I was the only kid at night school.
Adults slid behind desks and worked on properly punctuating sentences. When I was handed a ditto to work on, I looked at the Dick and Jane illustrations and turned around to find someone to laugh with. But every other head was bent into the work. My fellow night school students were a serious lot. They came from Laos and Honduras, and when they were not learning to write sentences in English, they kept their eyes on the teacher, moving their bronze faces like sunflowers following a path of light. They wore their pencils into stubs and spoke of a high school diploma with such reverence, I was shamed into working right along with them.