hannah I just sat there. I was really shocked.

[music]

I knew not to run up and get her a hug even though I wanted to really bad.

priya parker

This is a story about Mrs. Ricca, a teacher in Panama City, Florida, and her first-grade student, Hannah. Mrs. Ricca has been a teacher for the past seven years, and she loves her job. Since her school switched to remote learning a couple of weeks ago, she’s been holding story time on Zoom every evening for her students. One night last week, she noticed that Hannah looked really sad.

mrs. ricca I messaged her mom. I said, hey, can I come over? I promise I’ll sit in the driveway. I’ll stay six feet away from her. We’ll still honor our social distancing guidelines. hannah She came and sat down with me. We both sat on the driveway, and we read books.

[music]

mrs. ricca We sat, and just talked and caught up. And asked her what she was feeling, what was going on. At first she told me that she was feeling happy, but then I told her how I was feeling. And then she disclosed that she was feeling a little sad and that it’s hard when you don’t get to see your friends every day and you’re stuck in the house. These kids have really been through a lot because last school year, this same group of kids had Hurricane Michael. There was a category 5 hurricane that hit our town, and we were out of school for a month then. However, we had no power. There was no way to see anybody. We didn’t have internet, so we couldn’t do these kinds of things. So it’s been kind of like a reminder of that all over again, that, you know, we still can’t go see our friends. And it’s really hard on them.

priya parker

In partnership with The New York Times, this is “Together Apart.” I’m Priya Parker. When it comes to gatherings, teachers are the OG gatherers. These are people who, every day, are in charge of bringing together an entire group of students. They have to figure out, day in and day out, how they’re going to start the class, how they keep a certain amount of discipline so that the students can learn but enough openness to let them grow. They have to figure out not only their relationships to each student and to the class as a whole, but also the interactions among the kids. And this is just the daily gathering of the classroom, but there are also dozens of interstitial gatherings that also do a lot of work to bind a community. Many teachers are also coaches of a class club or volunteer at football games or the prom or graduation. What do you do at a time like this when you’re forced to limit the number of things we can actually do collectively? Which gatherings are essential this year, and what might it look like not just to salvage them, but to transform them based on what is true right now? This week, in turning to school gatherings, I spoke with teachers around the country and heard questions like

teacher How do I create this space of connection with students as a teacher before the end of the year? How do you reach those select few students that have just kind of turned off during this time? There is not really a protocol on how you will now switch to do things digitally, right? And how do you support a 10-year-old whose dad died? tanisha Now that we have the situation in which technology is needed, computers are needed, how to engage students who have not yet had the opportunity to share with us?

priya parker

The last voice you heard is a teacher named Tanisha. She teaches sixth-grade writing in New Haven, Conn.

tanisha I come from a pretty big family. I have six brothers and five sisters. I’ve always had some sort of a passion for working with kids. I just believe that when you educate yourself from within, that there is deep power there for you to live out your dreams and to change the world. And then I also have to believe that our better days are ahead of us. And so, like, when I think about teaching the youth of this country, there’s something special about seeing them realize their true vision for what our world can be.

priya parker

Whenever I do a coaching call, I first spend a few minutes getting to know the person and trying to figure out what makes them tick. And I do this in part to figure out what then might motivate her as a host. What is her purpose? Every gathering and if we think of the classroom as a gathering starts with one simple question. What is the purpose of this gathering? Now, you may be thinking, a classroom is a gathering? I define a gathering as any time three or more people come together for a purpose with a beginning, middle and end. It’s an event. And so in that way, every classroom experience every day is a gathering that you can shape. And in this case, I’m asking a teacher, Tanisha, what her purpose as a teacher is why does she do this in the first place? so that we can use that insight to identify the gatherings that she should uniquely be hosting in her way.

