Picture Dictionary & Books : Free for English Learner!

That was it, our conversation was rushed and awkward.

When I stepped outside the jail, a voice inside me said, "Come back.

If you don't come back now, you'll never come back." So I graduated from law school and I went back.

I went back to see Patrick, I went back to see if I could help him with his legal case.

And this time, when I saw him a second time, I thought I had this great idea, I said, "Hey, Patrick, why don't you write a letter to your daughter, so that you can keep her on your mind?" And I handed him a pen and a piece of paper, and he started to write.

But when I saw the paper that he handed back to me, I was shocked.

I didn't recognize his handwriting, he had made simple spelling mistakes.

And I thought to myself that as a teacher, I knew that a student could dramatically improve in a very quick amount of time, but I never thought that a student could dramatically regress.

What even pained me more, was seeing what he had written to his daughter.

He had written, "I'm sorry for my mistakes, I'm sorry for not being there for you." And this was all he felt he had to say to her.

And I asked myself how can I convince him that he has more to say, parts of himself that he doesn't need to apologize for.

I wanted him to feel that he had something worthwhile to share with his daughter.

For every day the next seven months, I visited him and brought books.

My tote bag became a little library.

I brought James Baldwin, I brought Walt Whitman, C.S. Lewis.

I brought guidebooks to trees, to birds, and what would become his favorite book, the dictionary.

On some days, we would sit for hours in silence, both of us reading.

And on other days, we would read together, we would read poetry.

We started by reading haikus, hundreds of haikus, a deceptively simple masterpiece.

And I would ask him, "Share with me your favorite haikus." And some of them are quite funny.

So there's this by Issa: "Don't worry, spiders, I keep house casually." And this: "Napped half the day, no one punished me!" And this gorgeous one, which is about the first day of snow falling, "Deer licking first frost from each other's coats." There's something mysterious and gorgeous just about the way a poem looks.

The empty space is as important as the words themselves.

We read this poem by W.S. Merwin, which he wrote after he saw his wife working in the garden and realized that they would spend the rest of their lives together.

"Let me imagine that we will come again when we want to and it will be spring We will be no older than we ever were The worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud through which morning slowly comes to itself"

I asked Patrick what his favorite line was, and he said, "We will be no older than we ever were."

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