About the Best Thing I Do

It is good to ask oneself what value one's activities have from time to time.
After retiring I decided to join my Connie as a reading coach for a program called Philadelphia Reads. She works downtown and every Thursday during the school year two classes of first graders come to her building from the Isaac Sheppard School, a 114 year old elementary public school in the poorest ZIP code in the city (or perhaps the country). Each week I get to help a kid learn to read. In a lot of cases, these coaches and their teachers are the only adults in the kids lives that think learning to read is important.
I never ask about parents because usually there is only one. Vacations are another bad topic, since they mostly never have any. They come in never really clean clothes, bright and cheerful and glad to see us. Then you learn that the oven at home has too many cockroaches so no hot food or, more importantly to them, cake. One child I coached was obviously dyslexic, but despite three tries by his teacher to get his mom to see a doc, he made no reading progress for the entire year.
This year, even this early into the school year, my kid is making good progress. At first he would not let go of his teacher's hand and worried (in Spanish) about people falling out of the neighboring office towers - he had never seen things so big. Now he is braver, speaks clearly, and holy moly, he reads better every week. So there may be hope for him, no matter how hard our legislators try to destroy his life chances.