priya parker And pre-COVID-19, you’re in your classroom. You have these students in your charge for the academic year. What is it that you most want them to learn or to be able to do because they interacted with you? tanisha Getting kids to be invested in the concept that we are all writers. We can use our writing to change the world. We can use our writing to express our feelings. We can use our writings to convey ideas. And so that’s the biggest boiled down point of what my class was all about. priya parker Tell me a little bit about now, what it’s like to how are you teaching? Paint a picture for me now, if I was in your digital classroom, what it’s like. tanisha It was very comfortable in the brick-and-mortar school system. And so if you come in now, you’ll see elements of some of the same things that I was trying to do where I’m trying to preserve time. And we have an hourlong meeting class for students to write. But it is not we don’t have the same engagement in terms of my ability to quickly pop in and check in on students’ work throughout a given class. It is more of me I’ll give an assignment. So last week, we wrote “This I Believe” essays just as a way to re-engage students. And so it looked like me having a small group of students come to me at a pre-assigned time, and talking through, and looking at their writing via Google Classroom. priya parker Let me pause for a second. I have a couple of ideas for you. But do you have a specific question that I can help you with within all of this? tanisha I’m still trying to figure out a lot of our units are built around so we’re in enslavement in the Americas, and at the end of this unit, we would have some type of a Juneteenth celebration where kids would share their writing, and it was, like, a huge thing. We had a band play last year. It was like a community event. And so how can we still build community? That’s one question I have. I have a couple of questions.

priya parker

At the mention of Juneteenth, my little gathering heart began to pitter patter. Despite the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, enslaved people in many parts of the States did not see their freedom for years after. Juneteenth is a gathering that commemorates the day Union soldiers landed in Galveston, Texas, letting the last enslaved people know that they were free on June 19, 1865. While this date is not recognized as a national holiday today, 46 out of the 50 states still celebrate it. And I asked Tanisha to describe what Juneteenth is in her words, and she explains that this is something she’s carried with her since college.

tanisha In college, it’s presented as, like, this is the true, what should be the 4th of July. This is the true freedom of everyone, the moment in which the last enslaved person was essentially “freed.” And an understanding of the deep legacy that black Americans have played in this cultural fabric of America. The second question that I have is around I feel like this situation has exacerbated the inequity in our society. And prior to Covid-19, we did have some attendance issues at school. We were always trying different strategies to make sure that our students were coming to school and that our school-wide, our goal was, like, 96 percent. And so and we hit that we were under our goal for the year before this hit. And so now that we have this situation in which technology is needed, computers are needed, potentially a quiet space at home is needed you might be taking care of siblings, or you might have some household responsibilities how to engage students who have not yet had the opportunity to share with us? I have a number of my students who I haven’t been able to connect with. And I can share what I’ve done, but how to engage students in the midst of what we’re all experiencing? priya parker Absolutely. I mean, they’re such sharp questions that are very wise and relevant to, I think, probably many teachers around the country. So first, with the Juneteenth celebration, you know, one of the things I actually think particularly if it was a if it has always been something people look forward to, something that, for you as a writing teacher, was almost like a carrot to get students to be excited, to sharpen their writing to a point where they know that they’re going to read their writing in front of the community, I actually think that I would still host it. And I would think about how do you digitally host it, and we can talk about that. But I actually think that in a sense, that if people feel excited and feel like there’s still an opportunity to present their writing in a meaningful way for the Juneteenth, that might also help with attendance. Right? So all I mean, when you’re in well, I shouldn’t say real life. This is all real life. When you’re in person together, all of these community gatherings become meaningful, and things we look forward to, and almost goals, whether they’re academic or whether they’re social, you know? You’re training for a marathon, or you’re getting ready to read in front of your peers, right? These are all motivators that help you go against the part of us that is resisting that.

priya parker

I realized that these two questions Juneteenth and attendance might actually have a relationship to each other. In other moments on this podcast, particularly when we were looking at baby showers, I talked about gatherings having legs, meaning because of what happened at the gathering, people leave differently. They walk out differently than when they arrived because of something that happened during the gathering. But gatherings are powerful in another way too, which is that a future event can change behavior before it. There’s a wedding coming up. The groom starts cycling again to get into that suit. The first home game is this Friday. Players bring a different enthusiasm to practice. You see, gatherings aren’t just powerful for what they change after, but also what they can change before. The anticipation of a gathering can be transformative. In a moment, Tanisha and I find a way to transform the Juneteenth celebration into something new. This is “Together Apart.” I’m Priya Parker.

[music]

priya parker Tell me let’s spend just a few minutes on this Juneteenth celebration. So tell me what usually happens. tanisha So there’s two different prompts that they can or projects that they can present or write about. The first one is imagining that they are running for office. And I usually say president. And they would have to argue whether or not black Americans should receive reparations and use evidence and facts to support however they feel. And then the second one that they used to work in groups around was just, like, that a lot of people don’t understand that enslaved Africans actually there was a large body of work that reports that they resisted against the institution of slavery. And so then they would create a writing piece or a writing project to better help teachers and students understand how enslaved Africans resisted slavery in everyday ways. And then we invite our parents and guardians and families to come in. I save at the beginning of the year, each teacher gets, like, $150 to be able to purchase school supplies. And I don’t use mine. I use that money to purchase food for this event. So it’s a big community celebration where kids are giving speeches. They’re presenting projects. Families are there celebrating. And last year, we had the band perform.

