I've been surfing around online looking into literature for young adults that I might use to engage the college prep class I teach at the Al Wooten Jr Heritage Center in South Central every Tuesday. The kids are bored out of their minds with my current program of mini online research projects and math homework assignments... I was discouraged to the point of throwing in the towel last week after a particularly fruitless session. Yet I realized after last Thursday's fundraising dinner in honor of the center's founder, Ms Faye Rumph, that the kids and staff are too much a part of my new LA family to just walk away. If I'm going to stay, then, a change of strategy is called for. Thus my research into good material for a potential book reading.
After a few hours of fruitless searching for something that would connect directly to the experiences of South Central kids while at the same being an interesting, easy read, I paused to think about stories that moved me at that age. The top two I came up with were 'Outsiders' by S.E. Hinton and the memoir 'This Boy's Life' by Tobias Wolff. Wolff's account of his own coming of age, much of which takes place in the backwoods town of Concrete, WA (less than an hour from my hometown), resonated with me in a particularly deep way. It's become easier with time to look at myself more in terms of who I am without at the same time ruminating on the road that led me here. Just thinking of the book, though--about what it meant to me as a freshman at Options High School and what I hope it could mean to my kids, opened up the floodgate of carefully contained memories and emotions.
When Robert LaRiviere assigned us that book I devoured it. A screwed up, sad, confused kid with little sense of direction, at the time I fooled myself into thinking that my life was riddled with a comparable amount of adversity to young Tobias'. It would take me until well into college to begin to disabuse myself of that self-sympathetic notion, but the fact was that I identified in a profound way with his sense of displacement, yearning for identity, and a way out. Wolff's description of the grey, rainy days in the backwaters of Skagit county, in a small town hidden in the middle of a rolling, evergreen forest hit me right in the heart. Some people like the peace and quiet, but I had a sense since I was a little boy that lives get lost out there. Beautiful as it is, I sometimes felt those forests were full of ghosts lamenting what could have been but never was. That I looked out of the window in Robert's portable classroom at the same grey sky, felt the same misty cool rain slowly work its way into my coat sleeves on the walk to the downtown bus station, and heard the same rustle of the pines on a windy day as young Tobias would have connected me that much more intimately to his story. Wolff's bruising, haphazard, relentless struggle out of an abusive home and the gloom of Concrete planted something deep inside my heart that would sustain and drive me in the years to come.
And I only fully realized this just now, sitting at my computer on a lazy Sunday night, wondering how on earth I can grab the attention of a group of kids full of such boundless promise but confronted with such difficult circumstances. That restless, 14 year-old me made his way to Stanford eventually, and it changed everything. That's also where Mr Wolf is currently a professor, though for absolutely no good reason at all I've never met that great man. It was totally improbable that either of us would ever make it there, but that deep restlessness that 'This Boy's Life' helped stir up in my first year of high school made me willing to try. Hunched over my desk at the SAT testing center as a sophomore at Western Washington University, rain dripping off the pines outside, I felt worlds apart from that incredible campus to which I was seeking to transfer. I threw the dice, though, and hit a pair of sixes. In life sometime all your tenacity, all your carefully planned energies, hinge on factors beyond your control. But you've got to play to win, to dare to say 'this can be, and will do all that I can do bring it about.' I pray that at least one of my kids will do the same.
Thanks Prof Wolff.
