28 is the Perfect Age
Dear God,
I’m 28. Thank You!
Thank You for all of the tidbits of other people’s lives I’ve been able to live. They have saved me time in determining my own.
Thank You for sending me on the press bus when Bill Clinton did his big tour through Washington in ’96. It was a great experience to have, once. By the end of the day, I’d heard him give his stump speech eight times and was bored to tears. My only real accomplishment was making a Secret Service agent smile. It taught me not to try being Wolf Blitzer.
Thank You for the Korean Neo-Confucianist-turned-Methodist pastor who taught me that I am not a Protestant.
Thank You for the extroverted, depressed and talkative girl who kept me as her “reserve boy.” Thank You for showing me the consequences of choosing one’s friends by breast size, and for not making me pay for it too much.
Thank You for two years in the Peace Corps to teach me that I am not Margaret Mead.
Thank You for two years working in a homeless shelter to teach me that I am not Mother Theresa. And, thank you for my psychotic but altruistic co-worker who taught me that regardless of the quality of an organization’s mission, I’ll never be happy unless I get along with the people in the office.
Thank You for the school shooting, which taught me never to try being a character from “Law & Order.”
Thank You for my large body and slow legs, which taught me never to try being Ricky Sanders from the Redskins.
Thank You for the 30-40 dogs I knew growing up, who taught me the joy of having one dog who will actually bring back your Frisbee.
Thank You for the shy, studious young woman who finished college at the age of 19. She was brilliant, but she learned about men from Jane Austen books. Thank You for teaching me the dangers of wanting a girl just for her brain.
Thank You for the crazy professor who led me up Pinnacle Peak, the top 300 feet of which are a cliff full of footholds that can be used by people with smaller feet than mine. Thank You for teaching me that it’s easier to climb up than down. Thank You for saving my life that day, for teaching me that by slow scooting, a large butt can grip what wide feet cannot, and for saving me from another expensive hobby. My Mom sewed up the shorts.
Thank You for the cheerful Cambodian boy who drew pictures of smiling people who were missing arms and legs. When I realized that they were land-mine survivors, I learned to be thankful for what you have, whatever you have.
Thank You for my current job paying bills for a non-profit too quirky to describe. Though I while away the hours typing things like “kumquat” into Google just to see what happens, I am sure someday I will understand why I had this experience.
Thank You for the former sorority president with long brown hair whom I met at church two years ago. I got such false hopes about her that when she turned out not to like me, I ran across the neighborhood to attend church at the parish with no girls in it. A lovely young woman came to help with the choir one day, and I married her.
I’ve had all these wonderful experiences, and now I’m 28, the perfect age. I know it’s perfect because 28’s divisors equal 28, see: 1+2+4+7+14=28. My next chance at this is 496.
I’m certainly glad I got to do this, especially while I was young enough to enjoy it and before I developed a standard of living. But, I want to ask You, what do I do next? What’s it all add up to? I wish all these parts of my life added up as well as 28.
Friday, December 14, 2007
Monday, June 18, 2007
Groom's Guide to San Francisco
You’re a relative or friend of mine, and you’ve decided to come some umpteen thousands of miles to my wedding. I’m honored! If your personal budget is at all like mine, the cost of your ticket plus those lovely “just married” mudflaps you’ve got in your suitcase probably don’t have you enthusiastic about blowing $14.95 on the fish and chips basket at Fisherman’s Wharf (drink not included).
This guide is intended to help you have fun, see interesting and special stuff, save money, and pretend that you know the town when friends of yours from work fly here for their vacations to the West’s biggest tourist trap.
First, some cost-saving tips:
1. We have three airports in the Bay Area, all of which are sort of close to a rail station. Go to orbitz.com and run a search on flights from your home to SFO, and click the box “airports within 80 miles” and you might find some deals. (Don’t go to Monterey.) One caveat, though – the Bay Bridge is going to be closed over Labor Day weekend for earthquake upgrade stuff. If you want to get from Oakland to San Francisco, you’ll have to take the BART (underwater subway train).
2. Think about buying a Muni Passport. This is a special pass that gets you unlimited use of the buses and cable cars. A one-day pass is $11, a three-day pass is $18, and a seven-day pass is $24. You don’t have to specify which days until you actually start using the pass.
http://www.sfmta.com/cms/mfares/passports.htm
Or, if you want a little more fun, think about a City Pass, which gets you seven days on the buses and cable cars, and admission to your choice of one of several museums, and you can also go on a boat tour of the bay. It’s $54.
http://www.citypass.com/city/sanfrancisco.html
Now, stuff to do, most of which does not require a rental car:
Socialize with some of the other wedding guests. There are two nearby restaurants that are great for this (motel has no lobby). I would like to suggest Asqew, 3348 Steiner, a shish-kebab grilling place, and Mel’s Drive-In, 2165 Lombard, a classic-style American diner with heavy food that should be eaten slowly. (Public restrooms are often a challenge to find in San Francisco.) One delicious exception from the “heavy food” category – the Tuna Ahi steak sandwich. These two are within a block of the hotel.
