I interviewed a young man about a year ago who was part of a Federal program which placed individuals in agencies so they could get some job experience. The idea was that this experience would help get them launched into the work force and off of government subsidies.
He was a little different than some of the people who I had met from the program; younger yet somehow mature and disarmingly self confident. I could tell that he had taken some pain over his wardrobe but he was large and shirts didn’t quite come long enough for him to get them tucked in. I got him comfortable and soon enough I could tell that he forgot this was an interview, that I was someone he maybe needed to impress and he visibly started to enjoy himself. I wondered how it was he had come to this place. He wasn’t an adult and obviously not in school anymore. But you don’t ask those questions in an interview and so I began.
“Why do you want to work in a library?” Well the library was on a bus route. Right, that was a first; no histrionics about loving books, this was a practical young man. No driver’s license yet because there was no car to practice in and by the way, he’d finished school by putting himself through an alternative program. He didn’t live at home; his mom dealt drugs and he figured that was not going to be his chosen career field.
Okay. What do you say to that? I asked what he thought his challenges might be. Well he figured it was probably going to be getting to work on time. There were a lot of people living where he was. Things were a little chaotic and he’d have to make sure he went to bed, even if nobody else did, and find someway to wake up and make the bus. Good place to start, from the beginning; waking up. Then he asked what he was supposed to wear. He wondered if what he had on was okay. Said that they’d give him coupons or something for clothes but experience had told him that his body shape didn’t come off conventional clothes racks. I told him I was interested in him coming to work in clean clothes, ones that didn’t have holes in them. He could manage that he said.
I’m a librarian so I had to ask a book question. Anything he’d read lately that he liked? Oh yeah, but he hadn’t been reading lately because currently he was without a library card, lost it or something. He needed an adult to open up a new account and that was problematic. Yes, I bet that was. If he could read something right now what would it be? He was hoping to get his hands on the latest Harry Potter. It so happened I had a donated copy on the shelf behind me. I handed it to him. He got this happy look. Why do you like to read I ask? And he gave the single best answer to that question that I have ever heard. “Because the time you are reading is “uncursed”.
I thought about that: a mother who dealt drugs, a house full of people with no alarm clocks and a person who was sixteen but could not get a driver’s license because there was no one he knew with a car, and about uncursed time.
He did come to work for us. People liked him. His friends stopped by. Some of them got library cards. The shirts never got tucked in but he was proud of these new tennis shoes he bought with his first pay cheque. They fit his huge feet. I understood that new and fit were not things he had experienced often when it came to shoes and clothes.
I never saw the Harry Potter book again. That was okay. The book had a mission; in its epic it was taking the curse out of living.
by Geraldine de Rooy
published 7-11-09 in Moscow-Pullman Daily News
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