[music]

priya parker

What she’s describing here they get their posters ready, they double check their facts, activities that they need to do to become stronger writers are motivated by the idea that there are some stakes to actually doing this, which is presenting to their communities. Gatherings matter when there are some stakes involved. And in this case, it’s the stakes of pride, of the vulnerability of reading your own work to people you care about and doing well in front of your community. Tanisha sent us a couple of moments from last year’s Juneteenth celebration.

archived recording (student) This school has taught me a lot in my seven years of being here. And the one I will cherish the most most is no matter what you face in life, you have two options A, to continue to persevere and show that you are more than your mistake, or B, to quit.

priya parker

So then I try and get her to name what the power of the event is.

priya parker And at the end of the celebration when it works really well from year to year, what do you think people leave feeling or thinking? tanisha Oh, my goodness. I feel like after last year, people left feeling and thinking we need to take this school-wide. And so that was going to be my charge this year was, like, how to give this into the school. There’s a deep sense of pride because a lot of the experiences that students are sharing in this Enslavement and Resistance in America unit, our students reflect this history. And so there’s a deep sense of pride not only in the history of who we are as people, but also in the accomplishments and the work. And so if you’re thinking about the course of a year, students come into the classroom writing at any given level, and then you learn a couple of things. And so this is kind of like I wouldn’t say it’s a peak, but it’s a really, it’s a big moment in which students are sharing not only what they’ve learned in the unit, but how much they’ve grown as writers. But it’s a deep sense of pride that students have and a deep sense of, like, wow, that feels good. Look at what I did. And I’m even smiling right now because I’m seeing the pictures that I’ve posted online previously about this event, and it’s, it’s I don’t know how to feel. It’s like the energy is palpable.

priya parker

This Juneteenth gathering isn’t just a beautiful experience. It’s doing a lot of work for the community, for the students and for this teacher. She says students are sharing not only what they’ve learned in the unit, but how much they’ve grown as writers. For this teacher, this is the gathering that’s essential. More than prom, more than volunteering at the end-of-the-year picnic, for Tanisha, Juneteenth is the gathering that is the embodiment and the proof of her purpose as a teacher. Like, did this work? Did what I set out to do to build the confidence in my students to express themselves through the written word work? And because it serves that purpose, this is absolutely the gathering she should be focusing on this year. And it got me thinking about this larger question. If you’re an educator, how do you decide which gatherings are essential? To know what is essential, we have to understand what the role of the gathering actually plays in the community, what it does for a community. And I’m working at two levels here with Tanisha. And similarly, if you’re thinking about gatherings in your community, the first level is just to ask what is essential, to really think about what is the role of this gathering in our community. What has it done for us in the past? And this year, when it’s really complicated to gather, what can go by the wayside, and what is truly essential? And it may not be the gatherings that you assume. And then, and only then, to begin thinking about how to make it transformative in a way that’s unique to this moment.

