Glendale Boys

My last years working as a social worker were the best gig ever. I worked part-time for the Cherry Creek School System and part time for the city of Glendale.  I started my day at noon and worked until 8:00 p.m. visiting families and supervising a tutoring program for students. Together with the city recreation direction and the victim’s assistance social worker, we planned social events and ran a support group for teenage boys.

We started the group when the boys were in middle school. Our goals were simple ~ keep them in school and out of trouble. We started with six boys, a mixture of ethnic groups and ages. We later added three more boys, refugees from Ethiopia and Bosnia. The refugees were no problem. The American-born boys were a handful.

In the beginning we bribed the boys with food to come to the support group. They didn’t like each other and they didn’t like our rules ~ things like staying safe and not hurting each other.  Gradually they began to see the value of the group. They learned to trust us and each other. They learned that the group was a safe place to talk about being angry instead of needing to fight.

The boys group stayed together for almost four years. At the end of the first year, the recreation director decided that we should all go camping. In the mountains. In tents.

I’m not a great camper. I much prefer a hotel with a pool. Except for the boys who were refugees, our guys had not spent much time outside the one-square mile, Glendale city limits. I wasn’t convinced this would work but I was willing to try.

Our campsite was on top of a very steep hill at the YMCA of the Rockies, near Winter Park, CO. It was rugged. There were no bathrooms. No showers. No kitchen. The boys had to carry huge containers of water up the hill every day, for hand-washing and cooking. They had to pitch a tent and cook over an open fire. I think we were there for three or four days. As you can imagine, these were not Happy Campers. Most of the time, they were Grumbling Campers. Dissatisfied Campers. Campers Plotting A Revolt. 

We didn’t allow them to use racial slurs against each other. In fact, the penalty for a racial slur was push-ups, in multiples of ten, for every offense. One boy did fifty push-ups before he got the message that we were serious.

I’ll remember a conversation with one of the boys about why we didn’t want to hear him use the n-word. “There is nothing wrong with that word,” he tried to explain to me. “It just means a lazy, useless black man.” 

I was incredulous. “Did you hear what you just said?” I asked him. He never did another push-up in front of me.

When it was time to go to sleep the first night, after an exhausting day of setting up camp, hauling water, and a goodnight campfire, the boys came to tell us three adults that they couldn’t sleep. They heard noises in the woods. They missed their families back home. They asked us if we would please, come and sleep in their tent. 

“Are you sure there is room?” we asked. It was not a very big tent.

“Sure. We’ll make room.”

So we dragged our sleeping bags into their tent and prepared to go to sleep.

One of the boys suggested that everyone say goodnight to each other. One by one, we went around the tent saying, “Good night…Sleep Well…Sweet Dreams…See you in the  morning…” and adding the name of their friend to the list. It was a tender moment in the lives of six boys I will always remember with a smile.

I don’t know where these boys are now. They would be in their early 40’s, probably with children of their own. I believe they all finished high school. I know that some of them went on to get mechanical certifications and college degrees. I pray that none of them got in serious trouble along the way.

Good night, my sweet boys. You will always have a place in my heart, if not in my tent.