Getting Up and Going

As the preacher's voice picked up into a passionate prayer and more of my friends and their parents got up to join this crowd, I started to feel like I was being left behind. Kids from rougher homes often got up for their own reasons, maybe going forward at their own pace without checking if anyone was coming along or keeping up. The well integrated middle class kids with two parents who attended church with them every week and did things like singing the choir tended to move in groups. You watch these little kids taking their first cracks at leadership, trying to manage the microcosmic social status inherited from their parents. Each individual was thinking about his or her own life in the state of their