priya parker So I have a couple of ideas for you, and particularly for this Juneteenth celebration, and then we can go to your other questions. You know, I think one of the things that is that’s unique about this time is that there are absolutely many, many ways in which our gatherings, our in-person gatherings are suffering because we can’t actually be together. And then there are certain ways in which gathering digitally or virtually open up certain options that were never thought of before. And I’ll give an example. I actually want to read something to you. There’s a poet named Clint Smith. tanisha Oh, yeah. I’ve heard of Clint Smith before. priya parker And he recently got his PhD, his doctorate. And he posted on Instagram a couple days ago. So the picture is basically his grandfather watching Clint Smith conduct his dissertation defense. And he wrote this. “A photo for my dissertation defense that I keep revisiting is this one of my grandfather watching back home in New Orleans. Born in Monticello, Mississippi in 1930, almost 90 years old, grew up in town where people were lynched, where the Klan rode by his family’s house at night and told the black folks in the neighborhood to stay away from certain parts of town. Through it all, he managed to get his PhD from Howard University in 1965. Only recently, as I’ve interviewed him for another project, have I gotten a sense of all that he overcame in order to make a new life possible for our family. The same is true for my grandmother. I felt so lucky to have them there with me to be able to celebrate this moment that they made possible. My maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather have passed, but I felt them there with me too. None of this would have been possible without them.” And then there’s this image of this elderly African-American man with a blue plastic cup set on a napkin on a tablecloth watching his grandson defend his dissertation that pre-Covid, you know, wouldn’t have occurred to them to put a video into the dissertation, right? tanisha Uh-huh. priya parker And I wonder if because and part of what technology allows, I wonder if you could experiment this year where you still host Juneteenth, you figure out how and who’s going to read what, and you help your students get to the point where they feel ready to read. And maybe you invite not the entire school, but maybe you invite the entire community or sixth grade classes in six other schools to join and bear witness. tanisha Hm. I love it. priya parker And you know, it’s one thing to try to salvage, to kind of water down this really beautiful, clearly powerful gathering and just say, OK, well, it’s still going to be us, but we’re all going to be alone watching each other in our rooms, but to pivot a little bit and say, what would it look like if we invited 10,000 people, from our grandparents and our aunts and our cousins and our siblings in other towns and cities, and all of the teachers and all of the classes to watch, and to invite them to invite their teachers and other schools to watch? And what if this year, Juneteenth happened online with your students? And you’d have to figure out, like, some of the coordination and who’s going to read what, and I would say still music. But perhaps it’s a completely different audience, and you expand in a way that you wouldn’t otherwise have thought to expand. tanisha Yes. There is something there that I really that excites me. Because, I mean, Juneteenth is the message and the pride that can definitely be spread virtually.

priya parker

I mentioned salvaging to Tanisha. I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot. What is the goal of a virtual gathering? Are we trying to make the best out of a bad situation, or are we trying to create new situations?

priya parker You know, maybe you announce it publicly. But I think part of with the students, to keep it focused also on their writing and the confidence of writers, is to maybe to have each student invite 10 guests that aren’t in the school. tanisha Yep.

priya parker

Or that wouldn’t normally be there, right? So that all of the community is actually an extension of your students, and then you become sort of the MC of sorts and connect this very unusual Juneteenth to the moment that we are actually in rather than pretending we’re not all suffering a global pandemic, to say here we are, and here we are still celebrating freedom.

tanisha Oh, I love that. I’m kind of at a loss for words because I’m so excited right now. But I guess my first thought is, like, OK, which schools would I invite? Who would I invite? And you know, how would I message this to kids? And this is a unique opportunity to be able to invite in even siblings who even if you go to our school, you haven’t been able to participate if you weren’t in sixth grade. And so just thinking about all of the different layers of people, or for parents who might have been working parents who weren’t able to come, how they can come in and then invite their friends, and so how to truly turn this into a community event and so generate that pride that students have around the work that they complete. When you said “so celebrating freedom,” that seems like it would be a theme that truly resonates with where we are because it’s kind of the irony there that we’re all in different places, and it can feel a little congested and tight, but understanding what freedom is and the cost and the price, at times, of freedom is that line, I might be taking it as this year’s theme. priya parker Take it. And I think one of the ways to create gatherings right now in this time is to not try to do middle-of-the-road gatherings where you kind of invite everybody to everything, but you go small, and you go big. So what I mean by that is, like, I think this is actually an opportunity, perhaps, to have each student share their writing with their community before they join this massive celebration.

priya parker

So I’m thinking here again in the vein of creating new situations. This is true for all types of gatherings right now. And my thinking here is to not stay in the middle. Go big and go small. This is what megachurches do, for example. There’s a large, perhaps 10,000-person service. But the larger the church grows and the more awe-inspiring that collective experience becomes, the more necessary it is to have something many churches call small groups, a group of six or so people you meet with every week to ground the experience and make people feel like they’re not only part of a crowd. The collective shouldn’t be at the cost of the small, and the small shouldn’t be at the cost of the collective. And so I mapped out for her how she might do this. And as I do that, here are the questions I’m thinking about in my head. What is going to be the right experience to warm people up? How do you meaningfully connect each student to their own community before they connect to the larger? How do we make this both small and big?

priya parker So maybe you even invite the first 20 minutes before people log in at 3:00 PM or whatever time it is, you invite each student to invite 10 people from their community and do a small gathering offline, like over the phone or on FaceTime or on whatever technology they have access to, or through a phone tree everyone adds a caller— where they just read what they wrote to their people for 20 minutes. And then they enter into this collective mass gathering that you coordinate. But I think you could really embed the community, and coming back to this core goal for you, which is to give your students the confidence to express themselves as writers. And to be able to express oneself as a writer to the people who know you is a deeply vulnerable act, right? It’s actually one thing to express it to strangers. It’s another to express it to, like, your cousins and worry that they’re not going to laugh at you, right? tanisha Uh-huh.

