On days when my schedule permitted, I volunteered at my daughter’s middle school. The teachers didn’t need classroom assistants the way the elementary school teachers did when my wife and I volunteered there. At middle school, the most desperate need was for help during the lunch hour. Crowd control. When I checked in at the front office, I was given a button that in large letters said, “Dads At Lunch.” On my first day of volunteering, the receptionist gave me some coupons for a free cheeseburger at the local McDonald’s.
“These are if you catch one of the kids being good,” she said, as she doled out a few into my hand. Interesting premise, I thought. “Catching” kids being good? I noticed the drawer where the coupons were kept must have had a thousand in there. At the rate she was handing them to me, my grandchildren would be students here before the coupons were used up.
”What do you mean by ‘being good’?” I asked.
”If they speak to you, or if they throw away some trash,” she said. “Just don’t give coupons to kids with plastic bags who are picking up trash. They are being punished for something.” Apparently they already had been caught for doing something other than good.
“Do I have to have a reason to give out one of these coupons?
“ She thought for a moment, and shrugged.
”I guess not.”
”Then can I have some more?”
She gave me a pocketful.
I didn’t really have any expectations as I approached the lunch area. My daughter had told me that it was mostly loud and messy and offered no counsel other than to not embarrass her. I got there about 10 minutes before the bell rang, so I stood off to the side of this outdoor concrete slab with metal picnic tables covered by a patio roof, waiting for the kids to arrive. About 50 crows and gulls also had gotten there early, but took their places patiently on the roof so they could see where their best chances would be for their own lunch in about 45 minutes. It was a type of ornithological security camera. They jockeyed for position with one another as I assumed the kids would do once the cafeteria windows were open for business.
What I didn’t anticipate was how my own memories of school lunches came flooding back, nearly causing an out-of-body experience.
There have been times in my life when I intentionally have gone back to specific places in my past just to stand in their midst and see if any ghosts were still there. I have sat in my elementary school parking lot remembering a teacher drawing blood out of my chin with her thumbnail for my misbehaving. I have walked through the rink where I got my teeth knocked out playing hockey, and have tarried at the spot on the way home from junior high school where I lost a fight. I have gone to the senior room of my high school where I was terrorized as a freshman and later terrorized freshmen three years later. I have gone to graves of friends who have left us too early, and have stood in the Library of Congress where I did my dissertation research, just to see if there were any ghosts lingering there. Names, mostly good memories, but no ghosts.
So it really caught me off guard at this middle school when, waiting for the sixth, seventh and eighth graders to pour into the lunch area, the jungle drums began to pound. I remembered how painful the school lunch hour could be at this age. It is the hour when it is unquestionably clear who the popular kids are and who aren’t. In the classroom, it isn’t quite as clear because the teachers can compensate through judicious treatment. Even in P.E., the kids are divided into groups, not according to ability or popularity, but according to the teacher’s sense of equality.
In the lunch area, though, the Invisible Hand that shakes the Sifter, sorting out who is in and who is out is unmistakable. I was not necessarily one of the school rejects when I was this age. I just remember seeing them everywhere and thanking God that I wasn’t one of them, that the Big Snapper hadn’t dragged me under yet. They were social lepers. If you got too close to them, people might think you actually knew them, which meant you were potentially as weird as them or that whatever their personality disease was could possibly leap off of them and onto you like an infected flea. You kept your distance. Regardless of what your pastor told you about befriending the friendless, you knew you were just going to have to accept the consequences of ignoring his instruction during lunch. You simply did not cross that imaginary line.
All of this came hurtling back during these moments while I waited for the lunch bell to ring. Entire cemeteries of ghosts emptied into the patio. I could see in this place the people I had tried to avoid years ago; and I thought of how nothing had probably changed, that the evolution of the species would not have included changing the brutal selection process of isolating the fat, non-English speaking, severely acned, hostile, poorly hygeined and socially backward from everyone else. I would have to see it all over again. The drums became deafening.
I was right.
The cool kids sat together. So did the rich kids. So did the athletes. So did the cheerleaders. So did the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts. So did the Bible Club with its Left Behind books. Sometimes the groups divided along racial lines; sure enough, there were the kids eating alone or with maybe one other person, unable to deny the reality of what the invisible lunchroom Sifter was telling them. They did not fit in or belong. They either would be ignored or picked on. I still don’t know which is worse.
I sat briefly with many of them and tried to engage them in conversation, trying hard not to act with condescension or pity. I asked them about classes, teachers and books. Some were very talkative. Even effusive, revealing some of the reasons why people steered clear of them. One barely seemed to endure my questioning and finally said, “I prefer to be by myself if you don’t mind.”
”Really?” I said. “Why?”
“Because people annoy me. They’re so stupid.”
At the end of each brief conversation I would produce one of these coupons.
“What is this for?” they would ask. I told them it was for a free cheeseburger.
“No, what did we do to deserve it?”
”Nothing. I just wanted you to have it. No reason. Just because I want to.”
The reaction to this kind of senseless dispensation of goodness was wonderful to watch. Some were thankful. Some walked away quizzical. Some showed their friends, and those friends would come to me and ask for a coupon. At this point I felt comfortable attaching requirements.
“You see that kid sitting over there by himself? Walk over there, sit down by him and tell him something good about himself,” I would say before giving the coupon.
Now THAT is fun to watch.
Some kids caught on to the coupon gig pretty quickly, and when they saw me would start acting like Eddie Haskel from “Leave It to Beaver”—helping others with their backpacks, throwing trash away, always looking my direction out of the corners of their eyes. One girl made sure she was always in my line of vision and that I saw her do something nice. She got a coupon, but I was less excited about handing out coupons to suck-ups. It’s boring. Mrs. Cleaver has my respect.
If I saw trouble brewing in a group (shouting, cursing, shoving, name-calling and backpack swinging were pretty good indicators), I would walk into the middle of the circle with the coupons. “Look at this,” I’d say. “Free cheeseburgers. Anybody want one?” They all did. Crisis averted.
Some of the tables had chess or checkerboards painted onto their surfaces; some days I brought checkers from home. All it took was sitting down and setting the checkers on the board, and kids would appear, wanting to play. The sound around the game was deafening. The kids played against me by committee: “No, don’t move there, Stupid! He’ll jump you!” Every move a kid made was followed by the obligatory declaration: “You suck!” Still, it was fun; and everyone got a coupon just for being in the crowd.
The noise and chaos of the lunch period built to an ear-bleeding pitch; and then the bell rang, signaling a return to classes. The place cleared out as quickly as cockroaches when you turn on the kitchen light. Then the crows and gulls parachuted in like the 101st Airborne Division, creating chaos of their own. None was interested in playing checkers.
As I thought about this coupon routine, I decided we all have something like this as our vocation. It isn’t as if we go find the misfits and give them a trinket and a pat on the head, though. Instead, we can look for those in our families, our places of work and in our communities who routinely are ignored, passed over or taken advantage of; and we can in one way or another say to them, “I see you. I notice you. You’re not invisible. You matter.” Loneliness can be the most devastating disease in the world. We really don’t need that much to fulfill our vocation. Jesus sent His followers out with nothing except instructions.
Sometimes, all you need are some coupons.
Adapted from God Hides in Plain Sight: How to See the Sacred in a Chaotic World, by Dean Nelson (Brazos Press, 2009). Nelson is the founder and director of the Journalism Program at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. He spent three years as a youth pastor in Detroit.
