Twenty-two and Twenty-three and my roof

It had snowed, again. That winter the snow was so intense the snow flowed over the driveway wall and down into the front yard but it had snowed so heavily so many times that the children next door had made a slide from my driveway down to my front yard, a full story below it, out of snow. The pile was so high it was having a little alpine slope all my own. Well, mine and the children next door.

While the pile at the front of the house was amusing, the pile on the flat roof in the back of the house was not. Years earlier, I had watched that part of the roof dissolve in a week of rain. I’d had it replaced by a professional roofer, but the weight of the several feet of snow was weighing on me like I was sure it was weighing on my roof. The catch is, I’m afraid of heights, so even though the roof was off a bedroom and had a railing, I couldn’t bring myself to go out. I kept thinking it might blow away in the high winds or melt or something. Of course, I was just avoiding the truth, that with highs in the 20s the snow on my white roof would never melt until Spring at the earliest.

My plow guy had politely but adamantly refused to shovel the roof. My friends had their own roofs to deal with. My family didn’t live nearby. So I offered it up to the Facebook gods and beg for help from someone who might know someone. Within an hour Twenty-two and Twenty-three had offered to come and help. They hadn’t been my students for years at that point, and they had no reason to help me other than they are purely nice people. I’d helped them find jobs at my local pizza place when they were old enough to work and before that they had helped with school projects like packing and unpacking the classroom, but this was different, at least it felt different to me. It felt like they had taken time out of their busy lives to help an old teacher just because they could.

Both of them met and walked to my house together, and when they arrived I realized I couldn’t even open the screen door because it was frozen in place. So I slit the screening so they could sneak through the gap and get out onto the roof. They were laughing and shoveling huge piles of snow off the edges, and I couldn’t believe how fast they went. I have never been so grateful to see two former students in my life. When they finished, I drove them home, so they didn’t freeze, and insisted they take something for their hard work. They insisted they wouldn’t.

I went home and cried. First, having the metaphorical and actual weight off me and the roof was such a relief. But second, because the two of them had been so thoughtful. I hadn’t had anyone to help, and they had come because I had asked. I cried because I hear about my students from the outside world all the time. About how kids in our city are rough and violent and thoughtless and all the other words people use when they don’t know any better. These were the children who, on their day off, had come to help me. These were the children who had walked across the city in the snow and hadn’t asked for a thing, and had refused to take anything for the work they did.

What I learned from Twenty-two and Twenty-three was that it doesn’t matter what people say about you, it’s about being who you are. Those two young men had made a choice a long time ago about who they were and decided not to care what people thought about their choices. They had decided not to let who people thought they were, influence who they actually were. It’s a lesson I’ve had to learn more than once because while the two of them naturally seemed to grasp this, I could not. I have spent the last seven years learning that lesson several times over. But I would never have started learning it if it weren’t for these young men. Thank you so much Twenty-two and Twenty-three.