Dorothye Jade Howe -- friends call her D.J. -- never actually expected to get a reply when she wrote to President Bush.

But when you're "10 fixin' to be 11 in April," you possess a certain childlike faith that too often gets lost along the way to adulthood.

The Meadowview Christian School fifth-grader wanted to know if maybe the president could help her dad. Andy Howe was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease in September.

D.J.'s class has been studying about the president, about how he holds the most powerful political office in the entire world. So D.J. figured that if anybody could help, the president of the United States could.

"My teacher, Mrs. Harris, said that anybody can write to the president. So that's what I did," D.J. says by way of explanation. "I told him my name is D.J. Howe, I'm 10 years old, I live in Selma, Alabama, and I have blond hair.

"And then I told him we just found out my dad has ALS and can you please pray for him."

Tracye Howe, D.J.'s mom, admits she was skeptical at first.

"She brought it to me and asked me to mail it," Mrs. Howe recalls. "She told me, 'I don't want you to show it to dad, because it might make him cry again.'"

She pauses for a moment and looks away. "I was real proud of her for thinking about her dad," she continues at last. "But we never dreamed she would get anything back. We just put a stamp on it and put it in the mail."

So no one was any more surprised than Mrs. Howe when she went to the mailbox a couple of months later and found an oversized envelop with a return address that read simply "The White House, Washington, D.C."

"I was shocked," Mrs. Howe says. "I was like, 'The White House? What are we getting from the White House?'"

What they got was a letter from George Bush, along with an autographed picture of the president. D.J. thought that was pretty neat. She took it to school the next day to share. Her friends thought it was pretty neat, too.

Civics class suddenly became much more interesting.

"That night after she brought the letter to school, the phone rang off the hook," her mom says. "All her classmates wanted to know, 'D.J., what's the address for the president again?'"

But what really has D.J. and her mom excited is that shortly after they received the first letter from the White House, a second letter arrived. The most powerful elected official in the entire world had taken the time to send a second letter addressed to D.J.'s dad. It reads:

"Dear Mr. Howe,

"I am sending this note of encouragement in the hope that you will be feeling better soon. You remain in my thoughts and prayers. Laura joins me in sending best wishes.

"Sincerely,

"George Bush."

Marvels D.J., "The strangest thing was they knew what my daddy's name was without me telling them."

"He was pretty happy," Tracye Howe says of her husband's reaction. "He's always been a pretty staunch Republican. I mean, he always wanted everybody to stand up when George Bush speaks."

Lou Gehrig's disease is another name for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. The disease attacks nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. Eventually, its victims lose all voluntary muscle control and become totally paralyzed. They cannot breathe or even swallow on their own.

Andy Howe is 42. When he was diagnosed with ALS in September, they gave him six months to live. "He's getting weaker," Tracye Howe says softly, glancing toward the room where her husband is resting. "He's progressing quite rapidly. His speech is beginning to slur."

Mrs. Howe confides that she and her husband were shocked when doctors first broke the news. "We did lots of crying," she says. "But then we said, 'We're going to deal with this.'"

Since then, she says, they've did their best to take things one day at a time.

"We pray every day," she says. "I think we must be on the prayer list of every church in Selma. Every time we run into somebody on the street they tell us, 'We're praying for you.'

"Now we know we're on the Bushes' prayer list, too."

D.J. says her experience has taught her a lot. She has learned, for example, that even 10-year-olds can write the president and get a reply. And she's learned something else, too.

"Other people do care," she says. "If you'll just tell them, they want to help."

Copyright 2003 Selma Newspapers Inc. All rights reserved.