priya parker

This is where the stakes come in because we’re all part of the individual’s rise.

priya parker I actually think that Juneteenth celebration could actually perhaps increase attendance, right? Because it ties the students to something that they care about and feel a little pressure around. tanisha Uh-huh. priya parker For you, I would first just get really clear on what is your primary purpose. If you can’t do everything, what is the need you most want to take care of right now? tanisha It is always my bottom line is to build the confidence of writers. That is it. And so when I talk about attendance, it’s because it’s in service of this desire for kids to be able to use writing to emote and to share their thinking and explore who they are. And so my bottom line is around this community and this culture of writing that we’ve been developing throughout the year. My first next step is to really think about invitations and who we can invite. And I’m sure that our school leaders will be on board with this 100%.

priya parker

After the conversation, I found myself thinking more about Clint Smith’s Instagram post, and I decided to call him up and ask him about that dissertation experience.

clint smith Hello. priya parker Hey. Thank you for hopping on with us. And thank your wife, please. clint smith OK. I shall. I shall, sure. priya parker Well, first, congratulations. I discovered you were a doctor through Instagram, that town hall bulletin board. clint smith Yeah. Thank you so much. It was a really, really remarkable day, and I’m kind of still floating from it. It’s a thing where I for so long, I had imagined that my dissertation defense would look a certain way. And I think I was feeling a lot of disappointment and despair from this moment that had kept me going for so long no longer being possible because of physical distancing. But it ended up being better than I could have ever imagined because I got to share the moment with so many people from every part of my life. priya parker So first of all, what is your what’s the title of your dissertation? clint smith So the title of my dissertation is “What If They Open That Door One Day: What Education Means to People Sentenced to Juvenile Life Without Parole.” So it’s the exploration of people in and around greater Philadelphia who were sentenced to life without parole as children, and trying to get a sense of how they what education means when you are told you are going to spend the rest of your life in a cage, specifically when you’re told you’re going to spend the rest of your life in a cage when you are a teenager. priya parker One element of that’s so powerful even to have so many people watch you defend your thesis, defend your dissertation they watched the, they watched the ideas portion, right? We usually get to watch the celebration, but not the ideas part. How many people were on your Zoom call? clint smith Like, 175. priya parker So to actually have 175 people listen to these ideas and defend the core of your thesis as not just a way of being proud of you, but of having 175 people listen to the rigor, pay attention to these ideas through the vessel of their love for you it’s already cracking outside the bounds of academia. clint smith You know, to have 45 minutes where I could sort of lay out both the impetus and the vision and the analysis of the thing that I’ve been spending so much time on, I think it gave a level of clarity to my friends and family. They’re like, OK, now I know what he’s been doing all these years. I also priya parker Why he was canceling Sunday brunch. [LAUGHS] clint smith Right. [LAUGHS]

^priya parker

^ Walk me through the experience of entering that Zoom room. What actually happened in the gathering?

clint smith Yeah. So during the gathering so I was presenting my work, and I could only see the three committee members. And then at the end, my committee said, everyone can turn on their cameras. And so everybody began turning on their cameras, and it was, like, small light bulbs popping up across the screen. And I saw people who knew me since I was in diapers. I saw people who shaped what my graduate school experience was like. I saw people who just from every corner and pocket of my life speckled across the screen. And it was this really powerful, remarkable moment. And then my kids came in the room. My wife came in the room. They made a sign that said, “Congrats, Dr. Dad,” which now hangs above my, above the windows in my office. And it was just, it was a special moment.

[music]

After they came in and said, you are now officially Dr. Smith, everyone clapped, and my parents cried. My grandfather was there, my grandmother was there, my cousins and my friends. And it was a really special thing. And then everybody kind of stayed for another hour and a half. And then just one by one, everybody went around and just said how proud they were of me. And I feel so lucky. And I have it recorded. Harvard recorded the entire thing. And so I’m so fortunate to have this sort of time capsule that I can always go back to.

