Why I Volunteer - and HOW I Do It

For mother of three Terry Marotta, connecting her volunteering to her early career as an inner-city teacher was essential. Finding organizations whose missions matched her youthful goals felt instinctively right, something she recommends. Marotta works for two nonprofits devoted to diversity: A Better Chance, which identifies talented young people of color for study at top middle and secondary schools; and her town’s Multicultural Network, helping people build inclusive communities.“As a high school English teacher in my twenties, I had had the chance to live out and uphold similar values to the ones these two boards cherish. In Room 334, we all listened with respect to one another, we learned to celebrate our differences, and before long got to [a point] where we were all really glad we had come to class each day.”Marotta knew the nonprofits were a fit when she felt the same way she did as a young, ambitious teacher. Her feeling of purpose has been key to her success as a volunteer.Many people are passionate about causes but unsure if they have the right skills. “Banish all such thinking!” Marotta urges. “Try to see if you can identify a couple of people—even just through social media—who work with the nonprofit. Ask what the joys and obligations are.”Then, she says, observe how the group acts. Perhaps you can sit in on a meeting. Get a sense of the organization’s tenor. Just visiting the group’s Facebook page may help you see how members interact.Most of all, Marotta says, consider your legacy when joining a group.“How do I know that ‘my’ work will live on? It sounds corny but I think I know it because of something that Mother Teresa said: ‘All that is not given away is lost.’ So give it away, your time and your love and your attention, and you will never be sorry, because the people you have given these things to will in time give away their own store of them,” she advises.Of course, volunteering can be taxing, especially with family pressures. Marotta worked  with  the Winchester (MA) Chapter of  A Better Chance for ten years when she was young, then took two decades off before returning. When she did, Marotta says, “I was a different person with a new ability to laugh, to survive setbacks, to keep things in perspective.” Now, she says, “I have much better boundaries. I know how to practice self-care. What I give, I give with a full heart.” Make sure you have the time and the energy to devote yourself to your chosen cause, so when you give, it’s without resentment or pressure. When this is the case, the gratitude—for both the volunteer and the recipient—is immeasurable.“I’ve seen this again and again,” says Marotta. “There is almost no greater force for good than the power of careful attention to another person.”So thanks Kara. Thanks for helping me say what I deeply believe. And thanks to my fellow board members on the Network for helping me stay mindful of the many good reasons I do any kind of volunteer work. I'm a lucky girl. 

How I Spent My Week Off

How I spent my week off: Not the way this picture would suggest. This was our vacation week; the only week old David and I take all year, just for ourselves, up at our place by the lake.My friend Bobbie, in a laconic email containing only one link, pointed me to an article in The Times about how you really mustn't let your work life encroach on your vacation. It says you just can’t keep answering emails and making calls, much less initiating them, but... well, you know how it is: you’re never on vacation really after about age 30, and certainly not if you're someone who writes for a living.And then in my case there’s the non-profit I spend so much of my time with the local chapter of an organization called A Better Chance that places outstanding students of color from all around the country in secondary schools that are regarded as the among the most challenging, the high school in our town being one such. We call it ABC for short and somehow I can never NOT work on ABC stuff, especially now with two shiny new ABC scholars due to arrive in a little over a week.  Lots of us volunteers have been busy lately, fixing up the house where our eight guys live together with two amazing resident directors and a crack resident academic coordinator. I myself have been buying new file cabinets and furnishing the newly painted study room with cozy window treatments and fresh artwork.I'll admit I’m mad for window treatments lately and earlier this month even tried hanging swags from old Dave's broad shoulders, like Carol Brunette did in her spoof of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind when Scarlett uses those velvety drapes from the lost glory that was Tara to make herself a ball gown. It’s like a nesting mania with me lately. You’d think I 22  and eight months pregnant.Anyway the the upperclassmen will be coming back any day now, one for Cross Country, one to row Crew and one just to help get the younger guys assimilated to life in New England. And there’s yet more to do: We’re spiffing up the grounds and painting the fence, getting a plumber in to replace one of the shower doors., and day and night I’m writing to all the new volunteers in an attempt to infect them with the enthusiasm I feel for this organization that helps so many young men grow into their gifts.Here’s one of them now, Machias Turner, who left here in June at 6’5” but looks to be returning to us closer to 6'7”. The picture was taken on the ABC College Tour outside of one of the buildings on the campus of UNC Chapel Hill.BUT ANYWAY, having said all this about the work i couldn't help doing, I did relax some. In fact, along about Wednesday that rainy,rainy day I relaxed so much I wasn’t paying attention even to the simple things. I was treating my coffee with liquid sweetener and  added some drops then tasted: added more drops and tasted again. Why isn’t this getting any sweeter? I wondered before looking down at what I held in my hand to see what I was actually using: the bathing solution for my contact lenses. I knew I was in what passes for vacation mode in my world when I was able to just smile. So I put saline solution into my coffee, so what? What’s wrong with a little salt to go with your sweet? I mean, what else made the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup the hit that it is? :-)

