Forty years ago, I worked one night in our basement so that the sound of my Dad's IBM Selectric typewriter did not wake up the rest of the family. I cannot remember why I fell behind on my work. It was high school, and in the morning, a ten or fifteen-page research paper was due. I do not recall what it was about. Just that my father stayed up to help me.
The only kids who knew how to type took a class over the summer. We knew one family with a computer. So, when I finished drafting a page, I handed the sheet of paper to my father, and he translated my incoherent handwriting to type it.
I was the kind of student who would be mortified by a missed deadline. I had probably cried, too stressed to move forward, and he stayed up to save me.
There was no way, really, to pay my Dad back. So, I paid it forward.
Throughout last night's almost all-nighter, I stayed up to keep my son cranking through a long list of incomplete assignments before the end of the quarter. I learned random facts about the Gospels for religion class, then jumped with him to Black History Month research (a month after Black History Month), then kept him awake to answer cultural questions in Spanish about Argentina, then Puerto Rico.
This morning, on three and a half hours of sleep, I said, "Please, let's not do this again."
I hope that the next time he does, it is decades from now when he pays it forward to get his teenager out of an academic hole. And I am sleeping soundly.
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