See the Wild Parrots of San Francisco. Somebody made a movie about them. I’ve never seen it, but the parrots are real. There are two colonies of them that I know about – one on Telegraph Hill in the trees surrounding Coit Tower, and the other at the Lombard Gate of the Presidio (military base turned into housing and office space). The latter is a mere eight-block walk from the hotel. To get there, walk out of the hotel and cross Lombard at Steiner Street. Go one block to Greenwich and turn right. Walk until Greenwich ends at a T intersection at Lyon and turn right. Go one block to Lombard, turn left and go through the gate with the big cannons by it. The parrots live in the eucalyptus trees up above the park. They have red heads and green bodies, and a wonderful, musical cawing. You’re most likely to see them around sunrise, which will be 6:40 a.m. on Labor Day weekend, but I’ve seen them out at 8 a.m., too.
If you want to go to Coit Tower, which provides a lovely view of both bridges, it’s a 2.5 mile walk. Or, you can take the No. 30 inbound bus, which stops one block to the north of the hotel at Chestnut and Pierce. Take that bus to Washington Square, and get off. From there you can walk up the hill to Coit, or you can wait for the No. 39 bus to come get you and take you to the top. Even if you have a car, this is a good strategy because the parking lot at the top of hill is usually very full.
Another spot worth stopping at in this neighborhood: The Italian-French Bakery at Grant and Green (1501 Grant). It’s one of the few San Francisco bakeries where they still bake bread on site. A small roll costs $.60
Let’s go fly a kite! Crissy Field is a nice, wide, grassy field along the bay with excellent views of the Golden Gate Bridge. Some serious kite flyers like to bring large stunt kites that are fun to watch here. Also, if you’re the type of guest who would bring a wet suit and a sail board to a wedding (and I know one) this is your place to launch. Just be careful at low tide – the current going out of the Golden Gate is strong and getting sucked out to sea sucks.
Getting there. Leave the hotel and walk north on Pierce St. Turn left on Beach, right on Scott. When you get to Marina Blvd., you’ll see Marina Green, which is a very pretty field, too, but you’re not quite there yet. Turn left on Marina. Go to the right at the funny fork in the road, and go through the Marina Gate of the Presidio. (Now you’re on Mason St.) If you look left, you can see the Exploratorium and the Palace of Fine Arts. (Also neat places to go, but we’re flying kites. Focus, please…) Keep walking on Mason, go past a lagoon, and on the right will be a big field, and a beach after it.
Other beaches: There are two other large sandy beaches in San Francisco, Ocean Beach, which unsurprisingly is on the west edge of San Francisco facing the Pacific Ocean. There’s an area where bonfires are allowed. You can walk for about two miles on the beach, and then when you run out of beach, you’re near the San Francisco Zoo. To get to Ocean Beach, walk to Fillmore St. and catch the No. 22 bus going uphill. At Geary Blvd., transfer to the No. 38 Ocean Beach bus going outbound (left-to-right). Make sure it says “Ocean Beach” on the front, as there are several varieties of the 38. Take it to the end of the line (next to a Safeway) and walk into the wind.
And there’s Baker Beach, with its excellent view of the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s got bigger waves, and a few rocks you can climb on. To get there, use the above directions to walk to Crissy Field. At Mason St. and Halleck, wait at a No. 29 bus stop. Get on there. (Make sure you’re headed towards the Golden Gate Bridge.) Watch out the right window for signs for Baker Beach, and walk through the parking lot. One caution: as you walk towards the north end of the beach, you might see a fellow off in the distance who’s wearing a brown suit. Um, he’s in his birthday suit. That end of the beach is a favorite place for the fabric-free.
If you feel obligated to act like a tourist, you can go to Fisherman’s Wharf via the No. 30 bus mentioned above. At the end of Pier 39 (the singularity point at the center of the tourist black hole) there is a salt-water taffy shop worth visiting. Also, in that same neighborhood is In-N-Out Burger at 333 Jefferson. The burgers here are the best around in my opinion, and they’re cheap! If you’re a chocloholic and you feel drawn to Ghiradelli Square, it’s a fine place to look around, but if you want to actually buy chocolate, go to a drug store or grocery store anywhere in San Francisco, and you’ll find the same products for 20 percent less.
The other cool thing you can do in the Wharf is hop on the F Street Car, which is an historic streetcar line that runs on the surface. It’ll take you through the Embarcadero, and past the Ferry Building, where there is often a farmers’ market. From there, it goes down Market Street all the way to the Castro.
