A teenager taking a selfie with a squirrel in the woods. What could possibly go wrong?
“I approached it making a clicking noise with my tongue, phone drawn,” Brian Genest, 17, told
Buzzfeed
.
“When I got close enough, the squirrel actually tried grabbing my phone. I shook it off, then snapped this photo.”
It was the flash that drove the beast completely bonkers.
”Next thing I knew, the squirrel was on my shoulder, then under my shirt, and then hanging off my back,” Brian recalled. “This photo is courtesy of my mom, who collapsed laughing shortly after.”
It’s pretty clear who emerged the victor in that encounter! Being bested by a squirrel is just one of the many indignities involved in being a teenager. Others include your parents turning into embarrassingly clueless numbskulls, teachers becoming sadistic fiends, and the refrigerator never holding anything worth eating, even after your mom comes home with bags and bags of groceries. It’s a tough life.
The high school years are challenging for everyone, and few of us get through them unscathed. No, I’m not sharing stories of my misspent youth right now; even the highlight reel would take way too much time. Suffice to say that against all odds I managed to survive coming of age in the sixties, and I figure the current crop of teens will likely prove equally foolish and equally resilient now that it’s their turn.
“Adolescents are not monsters,” insists “the Mother of Family Therapy,” Virginia Satir. “They are just people trying to learn how to make it among the adults in the world, who are probably not so sure themselves.”
Lots of teens make it a point of pride to avoid conversing with adults, while wily parents dream up ever more elaborate strategies for getting them to interact with the human race. Here’s how one mom succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.
“On a lovely June day in 2006,” Cathryn Couch recalls, ”my cell phone rang. Sue Curry, my riding instructor, wondered if I could give her daughter a job over the summer and perhaps teach her to cook at the same time.”
Impossible! Cathryn couldn’t babysit a teenager at her job as a chef at a Sonoma County retreat center. “But Sue was persistent and I have always been more inclined to say ‘yes’ than ‘no’ when the universe comes calling.”
Then Cathryn heard about friends of friends who were too ill to cook for themselves. “Sue offered to pay for the food, I donated my time, and Megan and I began meeting one afternoon a week to prepare meals for two single people and a family of four.”
When the father of that family stopped by to collect the food on his way home from work, the relief on his face made it clear this was a bright spot in a very dark time. “I witnessed Megan’s pride in the contribution she was making in their life, “ Cathryn recalled. “And his deep gratitude for the simple gift of the meals. Something about that moment took hold in me.”
The idea kept growing until it became the
Ceres Community Project
, which now operates two kitchens and two organic gardens in Sonoma and Marin Counties, just north of San Francisco. Each year, 300 teenage volunteers create organic, medically tailored meals for those who are ill and need extra help putting nutritious food on the table.
Yes, of course there’s adult supervision. Nobody is going to just hand kids knives and turn them loose in a kitchen!
Meal plans and custom recipes are created by professional chefs and dietitians. At the start of each shift, the cook labels plastic containers with the type and volume of produce, how it needs to be prepped, and where it’s heading next. The volunteers are responsible for following precise instructions and soon learn the difference between chopping, dicing, slicing, and mincing.
“The kids are learning good food habits,” explained my friend Rayne, a longtime adult volunteer at Ceres. “They learn about nutrition, they learn about responsibility, they learn about commitment.”
The kids also learn the joy of doing something useful that earns the sincere gratitude of strangers. “A couple of times a year we bring in clients to talk with the teens,” says Deborah Ramelli, Director of Development and Community Affairs. “The client will look at the teens and say, ‘You’ve saved my life. I couldn’t do this without you.’”
That sort of comment is thrilling for anyone to hear, and doubly so for teens, who tend to view all conversations with adults as the human equivalent of this classic Gary Larson cartoon.
“My hours in the community kitchen,” commented teen volunteer Alexis Weiss, “have taught me to make healthy homegrown meals, package them with care, and send them off with love… Volunteering at Ceres helped me realize how important community is and that we all need to be cared for sometimes.”
Ceres has helped affiliates launch in cities across America and in Denmark; next month the staff is training a group from New Zealand. Funding comes from donors, corporate partners, government grants, and contracts for studies measuring the impact of wholesome food on medical outcomes. “We’ve built a body of evidence that shows healthcare outcomes improve, healthcare spending goes down, quality of life goes up,” says Deborah.
Quality of life goes up for the teen volunteers, too. They develop skills that will prove considerably more useful than taking selfies with squirrels. While learning to cook, they discover the value of community and resilience and interdependence — qualities essential for any era, and more vital than ever in light of the uncertain and deeply worrying future unfolding before our eyes.
Most of all, these youngsters are learning that life is all about taking care of one another. As American guru Ram Das put it:
Whether
this is the first day of the Apocalypse,
or the first day
of the Golden Age,
the work remains the same:
to love each other
and ease as much suffering
as possible
Got a story about teens you know — or your own teenage years?
Please share it in the comments below.
FINDING HOPE
This story is part of a series of blog posts exploring ways people help each other find hope in this worrying world. Know someone you think should be featured? Let me know in the comments below.
See all the posts in this series.
DON’T MISS OUT!
If you haven’t already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I’ll take it from there.
[email protected]
SUBSCRIBED BUT NOT GETTING POST ANNOUNCEMENTS?
Check your spam folder
.
Internet security is in a frenzy these days. If you still can’t find it, please let me know.
FOR FURTHER READING
My bestselling travel memoirs & guides
Cozy Places to Eat in Seville
My new book:
My San Francisco
If you haven’t read
My San Francisco
yet,
you can order it HERE.
You can purchase the paperback edition, in person or online, at
Rebound Bookstore in
San Rafael, CA
Already read this book? I invite you to
leave a review HERE
.
GOING SOMEWHERE?
Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in
the search box
below
. If I’ve written about it, you’ll find it.
Leave a Reply