BLESSED AND VENERABLE

Dear Spike:

Your mother is a saint.

That’s not a prerequisite of being a public school teacher, but it certainly helps, especially in a school like the one she began teaching in a few weeks ago — the school you’ll be attending in about five years.

Among her students are several Sudanese war refugees and a number of children with family members in prison — including one little girl whose older sister is in jail awaiting trial on charges that she tortured and murdered their brother. There’s another girl whose mother is severely mentally retarded (that mom, by the way, was the only parent who showed up for back-to-school parent-teacher conferences,) several students who don’t know a word of English (and a majority who are still learning English as a second language) and a couple of children whose teeth are so rotten that it makes me wince when I see them smile. All but one of them get free lunch at school and several of them eat all three squares, each day, in the school cafeteria.

Most of them put on brave faces. But they’re troubled. And that often makes them trouble.

It’s heartbreaking. And hard. I wouldn’t last 10 minutes if I had to teach her class. But your mom does it all day long — breaking only for a few short minutes, during lunch, to feed you.

See? A saint.

We had dinner this evening with your mom’s teaching aide, Sue (actually she’s more like a partner, than an aide — and she’s a saint too) and Sue’s husband, Rob, who teaches English at a high school in the most crime-ridden district of Los Angeles. The first week he worked there, he remembered, one of his students was shot in the stomach after first being threatened during his class. Understandably, he wondered whether he’d made a mistake leaving Utah. But he’s been flying down to L.A. — leaving his wife, his home and his two beautiful dogs for months at a time — for seven years now.

Yup. Saints.

I’ve always felt like I had an important job — Tocqueville called freedom of the press “the constitutive element of liberty” (and since you can’t have freedom of the press without the press, I suppose that makes hacks like me kind of worthwhile.)

But I felt small sitting at a table with these people. Absolutely tiny. Miniscule. Subatomic. Quarkian, even. I mean, Jesus, what good is the press to an illiterate nation?

Catholics believe that saints are blessed and venerable people who, in the course of a lifetime, perform at least three miracles.

Heck, your mom does that every day.

She doesn’t just teach children to read, she teaches them to be. To have compassion. To have respect. To have hope.

She changes their lives. And in doing so, I’m convinced, she saves lives too.

Someday, somebody’s going to ask you who your heroes are. And I’m not ever going to tell you what to think, what to believe or what to say, but I’ll tell you who my hero is:

Your mother, the saint.

She’s my hero. My absolute, unequivocal hero.

Love,
dad