Fun for the Four-Eyed (and more)

Two days ago I picked up a pair of glare-canceling nonprescription glasses (for night driving) and also a pair of prescription glasses, for the dreaded unforeseen circumstances under which my contacts pop clear out of my head.When you're at the optician's, they clamp all these gadgets to your face and then take a picture.Soooo, documentarian that I am, I took a picture OF that picture.It's me all right - same dumb little nose - but my eyes look strangely un-brown. I knew I had better get some of those glare-killing glasses because I often have precious cargo aboard in my car: seven talented young scholars, entrusted  for four years  to my town's local chapter of the A Better Chance Program by their awesome families. Here they all are last fall, on a fun outing in Boston that Resident Academic Coordinator Penny took them on. It was also last fall, while bringing them to see an amazing performance of Romeo & Juliet at the Strand Theatre in  Dorchester,  that I glanced down at my navigator for half a second and rolled into the car in front of us.At 5 mph, but still. The woman driving that car yelled "That really hurt!" and grabbed her neck when I jumped out to apologize. She also called the Staties. Those guys arrived, lights flashing, together with three guys in a fire truck, all of whom quickly assessed the situation and declared it a non-event.The boys, meanwhile, had hopped out of my car right when I did, some of them to comfort me (she was really yelling) and some to take pictures of her completely unblemished rear bumper.But then, when we all climbed back in to resume out pilgrimage, they were, to a man, quietly texting their mums:"Terry just rear-ended someone."Humbling! AND scary!Now I take so many precautions behind the wheel it's a wonder I ever get out of my own driveway, where peace reigns and even the field mouse feel safe. 

