While I'm on the subject... I wrote this a few years ago for a memoir class. This morning, thinking about Daniela, I forced myself not to re-read it 'til I'd written that first post, lest it mess with my memories of her. Now, sitting here in full, messy tears after a quick read, I present to you a tiny piece of our collective story. Hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed reliving it.
The Biggest Little Difference
As a kid I was a chronic joiner; baton twirling, ballet, piccolo, swim team, scouts, track, mathletes, cheerleading, whatever – I did it all, for at least a few months at a time. I was determined to stick with each new thing and I promised as much to my folks in regular three-month intervals all through school.
Fast forward to a few years out of college; I’d just changed jobs, again, a natural extension of those fickle childhood patterns. At my last gig I was stretched so thin that there was never time or energy for anything else. Slaving away, um, fundraising for March of Dimes didn’t leave much space or money for enjoying one’s own life. So I’d taken a new, dull, much better paying position at Sun Microsystems where I would have the flexibility to pursue my real loves and interests, whatever those turned out to be. Four months into this freedom I found that I still didn’t have time for anything – except all the sitting around I was doing. Yeah, I was busy alright - busy skewing the average hours of television that American’s watch daily. Bored out of my skin, I needed to get off my ass, to meet some new people, to – it sounds ridiculous, I know – make a difference. I decided to volunteer; I would commit, and whatever I chose, it would matter.
Around that time Boys & Girls Clubs and Big Brothers Big Sisters were collaborating locally and in need of ‘Bigs’. When we met for the first time my ‘Little’, Daniela, was eleven years old and instantly loveable. Already nearly my height and outweighing most of her peers, she stood out in a crowd of fifth graders in exactly the way that pre-pubescent girls fear most. To the adults at the Columbia Park Boys & Girls Club in San Francisco’s Mission district, she stood out as the singularly most promising young person to come through the Guerrero Street entrance in a long time. She was the first to cut watermelon slices and put on Band-Aids for the little kids and the last to leave a room, making sure it was cleaned up and ready for the next group. Equal parts generous and humble, she was the most loving and helpful kid I’d ever met; still is, even accounting for any bias that I’ve developed over the years.
Initially our relationship was based solely on her ability to trounce me at every hand-to-hand game the Boys & Girls Club had to offer. Her years of steady after-school attendance at the Club truly shone in the ping-pong, nine ball and foosball skills that she’d developed. I’m not one for letting kids win, or at least that’s the theory I claimed after months of trying my very best and never winning a single game. The earliest photo I have of us together shows me with pool cue raised overhead in triumph after finally winning one measly round of pool. It remains, six years hence, my only victory secured with Daniela across the table. My guess is that she finally gave into feeling sorry for me, and let me win.
It didn’t take long for us to cover more ground than the game room offered. I’d been matched with a young lady that shared my love of baseball and the great desire to be the best at whatever she tried. Smart, determined and ever optimistic - so much for me saving her, she was already well on her way. Not that the neighborhood, her family and growing up poor and Latina in San Francisco didn’t do their best to throw up roadblocks.
At their core, the truth of both Boys & Girls Clubs and Big Brothers Big Sisters is that kids need adults to pay attention, to care, to hold them up to unbelievably high expectations. That is, hopefully, where the Bigs come in, and where we attempt do our very best. We’re not replacements for moms and dads, not at all, but we do our damnedest to fill in the often tremendous gaps. As much as their mom dearly loved Daniela and all four of her siblings, Maria was just plain in over her head.
– – –
When I got a 9:00am call from Everett Middle School asking me to pick her up, I figured they’d mistaken me for Daniela’ mother and that she wasn’t doing much to correct their mistake. Better to call the “Big Sis” than to get busted by mom.
“Mrs. Ruedas can never be reached, she’s unavailable today again,” I was curtly corrected. Daniela wasn’t in uniform and therefore not allowed to attend classes; I had to come pick her up, now. Never mind that I was at work or that I wasn’t sure it was appropriate to take her anywhere that her mom didn’t agree to ahead of time. Wasn’t there another family member or someone closer to the family?
“Your name is first on her emergency card with the office”.
The classic “aha” moment. Showing each week up had put me in line as family, as a responsible party to her growing-up years. Daniela was as much my responsibility now as she was Maria’s. Holy crap!
I made my across town the Mission District and to Everett Middle School’s counseling office where I was presented with the case against one Daniela Ruedas.
“Daniela can’t stay in school today because she’s not in uniform. We expect the students to wear a white collared shirt and dark pants. You’ll have to take her home with you,” the school counselor barked from behind her tiny glasses and greasy, unkempt hair.
