Looking For Something

He was in my fourth grade class. When I was a fourth grade teacher. That was ten years ago. I am still at the same school, but I am the computer teacher. Again. He is twenty years old now. A young man by most every measure. He was smoking a cigarette when he stopped and turned around. His moment of recognition was about as long as mine. We hadn't seen one another in five years.
Five years ago, he had come back to our school with his younger brother to look around the place and check out who he knew was still working there. At that time, he had gold hair and a state-issued ankle bracelet. When they left, one of our teachers was missing her brand new laptop computer. That kind of coincidence was unfortunately the kind of thing that followed these two about.
Five years later, he looked at me and apologized to his fourth grade teacher for smoking. "I'm trying to quit," he confided as he walked closer.
"Well, you might start by putting that one out," I suggested, pointing to the cigarette he had burned down nearly to the filter.
He dropped it and ground it into the pavement with a smile and a shrug. "You still here?" he asked.
"Right up there," I pointed to the classroom where I had been just a few minutes before, and for the past two decades.
"Yeah," he laughed a little. Then he went on to describe, for my principal who had been a teacher and then assistant principal back in those days, what had been happening over the past ten years. We had kept track of the family as best we could, even beyond that disappearing laptop. They were part of our community, part of the village. The fixture they had been, riding bikes and scooters up and down the sidewalks, dropping by to let us know how the family was holding together.
Then they were gone. His younger brother was in jail. His dad had moved away. His sisters were living their lives in other cities. He was back in the old neighborhood searching for something. A way to quit smoking. A way to quit smoking weed. A way to reconnect with the man he wanted to be. He told us he was going to have a kid. He didn't know if it was going to be a boy or a girl, and he had some names in mind. He told us that he had been living in Las Vegas. He told us a lot of things, including a tacit apology for his "anger issues" that he had back in elementary school. He told us about his friend who had been killed, mistakenly, by police a couple weeks before.
Then he told us that he was looking for his dad, and he was trying to find a way to get across the bay. And he didn't have any money. He needed a ride. He needed some cash. He needed a hand. This young man came back to the place where he had always been given another chance. My principal gave him that ride. And a few bucks.
Who knows when we will see him again, but I imagine we will.