THE MENTOR

When a man starts out to build a world, he starts first with himself.

— Langston Hughes

The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.

— Steven Spielberg

How?

How do you figure out what it is that you're really meant to do in this life? How do you find your point of entry? How do you begin?

A few people I've met seem to have been born to their calling, with gifts and dreams that stood out early on. Most of us don't fall into that category. Most of us have no idea at the start what we're meant to do or even what we're capable of. Some of us don't find our thing so much as it finds us. And sometimes it's only because of some special person who introduces us to possibilities we might never have imagined for ourselves.

Like many others, I have an early educator to thank for helping me make that initial connection. Mrs. Frances Turner was my fifth-grade social studies teacher and my very first mentor.

I was a rowdy, unfocused ten-year-old when I arrived in her classroom, and I can't say we hit it off right away.

Back then, I couldn't think of a subject more dry and joyless than social studies, and I held Mrs. Turner in contempt for having voluntarily chosen it at some point as the subject she would teach. What kind of a person would choose social studies?

Mrs. Turner never smiled. She was all business and immune to my limited charms.

What bothered me most, Frances seemed to understand me in a way that was unsettling.

I WAS a HANDFUL.

I was a handful. That had been the case since kinder-garten back in New York, where I spent the first seven years of my life.

In my kindergarden classroom, we had what was known as the "Sad-Face Box." It looked very much like the name suggests. It was a box drawn each day in the bottom left corner of the blackboard. At the top of the box, Ms. Lewis drew ... well, a "sad face."

Looked kinda like the emoji [??].

Names of the students who broke rules would go into the box. She kept a running tally of naughty kids and mine was, without fail, the very first name in that stupid box every single day. Half the time it would be so early in the day that she hadn't even gotten around to drawing the thing yet when I'd give her a reason to reach for her chalk.

I'd purposely speed through an assignment so she'd be faced with the hassle of finding me something else to do, or I would crack a joke that only my section of the room could hear and get a bunch of toddlers riled up.

Ms. Lewis would draw that Sad Face and put a box around it in a fit of rage. She'd break the chalk pressing too hard as she spelled out my name. You could feel her wishing it had more letters or that she could add punctuation after it, she'd be so pissed off.

L-E-S-L-I-E.!.!!!!!.!~!*###??!!!!=+&&&@

Children who were well behaved for the remainder of the day would find their names erased from the box as easily as they had been written.

In a particularly nice touch from Ms. Lewis, before the end of each day, she would find a way to erase all the names still left inside the Sad-Face Box. If, for a full minute, you could manage to sit with your hands folded, your back straight, and your mouth "zipped," if you could find some discipline and self-control for the final minute of the day, you'd start the following day with a clean slate. A kindergarten teacher's lesson in redemption was also baked into the Box.

Still, I didn't have the tools yet to understand how to make myself behave like the other kids. I had no clue how to begin to put my energy to better use. It would take five more years and the help of a no-nonsense social studies teacher to help me figure that out.

* * *

As I got older, I realized that part of my problem was the fact that I was one of those kids who felt (to himself anyway) like an adult on the inside.

When I turned thirty, I thought: Yeah, this is the age I've felt like since I was eight. Maybe even younger.

As a kid, I had trouble with rules and unquestioned authority. My mouth got me into a fair amount of trouble. I wanted to know why I was being asked to do a particular thing before I was going to do it.

"Put your heads down!"

Hand raised and question posed in a polite but thinly veiled accusatory tone: "Why?"

"If you finish your quiz before the bell, use the extra time to check your work. And no talking."

In a tone laced with suspicion and distrust: "Why?"

Today I understand that in classrooms filled with more than thirty other students, my teachers didn't have the seconds or the engery to take my earnest but ill-timed questions to heart. Back then, I wanted my concerns to be on the record.

Mom and Dad were fairly strict. If I found myself in some sort of trouble at school, I knew my transgressions would always have to be defensible. There would have to be a gray area that I could highlight. There would have to be Their Side, and My Side. When I pleaded my case at home there needed to be nuance and perspective. Or my goose would be cooked.

My parents would always hear me out. They would never ever take a teacher's word or anyone's word completely over mine.

That was the law, never to be changed. Until one day in the fall of 1991 when Frances Turner summoned my father for a parent-teacher conference one morning before school.

Monday through Friday, Leslie Odom, Sr., was wound tight, tight, tight. He had the shortest fuse of anyone I knew. Dad worked in sales. He spent the bulk of our childhood years (my baby sister, Elizabeth, came along when I was six) climbing the ladder in corporate America, and while he rarely let the world know it, the pressure took a toll.

Mom was Dad's partner in upward mobility. She worked in the field of recreation and rehabilitation therapy for as long as I can remember. Her pure goodness and capacity for empathy never ceased to amaze me.

Yevette Marie Nixon filled my world with light. Always slow to anger where I was concerned, she was my first teacher. She taught me to add and subtract, she read to me, and eventually she taught me to read to myself. My little sister takes after Mom, too. Sweet as can be.

With two educated, working parents, I understood their expectation of me extremely well very early on.

Dad's position was straightforward: "The same way I go to work every day and your mother goes to work every day, that's what we expect from you. School is your job. No excuses."

If I was falling down on my job and it made it harder for him to do his job ... it wasn't just the anger and discipline to be meted out later that twisted my stomach in knots,...