“Um, I’m not a family member and I would be taking her to work.”
“Whatever, she just can’t stay here and be disruptive in her purple shirt; it’s unacceptable and she knows better.”
Daniela was sitting all of five feet away, on a hard orange plastic chair that shot my memory right back to third grade. So I checked in with her to see what the deal was with the missing shirt. It was odd for her not to follow the letter of the law. There hadn’t been quarters for laundry lately and so the two white uniform shirts she owned were both too dirty to wear. Rather than miss class, she came in the closest thing she could find, making sure to at least wear a collared top. I, for one, never needed much of an excuse to stay home from school and yet, here she was breaking the rules in order to show up.
I explained the laundry and money situation to the stubborn woman behind the desk and she responded, practically at the top of her lungs for an audience of the ten or so other teenagers in the office.
“Huh, well if she can’t get the laundry done on time then she should learn to be more responsible and not so lazy. Did you know that she’s been absent 11 out of the past 28 school days? If something’s not done about her attendance she’ll not pass the seventh grade.”
Interesting.
“Let me get this straight,” I say, “she’s missed a ton of school, right? But today, she’s here, but wearing purple instead of white, so she has to leave and miss yet another full day of classes?” Surely this woman would see the gaping holes in her logic.
“If she really wanted to learn, she’d wear a white top.”
“If she really wanted to learn,” I leaned forward and hissed, “she’d have taken over an hour to get here on three different city buses and two separate BART trains, after first dropping off her eight-year-old sister at school across town, and in spite of knowing she’d get busted without her uniform and probably get sent home anyway. If she really wanted to learn, she’d be a 12 year-old who chooses to show up when other 12 year-olds are at the mall. You’re going to stand there and talk about miserable attendance and then send her away?”
At this point the woman miraculously remembered that she kept extra uniform shirts in the office, just in case students show up unprepared. How she hadn’t known this before dragging me away from work and mortifying a little girl in front of her classmates, I had no idea. Daniela could stay and she could learn, whether the school wanted her to or not.
I learned a lot that day as well. Life isn’t set up for Daniela, or the millions of kids exactly like her, to succeed. The burn of my angry, frustrated tears as I left the school’s halls warned me that I didn’t get to back out this time. This wasn’t the baton twirling or the piccolo playing of my childhood that I could grow bored with and set aside. This was a smart, sweet, brave child and she deserved more than this world was prepared to give her. I was hooked.
– – –
Nearly three years into our weekly get togethers, Daniela met me outside the Club doors in a red-face panic.
“Did you drive today?”
“I’m parked around the corner. Daniela, what’s the matter? What’s going on?”
“Something’s wrong with my mom, she just called and needs an ambulance. Can we go to the hospital?” The words were coming so fast and were so muffled by her fear that it took me a beat to even understand them.
A minute later, speeding to San Francisco General, we happened upon her mom, Maria, en-route on the sidewalk and stopped to pick her up and to see what had happened. She was doubled-over, crying and cramping. She wouldn’t get in the car to let me drive her; she argued that the ambulance had to take her and she’d already called 911. Maria spoke with an experience in these matters that told me that this was not her first time through the process.
In the emergency room of the lowest ranked hospital in all of Northern California, I began to understand why the ambulance was a necessary link between Maria and the doctors. There were lines for everything; lines to check in, lines to ask questions, lines to fill out forms, lines for the bathroom, lines for the phone. It was chaos. Had I driven her, she’d be stuck in the first of many lines that San Francisco General offers its low-income patients. Instead, the ambulance screamed in and medics whisked her behind formidable, stainless steel doors, presumably toward something that would pass as medical care.
This left Daniela, her little sister Brandy, and I to wait. We waited for ten minutes with our fellow line-standers. Ten minutes of war vets shouting curses at the walls and homeless men talking out of their heads. Ten minutes of assaulting smells and terrifying outbursts was all it took for Daniela to look at me, well up, and ask:
“Can we sit in your car?”
We left the chaos and found the relative quiet and safety of my 1996 Jetta. Always one to equate food with comfort, I chose some of their favorites from the corner bodega: Hot Chips, Ding Dongs and Dr. Pepper. These were shockingly steady elements in the diets of Mission kids. My friends and I ventured to their neighborhood for all manner of amazing restaurants: Mexican, Thai, Vietnamese, you name it. But the kids skipped all that and headed straight for the sugar and salt. On this night, that suited all three of us just fine.
