don’t shake hands here. We hug here.” I’m not naturally a huggy guy, but so began what has been so far five years of hugging.
We nominally gather around the table on Thursdays to eat, but, in reality, we gather to feed a deeper hunger. The meal is always the same, spicy chicken and black rice. Cellphones are banned (“Be in the now,” Kathy says). About a third of the way through the meal, we go around the table and each person says something they are grateful for, something nobody knows about them, or some other piece of information about their life at that moment. There are frequent celebrations—somebody passed the GED exam, got a job, or graduated from barber school. People also throw more complicated things on the table, too. A seventeen-year-old girl is dealing with a pregnancy. Another young woman has a failing kidney, and Medicaid refuses to pay the cost for a new one. A young man announces he’s bisexual, and another admits he is depressed. One day a new arrival sat at the table and told us that though she was now twenty-one, she hadn’t sat at a dinner table since she was eleven.
Most of our conversations are pure affirmation; people have had enough crap in their lives and need to hear how valuable they are, how much they are loved and needed. Often, we just tell jokes and laugh. The kids sing in their chairs. I brought my daughter one day and as she walked out she told me, “That’s the warmest place I’ve ever been in my life.”
After the meal we head over to the piano, and somebody will play an Adele song and people will sing. But the dinner table is the key technology of social intimacy here. It is the tool we use to bond, connect, and commit to one another. I’ve learned to never underestimate the power of a dinner table. It’s the stage on which we turn toward one another for love like flowers seeking the sun. “Thank you for seeing the light in me,” one young woman said to Kathy one night. The adults come from the emotionally avoidant world of Washington, D.C., and get to shed their armor. The kids come from the streets and call Kathy and David “Mom” and “Dad,” their chosen parents.
The kids around the table have been through the normal traumas of poverty in America—some have been homeless, some have traveled through the foster care system. The theme of male cruelty runs through their histories—some father or other male figure abused them, abandoned them, or misled them. But they are enmeshed now. Bill Millikan, who founded the organization Communities in Schools, came to the table one night. He’s in his seventies now. “I’ve been working in this field for fifty years,” he says, “and I’ve never seen a program turn around a life. Only relationships turn around lives.”
That’s what’s happening around the table. You wouldn’t know it if you were white and over thirty-five, but Washington, D.C., is a fantastic place to be if you are an artist, black, and under twenty-five. The kids who come to dinner are connected to this underground arts scene—as poets, painters, DJs, singers, or something else. We adults in the group provide them an audience in front of which they can realize their talents. Their gift to us is a complete intolerance of social distance.
Emotional combustion happens in the most mysterious ways. No one can really trace the chemical processes by which love bursts into flame in one community and not another. But it is here in this community, and all of us have been transformed in surprising ways. David gave up his job and now works with the kids full-time. Kathy organizes arts programs across America but comes home and has another full-time vocation waiting.
For years, the adults told the kids they could go to college, so when they began coming of age, they took Kathy and David up on the offer, and now we all have to find a way to pay for it. Kathy and David set up a nonprofit called AOK, which stands for All Our Kids. We are all deeply embedded now, giving each other helping hands. And it is because Kathy and David responded simply to need. Kathy grew up in a large Catholic family, so she’s used to having a large loving mess of people around. When she’s asked how she could possibly host that many young people, she looks