Waiting CAN be Fun

Waiting can be fun if the company's good. We had set out before 5:00 to get to the campus of Milton Academy to hear a talk by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, who in 1971 first came to this elite boarding school from the projects on Chicago’s South Side. He was a scholar with A Better Chance, the unique-in-the-country program that, since its founding, has helped more than 1400 students of color graduate from some 300 of the country’s most rigorous public and private schools and go on to careers in medicine, the law, government, you name it. (Read more about it here.)When I say ‘we’ I'm referring to the seven scholars in my own town’s ABC program, who live together in a cozy old house to which they came the summer before their 9th grade year.We had left for the event before 5:00 but now here it was almost 7:00 when ABC Executive Director Sandra Timmons stood to tell the crowd that foul weather had grounded the Governor’s plane in New York.Well, we could believe that;  even here in New England, dark clouds boiled and spit and winds were gusting up to 40 miles per hour.She said we shouldn’t worry though because, upon learning that his flight has been scrubbed, the Governor had started to drive, a four-hour journey under the best of circumstances.After some short remarks about the program, she said, “ Enjoy these wonderful appetizers!” “And… have fun networking!”“Have FUN?  Networking?” I’ll bet many were thinking. But in the end it was fun, in part because when you're waiting, you can relax. You’re where you’re supposed to be so for once you can let time spool, and enjoy the exchanges that come your way.One nice exchange I had occurred when I went to wash up from the buttery heaven of the appetizers and was greeted by a woman just drying her hands.“Welcome to the Ladies Room!” she cried and before we knew it we were talking passionately about the role of public education. Later, in that basement hallway, a gentleman and I laughed at the sight of a little brown lizard executing his calisthenics as he inched up the wall, blown up north, we joked, on this tide of southerly rain. And shortly after that, I stood at the beverage table where a third person and I noticed a bowl of greenery that appeared to be offering itself to one and all. We were examining it with interest when, in the nick of time, we saw a fork plunged in its pretty midst. “This is somebody’s salad!” we both yelled simultaneously, and just barely missed committing the faux pas of trying to make off with that guy's supper.A stir arose near the back of the hall and suddenly the Governor was bounding to the front of the hall.“Can you hear me without this? “ he asked, indicating the microphone.“Yes!” everyone  called back.Then he spoke simply, his hands clasped before him, about the lessons he has learned along the way.He said he now sees that his grandmother was right to say the prestige of having been admitted to Harvard meant less to her than opportunities her grandson would have there. He said you need to really peel back the surface layers of a thing to find its true meaning. Do that, he advised all of us. He said that when a young person asks something of you, you should try to say yes, and then stay faithful to that promise. He had stayed faithful, in fighting his way across the miles to see us. We had too, in waiting for him. And if we had some smiles along the way, why all the better.

(Sometimes it's good to have your schedule changed or to be blown a bit off course... )

      especially when your wait is really worth it  (Gamaral Sawyer with Governor Patrick in his office)  

Off to College

This boy came to our town as a five-foot tall freshman in high school. He was a scholar in our local chapter of the ABC Program. Such a journey!Back at the start of his time here I used to bring him over to Harvard for to bone up on his Italian with my nephew Matt. Matt was a freshman there at the time but time passed as time will do.Matt is now a senior at Harvard - and as of yesterday Rayvoughn was a freshman at the University of New Hampshire where he will study Computer Science.Even at 14, Ray was good with computers. Shortly after he arrived, he was already the go-to guy at the ABC House for PC issues.He networked all the computers and set up the wireless printer. And anytime anybody got a new Smart Phone - and we all know the Smart Phones are smarter than we are - Ray had it set and synched it up in a matter of minutes.I felt lucky. As a volunteer and then the head of the Student Life , I got to see him all the time, starting when he was just over 5 feet tall and stood up at the big Fundraising Dinner and all unbidden said what it meant to him to be part of this wonderful program.I remember when he began wrestling and found out he was good at it.That was the same time of year he wrote his History paper on the symbolic import of the Brooklyn Bridge in the years just after the ruinous War Between the States. I still have a video clip I made of him discovering all the material .But time keeps moving; we all know that. He began working for PC Quick Help and grew almost a foot and graduated from Winchester High School last June, making both his dad and his mom and the host family who sheltered him for four years very proud.

both as a 15-year old...

...and as an 18-year-old

And yesterday it was my privilege to bring him to college.And yesterday it was my privilege to bring him to college. Four trips up those stairs and my car, whcih at 10 am that packed to the gills, by 2:00 was once again empty.So shine on Rayvoughn Shion Millings! You have a world of support behind you!

