The Zoom church meeting: Dave was one of the speakers. The kid I watched grow up in New Hampshire, and such a good man.
He told a story from his teens that I hadn’t heard before, one that probably happened the summer after we moved away.
His parents had signed him up for a week at an interfaith camp in Boston. He did not want to go. He did not want to get out of the car when they got there. He argued, but they insisted.
The experience was life changing.
He was one of two Mormons in the group and the other was a girl he was friends with, so it was nice to find out he’d get to spend some time with her, anyway.
Midway through the week, after they’d all started to get to know each other a bit, they were told to divide up by which church they belonged to, and for this next exercise they were not to talk to anybody but the ones in their group. At all. Just talk amongst yourselves only.
Some kids had a big group and lots of people to find out more about, for Dave it was just him and his friend–
–and there was one girl sitting alone. All she could do was watch everybody else interact, and maybe listen as best she could. Okay.
The leaders kept not calling an end to the exercise.
After two hours, that poor girl was just too overwhelmed with the enforced loneliness while everybody else was enjoying themselves and in spite of I’m sure her best efforts in front of everybody, she started to cry.
Dave said it was the African-American kids who immediately did what he’d wanted to do all along: they instantly rushed to her side. They knew what it was to feel alone in society and they weren’t going to stand for it one more minute, and as soon as they did so so did Dave and his friend.
They were expecting to be scolded for not following the directions of the exercise.
To their astonishment, the adult in charge of it answered, What. Took. You. So. Long.