Of a Feather

Sara’s Side of the Story

In the summer of 2005, I packed a few suitcases, shoved everything else into a friend’s garage, and took off from Houston on a self-subsidized sabbatical. My journey took me from India to a commune in Virginia to New York City.

In early September, I was at Folk Art School in North Carolina. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, I called my friends in Houston to find out how it impacted them. “Sara, I can’t talk. We’re at the Astrodome trying to help people find housing.” “Sara, let me call you back later. We’re starting a tutoring program.”

I decided to cast my knitting aside and head back to H-town to help out. While tutoring at the Astrodome, I met Matt, a fellow tutor (who, ironically, had started working at my school the year I left). We argued every day about who would carry the tupperware containers of educational materials (each of us insisting that we could do it).

Matt was always the last tutor to leave. “Where’s Matt?” someone would ask as we squirted on hand sanitizer at the Astrodome exit. “Oh, he’s giving his kids a homework assignment. He said he would catch up with us.”

Matt was also the tutor who was still running five miles a day, even though he had to be at work at 6:30am and we didn’t leave the Astrodome until 8pm.

Matt was the guy with the sense of humor who–when I told him I had recently read about the five languages of love–remarked, “Yeah, I’m fluent in all five of them.”

Matt was the guy who was both rugged and poetic.

After a few of those arguments about the tupperware containers, I called two of my friends and said, “I think I found the guy I’m going to marry.”

Matt’s Side of the Story

It was the beginning of the school year in September of 2005 and I had recently joined the ranks of some incredibly hard working individuals at KIPP SHINE Prep. I was a new teacher being indoctrinated into the KIPP system of 10 hour work days, work on the weekends, and work when you got home. It was work, work, work.

Soon after the year began, Hurricane Katrina occurred and many of the refugees were heading towards the Astrodome awaiting next steps. Those staying at the Astrodome were away from their homes, away from family and the children were missing critical days of school.

My always empathetic colleague, Lindsay Fry, was driving me to the airport for my first trip back to Indiana, and she was utterly frustrated with the state of affairs in New Orleans. We were making our way around beltway 8 when she came upon the brilliant idea of going to the Astrodome to create a tutoring program that would occur each day after our school got out.

I eagerly kept tabs on the developments of the tutoring program that she and others were starting while I was away for the weekend and when I returned that Sunday preparations for the program were already being made so that it could begin on the next day. At 5:15 on Monday we were ready to head to the Astrodome for our first day of tutoring work.

After several nights, our tutoring program was becoming the bright spot of my day and their were rumors flying around our school that a certain “Sara Cotner” would be coming to visit KIPP SHINE to help with our tutoring program while we were busy during the school day. The rumors were true that the “infamous” Sara Cotner was coming to our school. When she got there, she seemed to wear an aggressive smile and a familiar dominant posture. She carried herself like the bull all the cowboys are scared to ride at the rodeo.

I am not a cowboy but I am equipped with the gift of sweet talk. And, never one to shy away from a challenge, I sat down and was able to coerce her into conversations first about education, and then about her trip and finally about her favorite music. Soon, that rowdy steer was practically cooing as well as playfully joking with me about carrying the tupperware filled with our educational materials into the Astrodome.

As we got in the habit of tutoring the students at the Astrodome, we noticed that some students would cycle through our program, leaving Houston with their families to move closer to other opportunities. Some students would show up one day for tutoring not to be seen again. But the frustration and gravity of the matters at hand were apparent in the faces of the students around us.

On one particular day, in the middle of tutoring, two boys in Sara’s group began fighting. As I was 20+ rows away from the incident, there was no way that I could react in time and Sara was left shouting and helpless to try and stop the brawl. A student close to the fracas was able to break the two up, sending the instigator away, and leaving the groups to settle back down into their seats. Though I was sitting back down, my heart was racing with the image of Sara, defenseless, next to the scuffling boys. I knew that I was starting to fall for Sara.