The People You Walk With

It was a good first day of the year, yesterday was. I fetched a young ABC scholar just off the bus from the long vacation and brought him and his two ‘brothers’ to Anna’s Taqueria for burritos. Then they helped David carry a desk as the size of an elephant down three flights of stairs in our house. It was bound for our daughter Annie's place after 'living' here for 20-plus years.I remember carrying this desk UP all those stairs, in 1991, with only one skinny teenager to help me.“We had to saw off one of its legs,” I told David as we anticipated this job. His take on things? That the skinny teen and I must have approached the task wrong way back in the 90s. So imagine my satisfaction yesterday, when, after turning it every which way, all four of these guys concluded simultaneously that the thing couldn't POSSIBLY fit out the door of the room it was in... Unless we cut one of its leg off.Then things got easier, boy. We found the old cut, applied a hacksaw to it, got the leg off and got that desk DOWN the stairs. Well, they did that part while I hustled outside and commanded the five rear seats in my minivan to lie down flat. The next thing you knew that desk was in there.Getting that major task done AND being thus vindicated felt great – but not as good as what happened to me as with these three guys I sat over my burrito at Anna's:A woman stopped at our table on her way toward the door. Her shining face as she leaned down to me made me reach up and take her hand."Can I ask you something?” she said."Sure!" I replied."Were you once a teacher at Somerville High?”"Yes I was!" I happily admitted and then she told me her name and like magic there she suddenly was in my mind as her 16-year-old self.She gestured then toward the three young men and asked if they were my sons.A dozen answers came to my lips but the one I finally came out with felt the most honest:"They’re ... well they're the sons of my heart,"I said.And when I think of the things they do for me, like today's Herculean task, and of all the hours we have spent together talking after seeing a play or movie, or while riding in my car, and how many of their papers and essays I have looked at, eyes peeled for the run-on-sentence, the pronoun that doesn't agree with its antecedent, the pitfalls you risk falling into with too many adverbs, I realize that they really ARE the sons of my heart, and am so proud that this lovely former student took them for mine.Here they are now, Tobi Omola, Enderson Naar and Rayvoughn Millings. What great things they will do in the world one day! What great weight they mean to one day carry on all our behalf!

Holiday Surprises

Things aren't going that great around  here. We began having the kitchen painted the Monday after Thanksgiving and as of this past Tuesday all the kitchen stuff was still in the dining room. Holiday decorating!My little guys came over a week ago and put all the fake-dripping-wax 1980s-era candles in the windows but the rest of the project stalled.I didn’t even buy the tree 'til last Sunday, in the pouring rain and dark, and failed to notice at the time that it has a kind of giant goiter of branches on one side only. Hence it falls over.Twice it careened onto the ground and once, when we turned it goiter side in, it fell into the wall behind it , which made the front half of its base life right up off the floorLast night just before dinner was the last time it fell. We heard that telltale whoosh and then a sort of muffled thud as of a heavy person sitting down on the floor. We hurried into the living room and there it was.There it is I should say. It's there as I write.Another complicating factor in my week was my last-minute opportunity to go with all the ABC scholars I love, and their Resident Academic Coordinator Mario Paredes, into the Boston State House to meet with the Honorable Deval Patrick , Governor of the Commonwealth.What a lovely man he is, who made these eight feel how much he has in common with them , having himself left home at 14 to be an ABC student at Milton Academy.I was too shy to ask for a picture of me alone with him but everyone else got to do that as the official photographer snapped away.This picture is one Mario took as we first sat down together at the table in that jewel of an office in the old Bulfinch building.  Look at these happy faces! How glad I am that Mario arranged this and the Governor agreed to give us 30 minutes!It's a lesson to me: nobody cares what the table looks like at most gathering, as long as everyone can find a seat at it.And we'll get there on the house preparations. Today we're lashing the tree with wire to hardware on the two windows that flank it. The show must go on!  :-)

Here's the tree after its third and most recent  fainting spell. ( Sigh.)  At least there aren't any lights or ornaments on it yet. 

