Picture Dictionary & Books : Free for English Learner!

He said it reminded him of a place where time just stops, where time doesn't matter anymore.

And I asked him if he had a place like that, where time lasts forever.

And he said, "My mother." When you read a poem alongside someone else, the poem changes in meaning.

Because it becomes personal to that person, becomes personal to you.

We then read books, we read so many books, we read the memoir of Frederick Douglass, an American slave who taught himself to read and write and who escaped to freedom because of his literacy.

I had grown up thinking of Frederick Douglass as a hero and I thought of this story as one of uplift and hope.

But this book put Patrick in a kind of panic.

He fixated on a story Douglass told of how, over Christmas, masters give slaves gin as a way to prove to them that they can't handle freedom.

Because slaves would be stumbling on the fields. Patrick said he related to this.

He said that there are people in jail who, like slaves, don't want to think about their condition, because it's too painful.

Too painful to think about the past, too painful to think about how far we have to go.

His favorite line was this line: "Anything, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me."

Patrick said that Douglass was brave to write, to keep thinking.

But Patrick would never know how much he seemed like Douglass to me.

How he kept reading, even though it put him in a panic.

He finished the book before I did, reading it in a concrete stairway with no light.

And then we went on to read one of my favorite books, Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead," which is an extended letter from a father to his son.

He loved this line: "I'm writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you've done in your life ... you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle."

Something about this language, its love, its longing, its voice, rekindled Patrick's desire to write.

And he would fill notebooks upon notebooks with letters to his daughter.

In these beautiful, intricate letters, he would imagine him and his daughter going canoeing down the Mississippi river.

He would imagine them finding a mountain stream with perfectly clear water.

As I watched Patrick write, I thought to myself, and I now ask all of you, how many of you have written a letter to somebody you feel you have let down? It is just much easier to put those people out of your mind.

But Patrick showed up every day, facing his daughter, holding himself accountable to her, word by word with intense concentration.

I wanted in my own life to put myself at risk in that way.

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