The other super-touristy spot in San Francisco is North Beach, although there are a few places worth seeing there, too. My favorite of them: Café Tosca, 242 Columbus. Order the House Coffee, which is really hot cocoa, steamed milk and brandy. It’s $5. Café Tosca was around back in the Beatnik poet days, so Jack Kerouac would’ve been drinking there. Spec’s 12 Adler Museum Café is nearby at 12 Saroyan Pl. It’s neat just for the signs on the wall. Two others worth visiting: Vesuvio, 255 Columbus, and Caffé Trieste, 601 Vallejo, is where Francis Ford Coppola took his typewriter for 8 hours a day and sat writing the screenplay to The Godfather. If you’re from Pittsburgh and feeling nostalgic, check out Giordano Brothers’, 303 Columbus, which is an almost exact copy of Primanti Bros. This bar/restaurant is famous for putting coleslaw and fries onto Italian sandwiches. (Odd but tasty.)
Nob Hill is also worth strolling around, and there are two spots up there worth seeing: The Top of the Mark, at California and Mason, which is a jazz club on top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel, has excellent music and great views of the city. It became famous with a photograph during World War II of servicemen saying goodbye to America there before they shipped out.
http://www.businessimagegroup.com/sfimages/history/NobHill.html
Grace Cathedral is a gorgeous gothic church at 1100 California St., and in it is a carpet labyrinth that will keep you occupied for some time. Maybe not as good as the one Tom designed in the snow one year at Christmas, but definitely worth trying. Take off your shoes.
Down towards my neighborhood, you can find a few places worth visiting. Tommy’s Joynt, 1101 Geary Blvd., is a restaurant/bar that has very well prepared and tasty meat dishes for less than $10. If you’re set on fish and chips in San Francisco, try Piccadilly’s Fish and Chips at 1348 Polk St. They’re cheaper and better there than the Wharf, but eat them slowly. And, last in this group is Saigon Sandwich at 560 Larkin, the best value in San Francisco, where none of these tasty Vietnamese sandwiches cost more than $2.50. (It’s open 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.)
Getting to all of the above involves a 1.5 – 2 mile walk or getting on a Southbound bus on Van Ness.
Finally, two more gorgeous spots: Holy Virgin Cathedral, at 6210 Geary Blvd., is a beautiful, beautiful church with five gold domes. To get there, follow the directions to Ocean Beach but get off at 25th Street, and walk to the tall Russian Orthodox church there. (Side note – this church shares the same name as the one where the wedding will be. The congregation moved from the Old Cathedral, 864 Fulton St., where we’re getting married, to the New Cathedral, which is, in my opinion, the most beautiful Orthodox church in North America.)
And, I want to put in a plug for the Mt. Lick Observatory, which is a two-hour drive from San Francisco, but it is a really, really neat place where you can get a tour of the telescopes, look at a whole bunch of neat astronomical photographs and see a magnificent view of the Silicon Valley. Here’s a link:
http://mthamilton.ucolick.org/
I hope this guide has been somewhat useful to you. The paper announcements will be going out in a few weeks!
Love,
Thomas Eric Ruthford
This guide is intended to help you have fun, see interesting and special stuff, save money, and pretend that you know the town when friends of yours from work fly here for their vacations to the West’s biggest tourist trap.
First, some cost-saving tips:
1. We have three airports in the Bay Area, all of which are sort of close to a rail station. Go to orbitz.com and run a search on flights from your home to SFO, and click the box “airports within 80 miles” and you might find some deals. (Don’t go to Monterey.) One caveat, though – the Bay Bridge is going to be closed over Labor Day weekend for earthquake upgrade stuff. If you want to get from Oakland to San Francisco, you’ll have to take the BART (underwater subway train).
2. Think about buying a Muni Passport. This is a special pass that gets you unlimited use of the buses and cable cars. A one-day pass is $11, a three-day pass is $18, and a seven-day pass is $24. You don’t have to specify which days until you actually start using the pass.
http://www.sfmta.com/cms/mfares/passports.htm
Or, if you want a little more fun, think about a City Pass, which gets you seven days on the buses and cable cars, and admission to your choice of one of several museums, and you can also go on a boat tour of the bay. It’s $54.
http://www.citypass.com/city/sanfrancisco.html
Now, stuff to do, most of which does not require a rental car:
Socialize with some of the other wedding guests. There are two nearby restaurants that are great for this (motel has no lobby). I would like to suggest Asqew, 3348 Steiner, a shish-kebab grilling place, and Mel’s Drive-In, 2165 Lombard, a classic-style American diner with heavy food that should be eaten slowly. (Public restrooms are often a challenge to find in San Francisco.) One delicious exception from the “heavy food” category – the Tuna Ahi steak sandwich. These two are within a block of the hotel.
