Smiles

A lot of days I think I am the least professional person in the history of the world, generally terrible at my job, in a nut shell a failure – well, if you read my blog you’ve heard my excessive self-deprecation theme. But today was not one of those days. Allow me to share a delightful tidbit from my work day.

So there I was juggling my normal balls of tutoring precocious eight-year olds, encouraging volunteers, building relationships with teachers and school staff (as a side note today that included buying a popsicle from the JCREW model-esque teacher some of the moms call Mr. Hot) and generally putting out fires during program when the cutest thing happened. This is just our second week of tutoring and in that time I’ve begun to banter a bit with one particular boy who for our purposes (because his name is so unusual) I will refer to as Andre (not to be confused with our own Andre Ethier).

Andre has the kind of smile that lights up a room. The banter between us has to do with me going on and on about how great his smile is. Trust me, if you met Andre, you couldn’t help but also notice his contagious smile. The banter makes him smile more sort of fuel for my fire in terms of teasing. Today after having come from an ad hoc meeting with his teacher, I said to Andre something along the lines – “I don’t see how anyone can pay attention to anything in your class when you are smiling.” To which Andre replied, and this is the part that made me a bit misty, “I only smile when I come here.”

Maybe I won’t make a million dollars, and more than likely I won’t get a promotion anytime in the next decade, but I believe I will sleep better knowing, even for the briefest of instances, I made Andre smile.