Roses to Justin Straus of Chapel Hill, whose way of dealing with a rare form of cancer, chordoma, gave those around him a life lesson on how to endure difficult times.

Justin was born with the disease and lived with it for 13 years. He endured more than a dozen surgeries, a spinal fusion, and several rounds of chemotherapy.

Between treatments, he liked to be like other middle school boys. He play baseball and basketball, pulled for his favorite college basketball team, the Duke Blue Devils, and went on a spring training trip to Florida with his dad.

Two weeks before his death, Justin refused to go to bed after a round of physical therapy. A tracheotomy made it hard for Justin to talk, so to explain why he didn't want to get back into bed he wrote one word on a whiteboard: "Perseverance."

In spite of the cancer, as long as he had the strength and energy, he didn't want to spend one more minute in a hospital bed than he had to.

His death six months ago brought sorrow to his classmates at Durham Academy, but his life had given them some inspiration, too.

So when they dedicated the scoreboard at the gym to Justin's memory recently, they put a sign up beneath the scoreboard with the word that his classmates chose to remember Justin by: "Perseverance."

Roses and raspberries too to the Chapel Hill Town Council for last week's handling of issues surrounding the Aydan Court project out N.C. 54.

The council's rejection of the high density zoning developer Carol Ann Zinn needed for her project rightly responded to growing citizen concern that Chapel Hill is growing too much too quickly. The town is in the process of appointing a task force that will re-examine Chapel Hill's growth guidelines and for now has decided to keep density downtown, though even there the transformation of Franklin and Rosemary streets from mostly two stories to eight and 10 stories continues to give pause.

But the council loses points for allowing this discussion to reach the name calling depths it did last week. The mayor and council may have been correct in noting Zinn took a business risk and that they had told her earlier to submit a more modest proposal. But in fairness, Zinn was responding to the council's oft-stated desire to pack residents in along transit corridors.

The council's failure to articulate or at least update its vision cost Zinn $600,000 and many months in preparatory work, she said. But town residents will live with the results of those projects already approved for much longer. The town needs to at least keep the conversation civil.

Belated roses to journalist Paul Cuadros, an instructor at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication, for his book "A Home on the Field" being chosen for UNC's 2009 Summer Reading Program.

UNC asks all first-year and incoming transfer students to read a book during the summer and participate in small group discussions led by faculty and staff when they arrive on campus.

In "A Home on the Field," published in 2006, Cuadros tells the story of a Latino high school soccer team he coached in Siler City that, despite social and immigration hurdles, climbed to a state championship.

"He raises tough questions about what services and opportunities the state of North Carolina should make available to these immigrants," said committee chairman and humanities professor John McGowan. "We are also thrilled that our students will be reading a book written by a UNC faculty member and one that is about North Carolina today."

Cuadros writes a My View column for The Chapel Hill News, where he focuses on the lives of immigrants, whether working in the state's Christmas tree industry or getting stopped for traffic checks by local law enforcement. At a time when immigrants have become a political scapegoat for America's ills, his calm, passionate voice cuts through the rhetoric to bring the discussion to the human level.