Hope for the Future

 There is hope for the future. 

This week, we had a stairlift installed in our house, which involved three technicians. I engaged in casual conversation with one of them, a young black man, 25 years old, with dreadlocks halfway down his back. I was ready to write him off. And yet, he introduced himself, shook hands, and went to work.

Over the course of the day, we engaged in casual conversation. Where are you from? Where do you live? That sort of thing. Niko mentioned that he was Jamaican, with a British mother; that he lived north of Baltimore in an area where most of my family lived; that he had graduated from college, not really knowing what he wanted to do—like so many college grads. He couldn’t see himself in an office, so he and a group of his friends decided they would each pursue training in different trades: electrical work, plumbing, HVAC, carpentry...and would help each other when/if they became homeowners themselves. 

Niko had worked as an HVAC technician,  but had moved to this stairlift company for no particular reason—just to broaden his repertoire of skills, I guess. In addition, just for fun, they agreed that each of them would learn another language. Niko chose Japanese, but explained that he could speak more easily than write it. And then demonstrated why that was so. He admired the art we had on our walls and admitted that he painted a little.

These  mini-conversations ranged from surprising facts like these to the fact that he collected words—and used them frequently on the job to embed them in his vocabulary. For which he was ridiculed,  but he took  it with good humor, as we saw in his conversations with his co-workers. On the subject of handwriting (cursive), he said his handwriting was so bad that he had taken up calligraphy because his girlfriend had criticized it. Really??

Think about that. A young man collecting words. A group of young men thinking ahead and planning for home ownership, willing to learn a new skill for future use as well as for sharing. A group interested enough in learning to try to master another language, just for fun. A boy who worked at handwriting—not simply Palmer Method cursive, but its more artistic, more precise cousin, calligraphy. 

Whether he was being honest about all this is unknown—maybe he was just a creative storyteller, and showing off a bit. But, if so, he knows enough to have built some great stories. 

If there are kids, if there are young people with that kind of attitude, that eagerness for knowledge, I am heartened. We might just make it through.