The Newsletter That Almost Killed Me

If someone were to ask me what I did with the month of October and first half of November I would say I produced the ABC newsletter. It feels like all I did in these last seven weeks but now it is done thank God, thank God.It was hard for me mostly because I have scant aptitude for serious information-driven writing and our student editor was just up to his eyeballs with academics and music lessons and football, so I said I would do it alone.  So I basically just used a bunch of pictures of these eight guys, got them to say a word about themselves and then just did some reporting about what the fall of 2012 was like at the Winchester ABC House,  just the way I would tell you if you were sitting here by me drinking soup say. On the couch say, in front of a fire say, our legs tucked up under us. It’s the only way I know how to write.I should say that National Program for A Better Chance has been opening the door to educational opportunities for thousands of young people of color in this nation for almost 50 years. Look here to read more .I have been Chair of Student Life for our local chapter of ABC for the last three years.This means I get to see our eight scholars a lot and in the most delightful ways.Example:At 8:30 on Halloween night I realized we had bought WAY too much candy for the number of Trick or Treaters who showed up at our door.I texted the ABC House leader, 17 year old senior Rayvoughn and said as much. He texted me back immediately. “We’ll be there in 20 minutes,” he said and sure enough at 8:50 here were five of the eight of them at my door. (The other three had too much homework to come. Winchester High is a hard school and these are serious achievement driven learners.)They got right at that bowl of candy.Then the boy called Hazees, a junior said “We want to see Dave."They like Old Dave, my husband since the first Moon Landing very nearly."David is reading in our room,” I said.“He'll want to see us, I know” said Hazees.So I hopped up the stairs to see if this was true. It was true and so up came all five and stood around our bed. David said "Not you guys again!", while smiling from ear to ear and they went on as males tend to do, saying jokey mock-insulting things back and forth.I took a picture with my phone but it's sort of terrible. It does show three of them standing around in our room.Better pictures are in the newsletter itself.. Like this one of Tobi, a sophomore who plays five musical instruments AND varsity football.and this one, of freshman LaVon:Then Gamaral with his mom  and his nice host family:Freshman Bryson with his two host brothers:And then there is this picture that isn't in the newsletter but shows three of the guys studying some of the pics I took on my phone:

Machias, Enderson and Tobi

What great kids they are and how I do love them all!Here is a page from the newsletter explaining a little of the more serious side of the program if you care to see it.

Important Notice: ABC Matching Gift Challenge is Under Way - A Message from the Board

As part of the 2012/2013 Annual Appeal, ABC has announced the kick-off of an exciting challenge from the Cummings Foundation.In honor of ABC’s long-time supporter Mike Regentz who passed away this past April, all donations to ABC in excess of last year’s pledges will be matched dollar for dollar up to $100,000. Also if a person’s employer has in place a matching donation program, the Cummings Foundation will ‘double the double’. Thus, a new gift of $100 which is matched by the donor’s company, would become $400.Funds raised in this way will be designated for college preparedness, and will make a huge difference to the lives of our scholars who must compete for those coveted college slots. Accordingly, we have over the last few years, begun identifying summer programs for them, as well as SAT preparation courses and college seminars.These things cost money, but the scholars could tell you how much they have benefited. In the last few years the guys have taken courses in Computer Science at Brown, Bioengineering and Molecular Biology at Clemson University, Writing at the University of Virginia, Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Psychology at Cornell, and general Humanities Courses at both Davidson College and Carleton College.When they come back to visit us as graduates they all go directly to the House at 2 Dix Street. This means that the current scholars all know their older ‘brothers’, and not superficially, but well.  DaLonn Pearson put it into words when he spoke at the Gala put on by the North Suburban YMCA. “This is what we do,” he said. “We build community.”  He expresses it exactly. It is what we all do when we are at our best, as brothers and sisters to one another and citizens of the world.

DaLonn at the podium Winchester High School class of 2009

Please help the scholars - and us - continue to build this extraordinary community of learners and future leaders.Winchester ABC has been opening the door to educational opportunity for talented, young men of color since 1971. It is funded entirely by private donations from Winchester individuals and organizations committed to making opportunity available to all. Donations may either be sent to Winchester ABC. P.O. Box 94, Winchester MA 01890 or made on line at www.winchesterabc.org 

Maybe the newsletter was hard to put together but it sure was fun gathering the news.

Now it's at the printer and very soon we will go get it bring it to the Post Office and out will go all 1700+ copies to all the good people who make the program possible.

Hazees and Ray below, with last spring's newsletter.. I feel so lucky, just to be watching them all on their journey.

