Things like: the round tops of chair backs, the round handle of a toy fishing net, any building with a curved roof, the front of a car.
While Jen and I repeatedly say back the right word, "ROOF ... ROOF" or "CHAIR ... CHAIR" this doesn't seem to matter much. Instead, his bright eyes and gleeful face grow ever wider and he replies to us and to his big brother Tyler (who also helps in the ball dissuasion mission) "BALL! BALL! BALL!"
And then, usually we all laugh because, hey, it's kind of fun to see almost everything as a ball.
Right?
But then I read the news. I open my front door and proceed to go teach my 7th graders. And everywhere I look I see the brokenness in our world. Baltimore. Nepal. Broken hearts. Broken dreams. And I wonder about that question Langston Hughes asked so powerfully and which Lorraine Hansberry brought to life so vividly: "What happens to a dream deferred?"
What happens to a dream when it is deferred, or worse: impossible?
There is a great scene in Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun when Beneath says to her Ma about her older brother, Walter, "There ain't nothing left to love!"
Walter has acquiesced to the racism of the whites in his neighborhood, who have offered to buy out the black family so that they move out of the neighborhood. Walter is broken, defeated man.
But Ma says to Beneatha a line that makes me tremble: "There's always something left to love." Her subsequent speech to her daughter beautiful articulates that when we are most broken, that is when we most need love.
Years ago, I would have my 7th graders in Hudson focus on that speech, and rewrote it about someone in their own life. We would read Hansberry's play and act it out in class, and every time one of my students read that line from Ma out loud, I would tremble. I would cry.
And my heart sometimes feels so weak. I can't read about the brokenness in our world without crying. And when I cry, I can't help wondering what I can do. What any of us can do against injustices that seem so formidable.
How can we change a deeply entrenched system of racism?
How can we find hope for deeply broken forms of education?
How can we transform lives--our own and others--fraught with despair or fear or hurt?
And I come back to Hughes. And I come back to Hansberry. And I come back to my sons.
Again and again and again I come back to trying to see the world not just through my own crying and weeping and wonder, but through the lens of hope which others show me.
I try to see that anything good--a poem, a play, a word on the blank page, an interaction with a student, a protest, a smile, a plea--is never wasted.
I know that, soon, Benjamin will learn the reality that not everything is a ball. Some things are most definitely not, and are in fact the complete opposite. Life is hard. Life is unjust. Life is fearful and confusing and painful.Life has jagged edges that don't even approach roundness, smoothness, and a curve towards good.
But there are still balls in the world. And there is still some hope that we might transform things that had no earthy business being balls into balls.
We might use the tools at our disposal to change, re-envision, rethink, and redeem. We might find ways to help create curves of growth and curves of possibility where none seem possible. And though I can't always find the strength to wipe away my tears and work, I find it most often when I realize the truth of Ma's statement.
In all our brokenness, there is still something left to love. There is still something worth fighting for. There are poems, plays, protests, pleas, and purposes which need hands and feet to energize them.
There is always something left to love.
