Over the last couple of days I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what Dave said in that Salon interview, about getting out of your house and doing something productive for someone in need.
My father died a year and a half ago, when I was 25, and afterwards I slumped into a pretty deep depression. I had never been depressed, had never even truly understood what it meant to be so. The enormity of it was surprising. I didn’t have a job and, at the time, didn’t financially need one. I stayed home all day, every day, under the pretense of working on my book, but I wasn’t really getting anything done at all. I could hardly get off the couch, even though I live in a climate that offers consistently sun-drenched, 70-degree afternoons.
During those apathetic days, I thought a lot about getting out, looking for a volunteer job, but I was too depressed to even do that. It took several months of unadulterated mourning and a really great shrink before I finally began immersing myself in the world again. Now, a year later, my days couldn’t be more different.
Yesterday was my first time tutoring kids at 826. As Steve explained in his post, 46 students from Animo Inglewood, came for the day to work on teamwork-inspired essays. It was thrilling to walk into this space that we’ve all worked so hard to create and to finally see the room filled with so many energized teenagers. The place was packed, students crowding into the offices and spilling out into the hallways, and the walls reverberated with their excited voices.
After lunch I teamed up with three boys: Freddy and Ismael, both in 11th grade, and Robert, a shy ninth-grader. I began by asking each of them to go around and read their essays aloud. I felt like Mark Salzman did in his incredible memoir about teaching a creative writing class at L.A.’s Central Juvenile Hall, True Notebooks: I was nervous that these boys wouldn’t like me, worried about what they were going to read and afraid that I wouldn’t know how to respond. Turns out there was nothing at all to fret about.
They all went back and forth about who should read first, none of them wanting to volunteer, until finally Freddy sighed, leaned back in his chair shrugging his shoulders, and began with his essay. I was immediately captivated by his vivid description of the feeling of handcuffs encircling his wrists when he was 14 and arrested for beaming lasers at passing helicopters. After he was finished reading what he had written so far, he explained how he plans to incorporate teamwork into the essay through recounting how, by not working as a team, he and his friends had failed to escape the LAPD.
We moved on to Ismael after that who had chosen to write about his grandfather in Mexico, known to have had “less than fourteen but more than eight” children. Ismael wasn’t quite sure how to bring teamwork into the essay but, after a thorough discussion between the four of us, he came to the realization that his grandfather had been the leader of the team making up Ismael’s entire family. Robert, only in ninth grade but already a gifted writer, had finished his entire piece already, a story about getting trapped on a boat with his family in Lake Mead one summer as a dangerous storm threatened to capsize their vessel.
We were all impressed with Robert’s essay and the way he so easily described the teamwork required by his family members to keep them afloat. After an hour, the boys were grinning at each other around the table, energized by all the new ideas they had come up with for their essays. We made plans to meet up often in the next few weeks to continue working and they spent the next 45 minutes getting to work on revisions.
On the way home yesterday, I was just humming with energy. J. Ryan and I talked excitedly in the car, tripping over each other’s sentences, each of us trying to tell the other about the kids we had worked with. Later that night I realized that, not once, during the four hours I spent at 826, did I think about my life, my problems, my deadlines or bills...and that felt good.
