled.

Here's the gift my husband revealed in that moment.

He was curious as to why her house was different from the others.

He was smart enough to guess the doors were there.

He was confident enough to knock out a wall and believe that if he was wrong, he could fix it.

I once bought an old piano that had been painted a ghastly rust color. I began laboriously stripping off the paint, working on it as a single piece. He came along, watched for a minute, and said, "Let me take a look." To my horror, he started pulling off pieces I didn't think were supposed to come apart. When he was done, instead of corners and crevices, I had mostly flat boards. The man had never really looked at a piano before, but he guessed what I didn't; that the parts were removable. (And yes, part of his gift is the ability to put it all back together when he's done.)

I'm good with words and explanations, but in the world of reality, I tend to see things as a whole. My husband sees them pieces and analyzes, almost without effort, how they work together. A broken fan. A stopped pipe. A rattling sound. I accept these things. He fixes them.

When I taught high school, I was often amazed when students revealed their own gifts, usually in speech class, as they spoke about what they loved. A girl with a bad reputation made beautiful floral arrangements. A boy many people thought of as slow told us how he plotted routes for oversized trucks to take in order to avoid low bridges, narrow passages, and hairpin corners (This was before GPS.) A kid who never said much of anything built a full-size, working Roman chariot out of scrap metal and brought it in for hid classmates to ride in.

We all have gifts, fueled by curiosity, intelligence (of many kinds), courage, and confidence. Our job as a society is to see the gifts different people have and encourage them. We shouldn't make everyone be the same, act the same, and think the same. After all, if my husband hadn't used his gift, some homeowner in Richmond, Virginia, would be unaware that she had beautiful, charming pocket doors hidden behind a bland, blank wall.