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Soon after Rochester and I arrived at Friar Lake on Friday morning, the first of two yellow school buses pulled up. I put Rochester on his leash and walked out to greet the clusters of chattering excited kids, a mix of boys and girls from around ten to twelve, predominantly white, but with a couple of Asian, Indian and African-Americans as well.
With a pang, I realized that if Mary’s first pregnancy had come to term, I’d have a child of about that age. Would he have been a boy like that one there, with floppy brown hair like I’d had as a kid? I’d been skinny then, awkward in my own skin, but these kids seemed supremely confident, talking and laughing with each other. Would Doug’s kids grow up that way, or had his death scarred them too much?
Rochester tugged on his leash, straining to back away from the buses, and I was surprised. He normally loved kids and attention, but maybe the presence of so many of them was freaking him out.
“I guess you don’t want to be part of the welcoming committee,” I said. “Fine, be that way.” I took him back to the gatehouse, where he took up a position under my desk.
Once he was settled, I walked out to the computer classroom, where I found Joey had already opened the door and was helping Yesenia make sure everything was working properly. I stood in the doorway and scanned the crowd of kids. Some had brought their own laptops, while others carried thick books about programming. A couple of them were talking eagerly about Boolean data, the basics of if/then statements in computer languages. Another boy was explaining the concept of reverse ciphers to a small group – the way that the letters of the alphabet were reversed – A swapped for Z and so on.
Yesenia had opened a presentation about Python, an open-source programming language, on the screen beside the podium. I was impressed. These kids were way more advanced than I’d been at their ages.
I sat through most of Yesenia’s introduction to Python, and it was cute to see the kids taking notes so industriously, writing down maxims of the language like “simple is better than complex” and “beautiful is better than ugly.”
It reminded me of my own training in HTML, where I’d been taught to make my code as readable as possible, indenting tables and rows so that it was easy to follow the structure visually.
I missed doing that kind of coding, and I wondered how I could get back to it. In my Silicon Valley days, I’d been able to go deep into the zone as I coded, shutting out everything else as I typed and visualized, tested and corrected.
After an hour or so, I slipped out to the chapel, where I helped one of the volunteer moms set up mid-morning snacks and box lunches, but I kept thinking about how I could return to the simple coding I had enjoyed so much.
I’d done some freelance web design work back in the day, before the advent of the more complicated technology. It was doubtful that I’d be able to go back to school and learn all that, but maybe I could do some work on the Friar Lake website myself instead of relying on the college’s programming team.
It was nearly ten o’clock by the time I returned to my office, where Rochester was skittering around the room anxiously. “What’s the matter, puppy?” I sat on the floor beside him and scratched under his neck. “Too much excitement for you?”
He nuzzled my face and I laughed. After I rubbed his belly for a while he spread out on the floor and went to sleep, and I got up, my joints creaking, and sat at my desk. But Rochester’s fidgetiness had infected me, and I worried about all those kids using the brand-new computers the college had sprung for in setting up Friar Lake.
I walked back to the classroom and peered through the window. The kids were all working industriously, some typing on their own, others clustered in small groups.
Was Yesenia training the next generation of hackers? She’d been born in Cuba, after all, and I remembered all the material I’d read about how many Cuban-Americans were involved in illicit activities.
I shook my head. I was stereotyping and letting my imagination run away with me. Yesenia Cruz was simply a mom with computer skills who wanted to pass her knowledge on to the next generation. I ought to be praising her, not suspecting her motives.
As I watched, she called a lunch break, and I followed the kids over to the chapel, where I sat with Yesenia at one of the small round tables we used for cocktail receptions. To atone for my sin in assuming she was doing something criminal, I thought I’d get to know her better.
“You have such a pretty name,” I said. “Does Yesenia mean something in Spanish?”
She shook her head. “When I was born, during the Cold War, lots of parents used Russian-inspired names starting with Y, like Yuri and Yulia,” she said. “And then the trend spread, so that when I was in school almost everyone I knew had a name that began with Y. My best friends were a boy called Yadinnis and a girl called Yoani.”
That name rang a bell, and it took me a moment to remember that Yoani was the name of the woman who had preceded Tiffany at the Center for Infusion Therapy. “So someone named Yoani would be Cuban?” I asked. I didn’t know why that mattered—after all, the CIT was in Union City so it wouldn’t be unusual if there were Cuban-Americans working there.
“Almost certainly,” she said. “You know someone by that name?”
“Not directly. A friend of a friend.” I picked up my sandwich. “I think it’s awesome that you’re providing this opportunity for kids. Are you a programmer?”
“I have my own computer consulting business,” she said. “I present a lot of seminars to corporations about email security. You’d be astonished how many computer savvy people still click on links that can install malware on their networks.”
I wouldn’t be surprised at all, because I’d taken advantage of that myself, but I wasn’t going to come clean about it to Yesenia.
“For one client, I send out a message every month or two that has a link in it that downloads a program, and even though I’ve lectured and lectured, still about five to ten percent of the staff click on it.”
“Did you learn all that in Cuba?” I asked.
“At first, yes. I went to a special school where a teacher from Moscow taught us how to use Russian ES EVM computers. Then I came to Philadelphia as a teenager, and I tried to sign up for an advanced course. I was told girls did not use computers. Especially not Latina girls.”
I heard the gentle lilt in her voice, the lack of contractions that was often typical of a second-language learner. “Wow. Someone actually told you that?”
She nodded. “The principal of the Catholic school thought I was Puerto Rican, because most of the Latins in Philadelphia come from there. He said I was just going to get pregnant before I even graduated so why bother? I had to tell him that I am Cuban, that my people are smart and hard-working. Eventually he let me take a very basic course. It was hard because it was in English but I already understood how computers operated so I was able to do very well. By the time I graduated I knew several languages and a lot of very high-level math.”
“Sounds like you got a good preparation,” I said. “And you had good mentors.”
“It’s a shame, because in many places Cubans have a bad reputation,” she said. “There is a lot of economic fraud committed by my people, so Anglos are still suspicious of Cuban programmers. I hope to make good changes with Kids Code.”
“I’ve been a high school teacher and an adjunct professor, so I’m all in favor of education,” I said. “If you need to, I hope you’ll come back to Friar Lake in the future. Maybe we can even involve some of our students as mentors to yours.”
“That would be great,” she said. “This afternoon they are going to put together their own routines in Python, and it would be great in the future to have a peer to check them.”
“What kind of routines?”
“I give them about two dozen choices, everything from simply adding two numbers to checking to see if a phrase is a palindrome or not, depending on if their interests are in math or in computer language in general.”
After lunch I went back to my office and opened up a web browser to look at the Friar Lake webpage. It was laid out like every other page on the Eastern College site—same header and footer, same links down the left side.
I had written the text, and the programmer I’d worked with had put together the list of courses and online registration forms. But the overall effect was bland and corporate, and I started brainstorming ways I could make it more interactive. As I had a roster of programs behind me, I could include seminar photos and testimonials.
I needed to beef up the information on faculty I had recruited to lead programs. Right now the links simply led to their computer-generated faculty pages, which listed their credentials and the courses they taught.
It was great to get so involved in my work again, in a way I hadn’t felt since I’d begun creating the programming. It was good to focus my attention on something other than mortality and malfeasance, though Doug Guilfoyle and the circumstances of his death still floated in the back of my mind.