See the Wild Parrots of San Francisco. Somebody made a movie about them. I’ve never seen it, but the parrots are real. There are two colonies of them that I know about – one on Telegraph Hill in the trees surrounding Coit Tower, and the other at the Lombard Gate of the Presidio (military base turned into housing and office space). The latter is a mere eight-block walk from the hotel. To get there, walk out of the hotel and cross Lombard at Steiner Street. Go one block to Greenwich and turn right. Walk until Greenwich ends at a T intersection at Lyon and turn right. Go one block to Lombard, turn left and go through the gate with the big cannons by it. The parrots live in the eucalyptus trees up above the park. They have red heads and green bodies, and a wonderful, musical cawing. You’re most likely to see them around sunrise, which will be 6:40 a.m. on Labor Day weekend, but I’ve seen them out at 8 a.m., too.
If you want to go to Coit Tower, which provides a lovely view of both bridges, it’s a 2.5 mile walk. Or, you can take the No. 30 inbound bus, which stops one block to the north of the hotel at Chestnut and Pierce. Take that bus to Washington Square, and get off. From there you can walk up the hill to Coit, or you can wait for the No. 39 bus to come get you and take you to the top. Even if you have a car, this is a good strategy because the parking lot at the top of hill is usually very full.
Another spot worth stopping at in this neighborhood: The Italian-French Bakery at Grant and Green (1501 Grant). It’s one of the few San Francisco bakeries where they still bake bread on site. A small roll costs $.60
Let’s go fly a kite! Crissy Field is a nice, wide, grassy field along the bay with excellent views of the Golden Gate Bridge. Some serious kite flyers like to bring large stunt kites that are fun to watch here. Also, if you’re the type of guest who would bring a wet suit and a sail board to a wedding (and I know one) this is your place to launch. Just be careful at low tide – the current going out of the Golden Gate is strong and getting sucked out to sea sucks.
Getting there. Leave the hotel and walk north on Pierce St. Turn left on Beach, right on Scott. When you get to Marina Blvd., you’ll see Marina Green, which is a very pretty field, too, but you’re not quite there yet. Turn left on Marina. Go to the right at the funny fork in the road, and go through the Marina Gate of the Presidio. (Now you’re on Mason St.) If you look left, you can see the Exploratorium and the Palace of Fine Arts. (Also neat places to go, but we’re flying kites. Focus, please…) Keep walking on Mason, go past a lagoon, and on the right will be a big field, and a beach after it.
Other beaches: There are two other large sandy beaches in San Francisco, Ocean Beach, which unsurprisingly is on the west edge of San Francisco facing the Pacific Ocean. There’s an area where bonfires are allowed. You can walk for about two miles on the beach, and then when you run out of beach, you’re near the San Francisco Zoo. To get to Ocean Beach, walk to Fillmore St. and catch the No. 22 bus going uphill. At Geary Blvd., transfer to the No. 38 Ocean Beach bus going outbound (left-to-right). Make sure it says “Ocean Beach” on the front, as there are several varieties of the 38. Take it to the end of the line (next to a Safeway) and walk into the wind.
And there’s Baker Beach, with its excellent view of the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s got bigger waves, and a few rocks you can climb on. To get there, use the above directions to walk to Crissy Field. At Mason St. and Halleck, wait at a No. 29 bus stop. Get on there. (Make sure you’re headed towards the Golden Gate Bridge.) Watch out the right window for signs for Baker Beach, and walk through the parking lot. One caution: as you walk towards the north end of the beach, you might see a fellow off in the distance who’s wearing a brown suit. Um, he’s in his birthday suit. That end of the beach is a favorite place for the fabric-free.
If you feel obligated to act like a tourist, you can go to Fisherman’s Wharf via the No. 30 bus mentioned above. At the end of Pier 39 (the singularity point at the center of the tourist black hole) there is a salt-water taffy shop worth visiting. Also, in that same neighborhood is In-N-Out Burger at 333 Jefferson. The burgers here are the best around in my opinion, and they’re cheap! If you’re a chocloholic and you feel drawn to Ghiradelli Square, it’s a fine place to look around, but if you want to actually buy chocolate, go to a drug store or grocery store anywhere in San Francisco, and you’ll find the same products for 20 percent less.
The other cool thing you can do in the Wharf is hop on the F Street Car, which is an historic streetcar line that runs on the surface. It’ll take you through the Embarcadero, and past the Ferry Building, where there is often a farmers’ market. From there, it goes down Market Street all the way to the Castro.
