The Children of North Philadelphia in Words and Pictures

As those of you who have visited this blog know, I recently had the great privilege of spending a day in North Philadelphia among those who are working to make lives better for children, and among the children themselves.

This vlog tells that story in words and pictures. It, like St. Christopher's Foundation for Children that sponsors the programs I visited, holds hope high and (I'll use that word again) aloft.

The music is from Les Choristes.

Thank you, Scott Waz of Audio Post, for helping me re-engineer the sound.

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Do Not not Cross Tracks

Last night I sat at dinner with a gorgeous 15-year-old girl who told me just part of her story. The tumor that first appeared when she was 13. The tumor that returned. Her last eight months lived inside the walls of a hospital, and, at night, within the gracious, truly good rooms of a Ronald McDonald house.

She didn't, she said, remember the color of her own hair.

She hasn't gone home, not one day, in the past eight months.

Her wig was black.

Her skin was porcelain.

She will be, she said, smiling, then taking true pleasure from the thought, Snow White for Halloween.

We fashion heroines for our novels, we tread up and down the street of our own worries, and out in the world all around us are people like this young woman who are living lives we can't imagine, living those lives gracefully.

I got on a train. I took a ride. I crossed the tracks, beyond myself.

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The Wisdom of Children

I'll be down in North Philadelphia today with the children of Centro Nueva, taking photographs as the children take photographs—as they document their world. We'll be inside a neo-natal ward, down on the courts of SquashSmarts, at dinner with those families temporarily living inside a Ronald McDonald House. Children (my son included) have always taught me the most important things about how to see and what to think, which conclusions not to draw.

The world is a slippery place, and these days we're all sliding. We're watching the green and mostly red arrows on Wall Street, the confidence polls, the housing starts. We're studying the houses themselves—the seemingly permanent posting of For Sale signs, the half-built homes that now stand naked and incomplete in roaring weather. We're waking up to the news that Doubleday has laid off 10% of its staff, that publishing houses can't much afford to invest in new books, that Barnes and Noble, which fought so hard to dominate the bookselling market, is once more clamping down, so thoroughly diminishing its orders of new books that many titles are guaranteed oblivion right directly out of the gates. Monopolizing bookselling was never—but we all knew this—a good idea.

We writers understand that our futures, like all futures, have changed. That it's going to be a whole lot harder to sell the books we love—to editors, to the book-buying public. The choice I'm making, in these difficult times, is to keep working. To read better. To think harder. To go out into the world with children, for example, and see the world as children see it.

We cannot control the forces about us. We can control how we live through this, who we are through this, how we emerge. I need the wisdom of children more than ever. I need that kind of courage.

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