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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jeff Hobbs
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August 25 - September 11, 2020
The past had happened; the future was literally locked in place. Neither could inform the present in any meaningful way.
how to minister to the often crippling emotional trauma caused by the suboptimal home lives of so many students, and in doing so, free their cognition—and their potential—in full.
Rob did get lost, and not by accident. Because of football, he was able to feel like he could come to St. Benedict’s each morning and take advantage of its curriculum and facilities without buying into its philosophies.
But words mattered, more so in Newark than many other places. In a world where income and possessions were limited, words represented dignity, pride, self-worth.
But there were the rare students bright enough to maintain high grades no matter what they were struggling with internally.
Losing a father was more than a singular devastating event. It marked the beginning of a struggle, a lifetime struggle made harder by the conscious awareness that it would always be so, that no achievement would ever nullify the reality of such an absence. The single thing that did help—to cope with if not to overcome—was friendship, to which these boys clung fiercely.
We crowded into Yorkside Pizza and Rudy’s Bar hoping to not be carded, which we always were. It was as if all of these kids had spent so long working so hard to get here that the reaction to actually being here was to become idiots.
With Rob, there was no judging, no need to hone any aspects of personality or tout knowledge.
They were accustomed to the administrative lag times by now, but the waits carried a more expansive kind of anxiety than either of them had before known; in Skeet’s and Rob’s eyes, the man had been freed, his conviction overturned on no less an authority than the Constitution of the United States, and yet here they were again, battling the legal army of a state-sponsored apparatus that seemed intensely focused on keeping him imprisoned.
Oswaldo’s advice was the same that, a few years ago, he himself had refused to hear from others: “Get the fuck out of Newark. Get the fuck away from people who won’t get the fuck out of Newark.”
My thoughts exactly. Rob should of left his home of birth after graduation from Yale . This should have been a preplanned absolute throughout his studies at Yale and especially during his senior year. He He should have inquired into job possibilities, cost of moving and living, cost of housing, and transportation avenues. Lastly he should have prepared some Resumés and tampered the ineffective aspects of his pride by realizing his future was predicated on forward momentum in life rather than the status quo .
The elderly and wildly successful credit card magnate believed that certain human frailties could actually help fuel success. Insecurity drove billionaire entrepreneurs. Emotional instability made for superb art. The need for attention built great political leaders. But anger, in his experience, led only to inertia.
Mr. Cawley understood that a life wasn’t lived on paper. He was not disappointed so much as confused, and he opted not to inquire further into what exactly had happened to Rob’s psyche between Yale graduation and now. He wanted to spare himself the sting of his own poor judgment. This conversation was the last he ever had with Rob.
Her frustration had little to do with disappointment but rather with fear. She was afraid for her headstrong son, because no matter how articulately Rob spun his circumstances, she knew what almost forty years of manual labor felt like (terrible) and what it earned you (very little).
What she knew, and what she couldn’t believe Rob didn’t know, was that problems such as theirs, problems that traced back generations and involved far more than money (though money was often their emblem), would never be solved with $500 every two weeks.
No matter how skillfully he was able to string these moments together and stretch them into future years, he nevertheless struck her as inextricably lodged within the minute in which he was living. And never more so than when he asked for her help in a new venture, which involved guns.
And Oswaldo understood now with a clarity he’d never had before that all of Rob’s troubles were self-inflicted—that on Yale graduation day Rob had stood within reach of everything he now didn’t have.
We weren’t speaking out of self-pity so much as presenting facts, and though none of us mentioned it outright, the facts spoke of something alarming about the world in which we lived and the generation we were a part of: among the four of us we shared over twenty years of education at Ivy League schools, and we were all motivated and hardworking, and none of us were currently able to make life function beyond the short term.
But Rob coveted money so that he could help other people materially and in doing so manipulate their perception of him.
his time and replaced it with negativity, the feeling ingrained over generations that any path taken—whether college, real estate, the opening of a neighborhood café—would only loop back to the kitchen table on Smith Street, a blunt and some liquor to pass around.
Sometimes those you may consider as friends can actually be hampering your growth in life. Rob had a misguided concept of loyalty and dependability. This can be noted when he goes and buys a fixer-up house and only one of his friends actually came to assist him with the work on the house. This also can be seen when he and four of his friends decide to score a large amount of marijuana and when it is obtained he is the only one left to process it and sell it. On closer inspection many people benefited off of him but he received very limited benefit in kind
The same inexorable movement of time had afflicted Oswaldo during the three years after college graduation. Resurrecting himself had been the hardest decision he’d ever made, but in retrospect it had simply been logical.
He wished that Rob’s father were still alive, in which case Oswaldo would have sent Skeet a letter in prison framing Rob’s situation and explaining what guidance might help him achieve actual progress. If he could have used Skeet as a conduit, he truly believed that he could have motivated his friend to change. Few influences on earth were more powerful than that which a father had on a son.
He laughed. “What do you worry about me for?” “I was there for a year,” she said. “And no one I knew was killed or even hurt. Back home, though, a lot of people were killed. Friends of mine. That’s why I worry about you.” To her, the war being fought abroad, engineered by powerful strangers, did not measure against the wars fought at home by people she knew.
Nobody, it seemed, was making the money he’d thought he would make, inhabiting the home he’d thought he would inhabit, doing the thing he’d thought he would do in life. Nobody was fulfilling the dreams harbored on graduation day almost ten years earlier.
This dynamic was exacerbated by a pattern that emerged in which none of his friends at Yale felt comfortable or capable of offering advice because of the hard way he’d grown up in Newark, and none of his friends in Newark felt comfortable doing the same because this was the guy who’d graduated from Yale. He was heartbreakingly isolated, even in the midst of his closest friends.
But even in that context, I encountered so much positivity that I do hope courses through these pages. He faced so many challenges, many self-wrought, many induced by the relentless algorithms of poverty, and he never wilted, he never stopped caring about others and, as his mother told me, influencing others.
But it’s also a story about love, and not just the standard associations of grace and depth, but the trickier components, the ones that are hard to confront let alone wrap your head around: the warped logic and impossible loyalties and invisible burdens that love can and does generate.
I’ve mentioned the idea of seeking out help. Yale has a comprehensive infrastructure in place, geared primarily toward students whose upbringings haven’t necessarily prepared them for college life—academic, emotional, social. There are guidance counselors and writing tutors and cultural advisers, all free
The author also mentions that the ones who need this help the most would most likely not avail themselves of it. Why? I feel this is a matter of displaced pride wrapped up in the fuzzy logic of socioeconomic impact on how one perceives the world and how it impacts the growth of an individual.
I’ve cited Rob’s aversion to seeking out help as an admission of not belonging. But what do you do about that gap? Who’s most culpable—the students falling behind or the administration unable to pull them forward?
