Of Bears and Penguins

I think this is maybe the fourth incarnation of Bears and Penguins, the title I chose as a nod to my favorite writer, favorite book and favorite animals - efficiency is key.

Clean slate. Back in Baltimore - a city who's NPR station declared it difficult to love to day on air. This is not untrue, nor is it untrue that some people love it. I feel neither love nor hate. The feeling that comes most strongly is gratitude for what I see. Though it is hard, it has changed me, and I think time will bear this out, for the better.

It is a strange experience here, like the haze that cloaks the harbor bridge keeping hidden all perspective. And it is gratitude I feel when I hear Miss Y. playing gospel music in her room and singing, oh she sings, and how she loves those children she teaches. The children who are often very damaged and needing her careful, gracious patience. Gratitude I feel when Miss C advises me to get my room annointed. Gratitude and admiration for the teachers who have been at the Radiant for 22 and more years. That's something, that's a real thing, a deep committment.

I am a short timer here. But when I leave, those teachers will still be working, striving to be everything for children who have nothing. I do think there is too great a tendency to canonize teachers as though they were holy, sanctified and infallible beings. And yet, I know some very fine teachers at the Radiant and they are greater because of their love.

Love bears up, and is not always softly gentle. Love bears all things. The gangs, and the drugs, the dangers and disappointments. Love bears up, and the teachers come back to the Radiant, to hang paper over gray walls, to set up aquariums for hermit crabs and snakes, to calculate how many books may be purchased - secondhand - for the children. Love bears up.

So I feel gratitude to have been taken in, to have observed and taken part. Gratitude for the year ahead, however fraught it may be with all the inner-city trauma that is par for the course. Gratitude because in Baltimore, these things remain: faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love.