archived recording (woman) I’m so proud of you. Congratulations, Clint. Wonderful. priya parker In years past, have other dissertation defenses been live streamed? clint smith I think this is the first time that it’s ever been live streamed in a systematized, university-sanctioned way. I mean, I think people in the past have had their grandparents on speakerphone. But to this extent and this sort of systematized way that was facilitated by the university, I believe this is the first time. My sense is that there’s no going back from this because they found how special it is for people from all parts of these folks’ lives to have the opportunity to tune in. I think this moment that we’re experiencing has pushed us to think about why certain things, both on a micro and macro level, weren’t offered beforehand. And it’s hard to imagine going back to a scenario in which people say, OK, well, now your grandparents aren’t going to be able to tune in because it can only be the people in the room. I mean, that would seem absurd. priya parker And actually ask this larger question of, well, who should be there? clint smith Absolutely. And I think, you know, part of it is fracturing and breaking down the antiquated notions of what university life and the sort of ceremony of university is supposed to be like and who should and should not have access to it, which speaks to a broader point that you were making about who and who should not have access to the sort of larger set of knowledge that exists in academia. It pushes us to reconsider what access is and what access looks like, I think.

priya parker

Who gets to participate in a gathering? Who deserves to attend? Who gets to bear witness, and who is worthy of the information or wisdom or knowledge in a gathering? We are in a moment where, out of necessity, live streaming dissertations are not the only place where we’re stepping into unprecedented territory of who can participate in a gathering. The Supreme Court is now meeting virtually, and for the first time, live streaming their hearings to the public. And it raises fundamental questions, like who is this for? Who should be hearing this? What does it mean to open up a closed-door gathering to anyone? Does it change the nature of the gathering? With all of these gatherings being canceled like prom and graduation around the country, I think this could actually be a very interesting moment to see what it might look like to have a national, countrywide graduation ceremony for our seniors this year. Could we, in our own way, go big and go small, create a new situation this year for students and their families, and frankly, for the rest of us? A few weeks ago, a student, @lincolnjackd, went viral with a tweet in which he requested Barack Obama to consider giving a national commencement speech to the class of 2020. Might there be a national commencement speaker this year, whether Barack Obama or someone else, that is the speaker for every school across the country in these strange times? Might we all gather with our loved ones virtually at home, invite our family members and friends and neighbors to a smaller virtual graduation ceremony, and then all collectively Zoom in to an unprecedented collective moment to honor our seniors, together apart? This might be a totally wild experiment, but if we as a country could pull something like this off, who would you nominate to be this year’s commencement speaker? You can share your thoughts on Twitter with the hashtag #TogetherApartPodcast and the hashtag #NationalCommencementSpeaker to build on a conversation that has already been started there. You think about that. But in the meantime, I’ll leave you with a poem Clint wrote. It’s called “Counting Dissent,” and he’s offered it this year for Tanisha’s Juneteenth.

clint smith And this is a poem entitled “Counting Dissent.” My grandfather is a quarter century older than his right to vote and two decades younger than the president who signed the paper that made it so. He married my grandmother when they were four years younger than I am now and were twice as sure about each other as I’ve ever been about most things. They had six children separated by nine years, three cities, and one Mason-Dixon line. There were twice as many boys as girls, but half as many bedrooms as children, which most days didn’t matter because poor ain’t poor unless you name it so. And kids prefer playing to counting, so there was never much time to wallow in anything but laughter. My mother was the third oldest or the fourth youngest, depending on who you ask. She was born on a federal holiday, which my grandmother was thankful for, said the good lord only got one day off when he built the world, so one day is all she needed too. Mom says Pops was persistent, wouldn’t give up when he asked if he could take her down the street to get some coffee, which back then cost $2 less than it does now. Now Mom has stopped drinking coffee, but she still loves Pops. They’ve been married for 31 years and have three kids who are six years and 1,517 miles apart. My birth took 12 hours and 43 minutes, which is probably because my head was five times too big. Mom said my head was big because I needed enough room to read all the books in the library, which seemed like infinity even though I didn’t really know what infinity meant. But I heard my teacher say it once when she talked about the universe, and books felt like the universe to me. I was pretty good at math too until about fifth grade when they started putting numbers and letters together which didn’t make much sense. My brother is 17 months younger than me but is taller and knows more about numbers, so it doesn’t always feel like this is true. My sister is 24 years of loyal and eight years of best friend. I am the oldest of three, but maybe the most naive. I still believe that we can build this world into something new, someplace where I can live past 25 and it’s not a cause for celebration. Because these days, I celebrate every breath. I tried to start counting them so I wouldn’t take each one for granted. I wish I could give my breath to the boys who’ve had theirs taken, but I stop counting because it feels like there are too many boys and not enough breath to go around.

[music]

narrator