Meeting new heroes on the job
May 14th, 2008, 5:03 pm · Post a Comment · posted by Aaron
A lot of my time on the job is spent on the crime beat, which could easily leave me pretty cynical. But sometimes I get to cover stories that are touching and even inspiring. On Monday, for instance, Matthews Hamilton became one of my heroes. Most of my heroes aren’t famous. They’re people I know personally, like my friend Brian Pace, who graduated from college with a biology degree and immediately headed down to Ecuador to help clean up the site of a massive oil spill in the Amazon rain forest using oyster mushrooms. The mushrooms, through some chemical process that I don’t really understand, basically eat up the oil and render it harmless. Pretty cool stuff. But I digress.
Matthews Hamilton, my new hero, is a 16-year-old recovering from leukemia. Although his cancer is in remission, he still can’t go to Barstow High School with his twin brother and 15-year-old sister. He has to wear a mask over his face to keep from getting an infection that could land him back in the hospital. He can’t do tricks on his skateboard or bike like he used to.
Under the circumstances, a person could easily be pretty depressed, especially when that person is a teenager. When I was 16, I remember carrying on as if the world was coming to an end over much less serious problems. But Matthews struck me as one of the best-adjusted kids I have met. He’s polite, smart, and interested in the world around him. When he couldn’t go to school any more, he made new friends at the hospital. When he couldn’t ride a skateboard, he picked up the guitar. While teenagers can be notoriously hard to get a good quote from, Matthews not only had thoughtful answers to my questions, he also had questions for me. When did I decide I wanted to be a reporter? How many people work for the Desert Dispatch? Do I like my job? He said he wanted to take a photography class, so I let him take some pictures with my camera (it belongs to me, not the paper, so I can take risks like handing it off to a 16-year-old).
It’s nice to be reminded once in a while that the kids are all right and some people can make the best of hard-luck stories.
Abby Sewell | reporter