The other super-touristy spot in San Francisco is North Beach, although there are a few places worth seeing there, too. My favorite of them: Café Tosca, 242 Columbus. Order the House Coffee, which is really hot cocoa, steamed milk and brandy. It’s $5. Café Tosca was around back in the Beatnik poet days, so Jack Kerouac would’ve been drinking there. Spec’s 12 Adler Museum Café is nearby at 12 Saroyan Pl. It’s neat just for the signs on the wall. Two others worth visiting: Vesuvio, 255 Columbus, and Caffé Trieste, 601 Vallejo, is where Francis Ford Coppola took his typewriter for 8 hours a day and sat writing the screenplay to The Godfather. If you’re from Pittsburgh and feeling nostalgic, check out Giordano Brothers’, 303 Columbus, which is an almost exact copy of Primanti Bros. This bar/restaurant is famous for putting coleslaw and fries onto Italian sandwiches. (Odd but tasty.)
Nob Hill is also worth strolling around, and there are two spots up there worth seeing: The Top of the Mark, at California and Mason, which is a jazz club on top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel, has excellent music and great views of the city. It became famous with a photograph during World War II of servicemen saying goodbye to America there before they shipped out.
http://www.businessimagegroup.com/sfimages/history/NobHill.html
Grace Cathedral is a gorgeous gothic church at 1100 California St., and in it is a carpet labyrinth that will keep you occupied for some time. Maybe not as good as the one Tom designed in the snow one year at Christmas, but definitely worth trying. Take off your shoes.
Down towards my neighborhood, you can find a few places worth visiting. Tommy’s Joynt, 1101 Geary Blvd., is a restaurant/bar that has very well prepared and tasty meat dishes for less than $10. If you’re set on fish and chips in San Francisco, try Piccadilly’s Fish and Chips at 1348 Polk St. They’re cheaper and better there than the Wharf, but eat them slowly. And, last in this group is Saigon Sandwich at 560 Larkin, the best value in San Francisco, where none of these tasty Vietnamese sandwiches cost more than $2.50. (It’s open 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.)
Getting to all of the above involves a 1.5 – 2 mile walk or getting on a Southbound bus on Van Ness.
Finally, two more gorgeous spots: Holy Virgin Cathedral, at 6210 Geary Blvd., is a beautiful, beautiful church with five gold domes. To get there, follow the directions to Ocean Beach but get off at 25th Street, and walk to the tall Russian Orthodox church there. (Side note – this church shares the same name as the one where the wedding will be. The congregation moved from the Old Cathedral, 864 Fulton St., where we’re getting married, to the New Cathedral, which is, in my opinion, the most beautiful Orthodox church in North America.)
And, I want to put in a plug for the Mt. Lick Observatory, which is a two-hour drive from San Francisco, but it is a really, really neat place where you can get a tour of the telescopes, look at a whole bunch of neat astronomical photographs and see a magnificent view of the Silicon Valley. Here’s a link:
http://mthamilton.ucolick.org/
I hope this guide has been somewhat useful to you. The paper announcements will be going out in a few weeks!
Love,
Thomas Eric Ruthford
Monday, January 22, 2007
Good news from San Francisco
January 22, 2007
San Francisco
I have a second-grade student, Sariyah, whom I tutor in the After-School Program at Raphael House. She's very serious, and doesn't let me get away with much. Last week, I tried telling her an elephant joke.
"How do you put an elephant in a refrigerator?" I asked.
"You can't do that -- it would hurt the elephant. He would be too cold and he wouldn't be able to breathe."
A few months ago, one of her classmates, Jenny, cut out a paper set of eyebrows and a musketeer's goatee, and taped them on her fact. Jenny came walking into the tutoring room wearing this. I saw Jenny and cracked a smile. Sariyah shook her finger at me and said, "We're working."
This isn't to say that she doesn't have a sense of humor -- she does, it just comes out at odd moments. One day, her father and 18-month-old brother came to pick her up.
I said to Sariyah, "You should be nice to your brother because he's a boy and some day, he'll be bigger than you."
"So should you," she replied, "because when that happens, you're gonna be dead or really old."
She's one of our most hard-working students, and I think, one of the most intelligent, although one wouldn't have guessed it when she first came to Raphael House a year ago. She read words in books very, very slowly, sounding out every syllable, and when she wrote, she spent about a minute and a half on each word, crafting every letter perfectly on the page. I encouraged her to go faster, but she wouldn't hear of it -- she wanted to get it right the first time.
Her language abilities were a bit behind her classmates' partially because she was learning English as a second language -- her family immigrated to the United States three years ago -- but I soon realized that her slowness was because she was a perfectionist. For her, this turned out to be more of a help than a hindrance. She had wonderful learning techniques, often while we were practicing spelling words, she would scold me if I didn't cover the words with my hands. "I won't learn them if I can see them! I have to have them in my mind," she said. Her knowledge base was limited, but she knew how to expand it.