Saints? We're No Saints

Somebody said to me yesterday, “You and your husband must be saints, having teenagers in the house all summer"  -see yesterday's post "The Give and the Get" - but it makes me so uncomfortable when people start with that you-must-be-saints stuff.I grew up in a three-generation household so it feels totally normal to me to have a bunch of people under one roof and I’m guessing it feels normal to  Old Dave too. Wasn’t he one of four brothers in a three-bedroom house that also included a single aunt?Didn’t he share a room with that aunt as a baby?These are the four Marotta boys on the left here. That’s oldest brother Toby looking like a teen idol, then my future husband David with his striped shirt and his white teeth, then in the front row younger brothers Skip and Jeff.Even here in our current house we've had many years when there were six or even seven kids, only three of whom our biological ‘own’ kids – and this is back in the era when we had just one shower. .David does occasionally have insomnia these days, so the one request I made to the guys when they moved in last June was that they be out of the downstairs after midnight which is when the affliction really hits. I figure what sleepless adult born before the first moon landing wants to come downstairs with his George R.R. Martin book to find a 17-year-old draped on the couch in front of the Cartoon Network?They got that. Of course they got that. They also got it that I don’t want to be chatted with when I’m writing.And for our part we ‘got’ some things too. A long time ago we started ‘getting’ it that most houseguests don’t want to be fussed over. Accordingly, we showed the boys the spoons and dishes and bought them the right milk and the right cereals and the kinds of chees and rolls and coldcuts that they like. We showed them the pots and the cutting boards and kept the fruit bowl full and that was about all we had to do.They were easy - in part because they are ABC Scholars, young people who because of their academic ability and their ambition applied as eighth graders to the national A Better Chance program and ended up coming here to this town with its first-rate high school. They left home and family at 14 to do this – some came at 13 - and they know better than most of us how to navigate new waters.Plus having lived with one another in the ABC House, they’re wonderfully neat. The bathroom they used all summer never had so much as a wet towel in it never mind any toiletries. They carry those things in and when they’re done they carry them back out again.Then they’re so funny and smart and they wrestle each other to the floor just like I used to see Dave’s brothers do with him when we were young and I was first coming into the Marotta family.So saints? We're no saints. We're just doing what we've always done in this house. This below is Dodson, our own ABC host son, when he lived here too just before heading off to college in long-ago 1990. Then under that here is he is again teasing our oldest girl Carrie. They painted the study for me and earned money pulling  the old shingles off the front porch roof that summer. I look at these pictures and remember back over  these last two months and think, well, the fun is where you make it in life!

The Give and the Get

It’s not hard to love the people who live in your house. They're right there in your house, so you really SEE them,  almost from inside their very own eyes!I mean here's this one’s toothbrush, and comb, for example and the towel he uses each day for his shower, tokens of the daily care-of-the-body tasks we all must perform each day.Here’s the book that one reads when sleep eludes him. He has left it on the porch, thinking maybe to pack it on his bike and take it to work to read at the lunch hour.And here, under the bureau: here is a balled-up sock where it has landed after being taken off and tossed away some weary midnight.You can never be annoyed at a person once you have seen these things.I should say I don’t do actual maid service around here- not unless my houseguests are the ages of the two little ones I wrote about yesterday - so I see socks and such only sometimes, when these guys would be away for a week or two and I stripped their beds to washed their linens, just because everyone deserves clean linens….But why don’t I back up a little here and explain this better: We have had four different young people staying in our house this summer, all part of the National Program for a Better Chance, all young men of on the cusp of college life.  No shower has gone forth without the muted boom of hip-hop pulsing from the bathroom. No golden summer afternoon has billowed into evening without the sound of their happy voices in the kitchen.Two of them had jobs in this the first summer before heading off to Bard College RPI. That's Cam and Tristan at the top here. Then a third, now a high school Senior, worked as a tech for a computer repair company, leaving for a two-week stint at Brown where he took a course in the computer operating system known as Linux . And a fourth, a high school Junior did a college tour, took a Neurobiology course at Emory and spent just a week with us, doing an SAT-prep boot camp at a great place called Chyten.  Boy Three did the same course and both came home each day at 5:00, brimming with news about all the English words derived from Latin.The "give" By David and me was that they slept here and ate a little, though not very much I must say. They packed their own lunches so I just had to buy deli stuff , and it's amazing how far a teen male can go on Pop Tarts and Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Cocoa Puffs, foods I have never before stoked in this house. It's true they like meat at night but hey so do we and if you're grilling two nice fat burgers you might just as well grill six. I guess I also gave them rides to the Y so they could work out but again, I was going to the Y myself to catch those cardio classes I love so much.So that was pretty much the 'give.' Not such a long list.The 'get'  list for me is much longer. I personally got:

