Work Zone

He turns to the blueprints spread out over the table.

His employer, Miller and Long, has given him a chance to get ahead. It is paying his tuition, and paying him to attend, a carpentry class run by Amalgamated Builders and Contractors. It trains unskilled workers. It meets once a week for two years. If he makes it, he'll earn an apprenticeship license. It could boost his salary to $23 an hour. He also wants to learn to operate a crane, an even higher-paying skill that could earn him $70,000, $80,000 a year.

"You got to have a plan," he is saying. "By the time I'm 40, I want to be in a crane, be married, have a family, maybe a house. They got programs, you know, for people who never had a house, what you call them, first-time homeowners. People who don't got a lot of money. That's what I got my eye on."

By fall, he's beginning to make a believer out of a few people.

He's in a small classroom in a two-story building on East-West Highway in Prince George's County. There are a dozen guys in class, slumping over their desks. Glover is the only native English speaker. The others are Latino immigrants. The teacher, Bruce Weatherald, conducts the class in Spanish, then backs up and does it in English for Glover.

The lesson is tedious. It's about using a carpenter's level to determine the relative height of a wall in a building constructed on land of differing elevations. Weatherald talks to them about the formula for computing how much pressure there is in a form of poured concrete.

"But what about vibrated concrete?" he asks. There are giggles. Guys. You can count on it.

Weatherald acknowledges this with a smile, then, "Okay, I'm not playing now -- you ever vibrated concrete? You held onto a vibrator? It takes muscles -- "

And this is lost, lost, the guys laughing out loud, elbowing one another.

Glover is one of the best students in class. He averages nearly 90 on most tests. By December, Miller and Long is using him to represent the ex-offender program. He is a good speaker, earnest and brief, and he talks to the students at Cardozo High School about new vocational classes his company is helping sponsor.

"The message I want to get to you is to please get this education," he tells them. "All I wanted to do in school was learn enough math to count my money. I didn't think I'd need all this math. I didn't. But I do now. And you can make good money in this work. My future looks bright, and I want y'all's future to look bright, too."

In June he graduates from the carpentry program, second in his class. Twenty-one students started, nine finished.

Remember the 60 to 1 odds against?

Those are the odds you have to beat, just to survive.

A Milestone to Remember

In late May, there was a very small celebration that nobody in the wider world noticed.

Kenneth "Boo" Glover turned 37 years old, out of prison, drug-free, employed. A major accomplishment in a small world.

Present at a birthday luncheon at the Timbuktu Restaurant in Hanover were the faithful women in his life -- mother Barbara Jean, sister Kim and aunt Cookie. They are seated among people out after church, all in their Sunday best. He blesses the food and says in prayer, "Thank you, Lord, for 37 years, to be where I am."

And the women say, "Amen."

The four of them open their eyes and look up. Barbara Jean says, "Well. Thirty-seven. You happy, son?"

"Yeah, Ma, I am. I didn't think I'd make it to 25."

"Neither did I."

She laughs. There is genuine affection between them, the warmth of a life together and battles survived. During lunch, the conversation turns to Kenny-back-in-the-day chatter, an overlapping story about an ill-fated trip the women made, two decades ago, to visit him in a remote juvenile detention center:

"We got stuck in the mud -- "

"That blue car -- "

"The Impala?"

"Mama couldn't drive in the mud for -- "

"Thought we was gonna die -- "

"It was the blue Vega. The Vega."

"Raining like everything -- "

"The Vega? Lord, I thought -- "

"Couldn't find the place for -- "

"Might well have been in West Virginia -- "

"So mad at that boy -- "

And it dissolves into warm female laughter, razzing the guest of honor, who is looking down at the table and smiling.

"I think I been to jail enough for everybody in my whole family ," he says, and the laughter starts up again.

"You got it covered for the grandkids?"

"Ain't no reason for anybody else in this family to go to jail for a few generations -- "

"I can tell 'em 'bout the food -- "

"Just tell the judge, 'My uncle did my time for me.' " And the conversation melts into a stream of affection, drifting through the afternoon, lost in the conversations of other families at other tables.

Laughter is a good thing. When it is about pain, it is one way of showing that the hurt is past.

Muffling the Call of the Street

Snapshot, the life of Kenneth Glover, a few days later:

He awakens three hours and change after midnight. A box fan is blowing, stirring the stale apartment air. There are voices from the street below. Two men are drinking a beer and offering drugs to a passing driver.

He staggers out of bed and switches on the tube, ESPN. "SportsCenter." Makes some oatmeal. Eats it out of a plastic bowl, standing up in the kitchen.

At 4:23, he pulls the apartment door shut behind him. Step, step, down the stairwell, work boots slap-slapping in the predawn darkness, then he's outside, exchanging nods with the men on the sidewalk. There will always be men here. There will always be the hollow-eyed women, the ones who will do things in the alley for a few crumpled dollars.

He sniffs and wipes his eyes, cranking his aging Ford van.

By sunrise, he is another figure at work on the growing spine of an office building near Union Station. For the few passersby who bother to look up, he can be seen on the top floor in hard hat and sunglasses, a native son of Washington five floors up, a shadow against the brilliant blue sky.

He has little to sustain him up there but family, determination and a belief in something beyond what he can see.

Sometimes, when you are strong and life is merciful, what is broken can be made whole.

Sometimes, that is just enough.