Children who have been homeless are often mislabeled as "special needs" because they're behind in their academic abilities. But, their problem is usually a lack of a place and a time to study. We have an average of 28-30 children in the After-School program, and when they come on a regular basis, it's amazing to see them improve.
Sariyah's now about where she should be for a second-grader, and she can read books to me with minimal help. She's a remarkable child for another reason -- she comes from an intact family, unlike most of the families we serve, 75 percent of which are headed by a single mother. Her family is functional and healthy, and both the parents are hard-working, but even with the jobs they had upon arriving in San Francisco, they couldn't pay the rent, and they came to live in the Raphael House family homeless shelter. They were here for a few months at the beginning of 2006, and then they were able to move into transitional housing, and now they have an apartment of their own. Even though they don't live at Raphael House any more, Sariyah still comes to our tutoring program every day.
She has an unusual amount of social grace for a child her age, often asking me what's wrong if I'm tired or sad. Sometimes she and her classmates get philosophical, too, and I learn quite a bit.
Once, I was helping a classmate of hers, Jenny, with compound words, and Jenny whined, "I don't ge-e-e-t it."
I said, "A compound word is when you have two small words that make something else when you put them together. You know what a dog is? You know what a house is? A doghouse is something different."
"I still don't get it," she said in the same tone.
"What's a boy?" I asked.
"A person," she answered.
"What's a friend?"
"Someone you like."
"Well, a 'boyfriend' is someone a girl might kiss," I said, and Jenny, Sariyah and the two other girls at the table recoiled in disgust. Sariyah pulled up her jacket over her face to hide from the thought.
Jenny told me in her most authoritative voice, "No, it's not. A boyfriend is a boy you're friends with, which is more better. You don't do that."
Sariyah extended her hands out to her sides as if they were a scale. With one hand, she said, "That's in high school that the kissy stuff happens." With the other hand, she said, "Now, you don't do that."
Hearing Jenny tell me how it is made me happy. She's a girl who comes from a difficult family situation. Her family stayed at Raphael House twice. During the frist stay, her youngest brother was born, and our staff didn't know her mother was pregnant until she went into labor. (She was too shy to tell anyone.) During the second stay, Jenny's parents' marriage fell apart with both physical abuse and her father abusing drugs and getting deported.
Last year, Jenny would get into "moods" in which she was impossible to deal with, once standing in one place and spinning in circles for 45 minutes because she couldn't have her way. Also, once I had to restrain her by the arms to prevent her from running into traffic, and she squirmed and wrestled to try to get away (this failed; I have a mechanical advantage) and then she started stomping on my feet.
Now, she doesn't get into these moods, and given how well she explained the dangers of dating to me, she may just stay out of trouble as she becomes a young lady. (Another time, she shared a delightful joke with me: What do you call a pig who knows karate? Pork chop.)
I got an excellent bit of theology this week when Sariyah and Anthony, a third-grader, were talking about their futures.
"When I grow up, I'm going to be a babysitter," said Sariyah.
"When I grow up, I'm going to be dead," said Anthony.
I interjected, "That's true, but what are you going to do before you're dead?"
He answered, "Before I'm dead, I'm going to die."
"No, I mean what job will you have?" I asked.
"I'm going to be a doctor and cure people and then I'll die and I'll be dead after that, and after that I'll be dead and after that I'll still be dead."
Sariyah opined, "I don't want to be dead. I want to live forever."
I said, "There's the Resurrection, when God will bring all the good people back to life."
Sariyah said, "That's right. He's the greatest, biggest, most perfilous person in the universe."
"Perfilous?" I asked.
"I said powerful. He made everything and can do anything. He's everywhere."
Sariyah and Anthony began to chat about their day at school, while I pulled out a piece of paper to record the above conversation so I could remember it to write it here.
"What are you writing?" Anthony asked.
"Something to my girlfriend." I answered.
Sariyah sneered and said "ew." A minute later, she said, "I know her. She's got black hair and glasses and white skin, and she was here on Halloween."
Anthony added, "And you like her."
"Yes," I said, "I'm going to marry her."
Sariyah recoiled again and said, "We don't need to know that."
There was another pause in the conversation. Anthony stood up to get a glass of water, then tried repeating an old joke. "When I grow up, I'm going to be dead." (I should note here that his jokes are usually funnier, such as: Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to the other slide.)
"I'm not going to laugh at that. It's not funny anymore."
He hugged me and said, "When I grow up, I'm going to be tall."
"How tall?" I asked.
"As tall as you!"
"You have to eat your vegetables and exercise to do that."
"And eat cake," he added.
Sariyah interjected, "When you eat vegetables, you get bigger this way," and put her hand above her head. "When you eat cake, you get bigger THIS way," and extended her hands to her sides.