• Much more motivation to get to the Y than I would normally have.
• Help putting away the groceries
• Companionship in buying the groceries
• All the emergency help I could ever have wanted with my PC, my i-Pad and i-Phone and even  my i-Pod when I dropped it in the sink that time
• Help hanging drapes on extra-wide windows (Number Three has a six-foot wingspan) and..
• A million laughs.

Here are House guest Numbers Three and Four, Rayvoughn and Hazees, helping me tote stuff in June.Ray was with us almost the whole summer. He helped me, he teased David, he backed down from an arm-wrestle challenge from David (more than once) and he played with our little grandsons.It's  time now for him to start the long grind of applying to colleges.He's equal to the task I think. He's a smart as a whip and hurdles just don't scare him. even if he doesn't always ZIP the life jacket even tough he put its mostly on, and maybe THAT's the lesson he taught me this summer: Strike a humorous pose, look like you're equal to any challenge and you might just pull it off!

Mysterious

 Some days all you can do is pray on it all. This picture if from 1986:

This one is from 1988:

I was 36 when I met these guys. I was the English  tutor in the ABC program.Now I’m 62, yet I can still feel my 13-year-old self inside me, so serious a girl then.I was merry as a small child, then I grew grave as my circumstances changed. Then I met David and married and have been merry ever since.He thinks I’m funny. Wrong a lot, but funny. I think he's funny too. Truth is, we've only recently stopped dumping cold water on the other guy while he or she is in the shower... Good times~Uncle Ed is 91 today. Our honorary daughter-in-law Veronica bought all his favorites foods to him at lunchtime. She and I met at his apartment and it was so cheery on a dark rainy day.Once he looked like this when he was four years in the South Pacific:Life is so mysterious. If I get 91 years it will be 2040… Can't wait to see where we all are by then!   

Go Safe

Most of them have gone home to their families now, the scholars of our town’s ABC program. I know this as the person who organizes their enrichment and outreach activities.Together with some stalwart helpers I set up all our adventures and didn't we have a lot of them this past year, among them a trip to the zoo, a viewing of Shakespeare's Antony & Cleopatra, frequent car ride in to the city to work with schoolchildren at 826 Boston, one of the most amazing after-school writing programs in the country to name but a few.ABC is pretty amazing itself but to go on for now with our list: We went go-carting one Saturday and did laser tag another. (I held the coats.) One bitterly cold weekend in January we went to an indoor water park called Coco Key, and treated ourselves to an overnight in the attached hotel, my husband David and I staying in a room two doors down from the eight students. (I smile at that memory: I must have cut up 10 pounds of fruit to leave in their suite in an attempt to at least partially counteract the harm done by the too many soft drinks and high-salt snacks I knew they would be consuming late at night as they watched TV and dropped one by one into sleep.) All year they participated in athletics,  swimming and wrestling, hoops and lacrosse, and now the three seniors are off to Northeastern, to SUNY Binghamton and to Phillips Exeter for a post-grad year before college.Meantime, the underclassmen are hot on their heels in the achievement department with their SAT prep classes and the summer programs. (Our poor exhausted kids these days! when do they rest?) I am part of what they need rest from no doubt, since I'm forever emailing, texting  and Facebook-messaging them to set up these various activities we do together. Not that they didn't reach out to me plenty of times too, especially when they needed one of those after-school rides to the Y. So I guess I won’t be hearing the glassy ping! of their incoming texts for a while and I admit I will miss that. I started volunteering with this town's ABC program back in '86 when I served simultaneously as the Enrichment Chair, the English Tutor and a Host Mom. Then I was away from it for 15 years but I sure am back now, since 2008, and looking at these pictures below I don't know as I'll ever be able to leave again. I wonder: Do kids ever know how much they mean to the adults who help nurture them?