I’d never seen Daniela cry; she’d had plenty of reasons but kept things pretty well locked up tight. It was awfully disconcerting and, in between sips of soda, I was having a really hard time keeping it together myself. Her mom was having another miscarriage and Daniela was scared to death. I didn’t have any of the right things to say, I had no idea how to promise her that it would be okay. So I distracted the girls with games and made sure to keep tight hold of their hands. On and off throughout the night we’d check in at the emergency room for updates. I eventually sent them home with a friend, chosen specifically for her gentle way and amazing grilled cheese sandwiches. I knew she’d show the same love for the girls while I waited for their mother.
At some foggy hour the next morning Maria was released; a painful D&C and yet another pregnancy behind her. This was her fifth miscarriage and she was unfazed, wanting only to collect the girls and head home. I’ve often wondered how that night, and the four times before that I wasn’t witness to, have shaped Daniela and her sisters. We’ve never talked about it.
– – –
Something we do talk about a lot though is baseball. I’m a self-professed mega-fan but if pressed, will quickly reveal that what I actually love about the game is that precious and magical combination of sunshine, grass, hot dogs, and beer. Daniela, on the other hand, is a true fan, a lover of the game itself. She can recount a ballgame weeks later, practically play by play. She’ll remember who hit into a double play in the top of the sixth inning and how that turned the game. My commitment to the game goes as far as knowing what a fielder’s choice is, and fully, passionately caring if the Oakland A’s win or not. We’ve spent many afternoons, hot dogs in hand, catching up on each others lives with the game as a backdrop and a common ground on which to get to know and cherish each other. I’ve read numerous accounts of sons getting to know their fathers this way. It makes the most perfect kind of sense.
On the way to pick Daniela up for a June afternoon ballgame, a pregnant friend of mine called to say that she’d lost the baby. She and her husband had been trying for years to get pregnant, and the highs of finally succeeding were wholly crushed by the depths of this news. I could barely see straight to park outside the Club. I needed to get it together before I saw Daniela, not to mention the hundreds of other kids that would be inside those walls. Cleaned up and dried off, I made my way in, if only to beg off and take a rain check for the game.
She wasn’t having it – at only 14 years old, Daniela saw right through my brave face. All she had to do was to ask what was wrong and it all came to the surface, blubbering and scared. We started to draw a concerned crowd of kids; this was not going at all how I’d planned. Daniela, already full of grace and wisdom, looked up at me and asked:
“Can we sit in your car?”
She met me at the Jetta, produced some Hot Chips and Dr. Pepper from her backpack, and then held my hand and let me cry over my friend’s loss. She has told me since then that she knew exactly how to help that afternoon; that she’d learned how the last time we had sat scared together, outside San Francisco General Hospital.
– – –
I don’t live near my ‘Little’ anymore, and my heart aches to think how far apart we are now. For four and a half years, we spent a few hours together each and every week. I’m incredibly grateful that Daniela let me into her life; she has been as much of an influence on me as I’ll ever be on her. She taught me the hidden intricacies and nuances of 50 Cent’s lyrics, and I taught her to love Thai food. She introduced me to the beautiful rhythms of the Mission District and I showed her that college was definitely within her reach. I was proud of her academic successes and growing responsibility at Boys & Girls Clubs. We knew each other’s daily struggles and triumphs. We were as comfortable in each other’s homes as in our own. To be in her presence was to know that this world was going to be okay, that there were tremendous forces of good at work.
As for me, I finally stuck with something. We rarely missed our weekly dates and I found myself constantly on the look out for novel things we could do together. Being around Daniela gave me a sense of purpose and perspective. Regardless of awful days at work or massive breakups with boyfriends or disappointment elsewhere – her needs and her challenges were so much more immediate and daunting. Yet I always felt that we could make headway. I know now that she’s a miracle worker; she taught one of the most self absorbed people around to live unselfishly. I know it will be many years before I can fully explain to her what she means to me and how she changed my outlook forever for the better.
These days ours is a relationship kept alive through email, sporadic phone calls, and yearly visits to the Bay Area. When I’m there, we never miss an opportunity to share a meal, take in a ballgame, and get straight to the point with each other. On a recent visit I found that she’d pierced her nose, started wearing make-up and paying attention to the boys in her class. Perhaps it’s better, at least for my heart-health, to not be a daily witness to these changes after all. I’ve expected each one, having been a teenage girl myself. It’s just so terrifying to watch! She’s promised to follow my grandmother’s advice and only seek out the guys who are kind, generous, funny and smart. I have my fingers crossed that her high school is full of them.
I still need her to do well, to be happy and healthy and to fling herself far and wide into this world. For all our sakes, I hope that she does just that, and that she makes herself known to as many people as possible. Hers is a life bursting with possibility and overflowing with promise. All she needed was someone, anyone really, to get off their ass, turn off the television, show up, and expect her to shine brightly.
.