A few minutes later, Anthony started his homework. He had a picture graph in which a smiley face represented six children. One question asked him to use smileys to represent three children. So he drew half a smiley. The next question asked him to represent nine children. He drew an upside-down smiley.
"Why'd you do that?" I asked. "Why not one and a half smileys?"
"One smiley is six," he said. "And nine is an upside-down six, so nine is an upside-down smiley."
THE ENGAGEMENT
You may have noticed that I mentioned to the kids that I'm getting married. This is true. You may also wonder why I buried it so deep in the story, and it's because I'm testing whether this story is compelling enough to drag you this far into the text. If you're still reading this, maybe it's a funny story. That, or you're still reading because you're hoping I'll give the punchline to the elephant joke. (Open the door and put him in.)
So, the engagement. Yes, I gave my lovely girlfriend, Miriam Ruth Moser, an engagement ring on Tuesday night, January 16, which was also her 27th birthday. So now she's my fiance, and we're looking to get married in the summer of 2008. She wants to go to school and go through a one-year training program in zookeeping, and we're looking to get married after she's finished with that program.
I met Miri at church at the end of July, and we've been dating since Sept. 21. I met her family over Thanksgiving, and she met my family over New Year's, and we've just been having the most lovely time together. I'm so excited about all of this.
Here's a link to some photographs:
http://www.pbase.com/allears/gallery/engagement
Keep in touch!
In Christ,
Thomas Eric Ruthford
p.s. If you want to know more about Raphael House, you can click here:
http://www.raphaelhouse.org/
San Francisco
I have a second-grade student, Sariyah, whom I tutor in the After-School Program at Raphael House. She's very serious, and doesn't let me get away with much. Last week, I tried telling her an elephant joke.
"How do you put an elephant in a refrigerator?" I asked.
"You can't do that -- it would hurt the elephant. He would be too cold and he wouldn't be able to breathe."
A few months ago, one of her classmates, Jenny, cut out a paper set of eyebrows and a musketeer's goatee, and taped them on her fact. Jenny came walking into the tutoring room wearing this. I saw Jenny and cracked a smile. Sariyah shook her finger at me and said, "We're working."
This isn't to say that she doesn't have a sense of humor -- she does, it just comes out at odd moments. One day, her father and 18-month-old brother came to pick her up.
I said to Sariyah, "You should be nice to your brother because he's a boy and some day, he'll be bigger than you."
"So should you," she replied, "because when that happens, you're gonna be dead or really old."
She's one of our most hard-working students, and I think, one of the most intelligent, although one wouldn't have guessed it when she first came to Raphael House a year ago. She read words in books very, very slowly, sounding out every syllable, and when she wrote, she spent about a minute and a half on each word, crafting every letter perfectly on the page. I encouraged her to go faster, but she wouldn't hear of it -- she wanted to get it right the first time.
Her language abilities were a bit behind her classmates' partially because she was learning English as a second language -- her family immigrated to the United States three years ago -- but I soon realized that her slowness was because she was a perfectionist. For her, this turned out to be more of a help than a hindrance. She had wonderful learning techniques, often while we were practicing spelling words, she would scold me if I didn't cover the words with my hands. "I won't learn them if I can see them! I have to have them in my mind," she said. Her knowledge base was limited, but she knew how to expand it.
Children who have been homeless are often mislabeled as "special needs" because they're behind in their academic abilities. But, their problem is usually a lack of a place and a time to study. We have an average of 28-30 children in the After-School program, and when they come on a regular basis, it's amazing to see them improve.
Sariyah's now about where she should be for a second-grader, and she can read books to me with minimal help. She's a remarkable child for another reason -- she comes from an intact family, unlike most of the families we serve, 75 percent of which are headed by a single mother. Her family is functional and healthy, and both the parents are hard-working, but even with the jobs they had upon arriving in San Francisco, they couldn't pay the rent, and they came to live in the Raphael House family homeless shelter. They were here for a few months at the beginning of 2006, and then they were able to move into transitional housing, and now they have an apartment of their own. Even though they don't live at Raphael House any more, Sariyah still comes to our tutoring program every day.
She has an unusual amount of social grace for a child her age, often asking me what's wrong if I'm tired or sad. Sometimes she and her classmates get philosophical, too, and I learn quite a bit.
Once, I was helping a classmate of hers, Jenny, with compound words, and Jenny whined, "I don't ge-e-e-t it."
I said, "A compound word is when you have two small words that make something else when you put them together. You know what a dog is? You know what a house is? A doghouse is something different."
"I still don't get it," she said in the same tone.
"What's a boy?" I asked.
"A person," she answered.
"What's a friend?"
"Someone you like."
"Well, a 'boyfriend' is someone a girl might kiss," I said, and Jenny, Sariyah and the two other girls at the table recoiled in disgust. Sariyah pulled up her jacket over her face to hide from the thought.