Homecoming

I’ve spent the last three weeks clearing out every drawer and closet on the third floor because he's coming home today. I mean Dodson. Dodson is coming home. We call him our oldest child, not because  I bore him  - I  didn't; his awesome parents are New Yorkers - but because he gave himself to us when, as a high school freshman just five feet tall he came into our lives as a member of the A Better Chance program in our town.He and his friend Keith were so small the football players once put them on top of the lockers just because they could. Dodson didn’t seem to mind; he had a fine sense of himself  even then. Didn't he wear his red and blue satin Mets jacket all that year? This in the fall of 1986 when everyone in every seat around him was rooting for the Red Sox?Our biological kids were 10, 7 and 2 when he came into our lives and he simply became... their big brother.For college he had a choice between Georgia Tech and RPI and we were so glad he chose RPI because Troy NY was just three and a half hours from here. He lived with us summers too, and on most school vacations. (I should say that this picture at the very top shows him with our girl Annie when Annie was a high school sophomore.)He got his first real job right near here, at Raytheon; bought his first car here, which Annie then drove for five years once he was done with it and Michael drove for five years after that; go this first apartment here. He let me practice on him when I was going to school to become a massage therapist. He really bulked up then as you can see.He called that process "the thickening" and it sent him straight to the gym where he magically transformed himself back into slenderness.Then one fateful day in 2005 while visiting my sister Nan and niece Gracie in Florida he met the little firecracker God had been saving for him all along. Veronica was visiting from Argentina, he was living in Lowell MA in one of the gorgeous converted mills along the Merrimack River. Could they make a life together?They could and they did, getting engaged in 2006 and marrying in 2007. They settled in Sarasota and now - now, saints be praised, they are moving back, to make their home and and start their family here by us. the ones who fell in love with him in that long-ago year when it was was the Mets and the Yankees in the World Series.

Last Seen Wearing....

Last weekend I took these guys to the zoo and today we’re going to attack a corn maze. It makes a nice break from working on the intricate moving parts of Honors Algebra or reading your 40 pages per night of Jane Austen.These are 6 of 8 top students who, through the National Program for a Better Chance , left their warm homes and familiar neighborhoods to attend high school in our town. ABC places kids in over 300 public and private schools throughout the country and we have such a program, supported by 80 volunteers, by countless donations  from the community and, this year, by my own small contribution as Mistress of  Enrichment, Community Service and Last Minute Rides to the Y.

Most weekends the scholars are busy studying for SATs and playing sports and writing papers but this weekend we decided to drive to my family’s summer place, together with Winchester ABC’s President Jennifer Regentz and her hubby Mike who between them seem to be doing all of the the cooking  (yay!)

And today we're doing something much more arduous than interacting with jaguars. They're  still sleeping at the moment – something about that midnight screening of  "Fight Club" I found them enthralled in when I wandered out to the kitchen to fetch a glass of water – but soon we will all get marched into a maze so puzzling it makes old Honors Algie III look easy: the famous Corn Maze at Moulton Farms.   My kids and I did it last fall and if it weren't for our son Mike with his memory like God’s own memory we'd still in there now. I'll report  back in a few days if we manage to get out that quickly. And oh yeah: Ray in his hoodie might be trying to look like some tough guy in the picture above but he's a big softie really, as you can see here with his arm around Class of  '14-er Hazees.

good luck to us; they don't even give you  a map! corn maze from the air Mouton Farms NH