Jenny told me in her most authoritative voice, "No, it's not. A boyfriend is a boy you're friends with, which is more better. You don't do that."
Sariyah extended her hands out to her sides as if they were a scale. With one hand, she said, "That's in high school that the kissy stuff happens." With the other hand, she said, "Now, you don't do that."
Hearing Jenny tell me how it is made me happy. She's a girl who comes from a difficult family situation. Her family stayed at Raphael House twice. During the frist stay, her youngest brother was born, and our staff didn't know her mother was pregnant until she went into labor. (She was too shy to tell anyone.) During the second stay, Jenny's parents' marriage fell apart with both physical abuse and her father abusing drugs and getting deported.
Last year, Jenny would get into "moods" in which she was impossible to deal with, once standing in one place and spinning in circles for 45 minutes because she couldn't have her way. Also, once I had to restrain her by the arms to prevent her from running into traffic, and she squirmed and wrestled to try to get away (this failed; I have a mechanical advantage) and then she started stomping on my feet.
Now, she doesn't get into these moods, and given how well she explained the dangers of dating to me, she may just stay out of trouble as she becomes a young lady. (Another time, she shared a delightful joke with me: What do you call a pig who knows karate? Pork chop.)
I got an excellent bit of theology this week when Sariyah and Anthony, a third-grader, were talking about their futures.
"When I grow up, I'm going to be a babysitter," said Sariyah.
"When I grow up, I'm going to be dead," said Anthony.
I interjected, "That's true, but what are you going to do before you're dead?"
He answered, "Before I'm dead, I'm going to die."
"No, I mean what job will you have?" I asked.
"I'm going to be a doctor and cure people and then I'll die and I'll be dead after that, and after that I'll be dead and after that I'll still be dead."
Sariyah opined, "I don't want to be dead. I want to live forever."
I said, "There's the Resurrection, when God will bring all the good people back to life."
Sariyah said, "That's right. He's the greatest, biggest, most perfilous person in the universe."
"Perfilous?" I asked.
"I said powerful. He made everything and can do anything. He's everywhere."
Sariyah and Anthony began to chat about their day at school, while I pulled out a piece of paper to record the above conversation so I could remember it to write it here.
"What are you writing?" Anthony asked.
"Something to my girlfriend." I answered.
Sariyah sneered and said "ew." A minute later, she said, "I know her. She's got black hair and glasses and white skin, and she was here on Halloween."
Anthony added, "And you like her."
"Yes," I said, "I'm going to marry her."
Sariyah recoiled again and said, "We don't need to know that."
There was another pause in the conversation. Anthony stood up to get a glass of water, then tried repeating an old joke. "When I grow up, I'm going to be dead." (I should note here that his jokes are usually funnier, such as: Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to the other slide.)
"I'm not going to laugh at that. It's not funny anymore."
He hugged me and said, "When I grow up, I'm going to be tall."
"How tall?" I asked.
"As tall as you!"
"You have to eat your vegetables and exercise to do that."
"And eat cake," he added.
Sariyah interjected, "When you eat vegetables, you get bigger this way," and put her hand above her head. "When you eat cake, you get bigger THIS way," and extended her hands to her sides.
A few minutes later, Anthony started his homework. He had a picture graph in which a smiley face represented six children. One question asked him to use smileys to represent three children. So he drew half a smiley. The next question asked him to represent nine children. He drew an upside-down smiley.
"Why'd you do that?" I asked. "Why not one and a half smileys?"
"One smiley is six," he said. "And nine is an upside-down six, so nine is an upside-down smiley."
THE ENGAGEMENT
You may have noticed that I mentioned to the kids that I'm getting married. This is true. You may also wonder why I buried it so deep in the story, and it's because I'm testing whether this story is compelling enough to drag you this far into the text. If you're still reading this, maybe it's a funny story. That, or you're still reading because you're hoping I'll give the punchline to the elephant joke. (Open the door and put him in.)
So, the engagement. Yes, I gave my lovely girlfriend, Miriam Ruth Moser, an engagement ring on Tuesday night, January 16, which was also her 27th birthday. So now she's my fiance, and we're looking to get married in the summer of 2008. She wants to go to school and go through a one-year training program in zookeeping, and we're looking to get married after she's finished with that program.
I met Miri at church at the end of July, and we've been dating since Sept. 21. I met her family over Thanksgiving, and she met my family over New Year's, and we've just been having the most lovely time together. I'm so excited about all of this.
Here's a link to some photographs:
http://www.pbase.com/allears/gallery/engagement
Keep in touch!
In Christ,
Thomas Eric Ruthford
p.s. If you want to know more about Raphael House, you can click here:
http://www.raphaelhouse.org/
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