- It's actually Dave Scanlon, and actually I'm just here to sing the song Love Hurts, but no, I'm just kidding.

But this has nothing to do with my story, okay?

None of these injuries or anything.

So I graduated from college in 1998.

I graduated from Villanova.

And when it was coming towards the end of my time there, I was trying to figure out... I felt like four years had been spent and a whole lot of money had been spent on me, and I felt like it was time for me to try and do something for somebody else.

So I looked up the volunteer programs and I found this one called the Inner City Teaching Corps.

It was based in Chicago, and I went out and I lived in a convent for two years with six other recent college grads, and we taught around in different schools in Chicago, and we got paid $5 a day.

We actually had an answering machine, which we did, where we said we were seven strangers picked to live in a convent and teach in the inner city.

What happens when things stop being nice and start being real?

But anyway, so that was our answering machine.

But we were just full of optimism and hope for the future and hope for what we could do.

And I felt like we were like sponges and the program just had all this idealism and we just soaked it all up and just hoped some of it would get leaked out into the community as we got stretched and beat throughout the year.

And that's what we were doing.

So we were teaching.

And then 1999 came around and in between my first and second year, and they were starting a program there called Books and Hoops, and it was going to be an academic basketball camp.

And I'd been a camp counselor and stuff like that, so I joined on to be part of the Books and Hoops camp.

Now it was going back to my teaching, one of the things that was kind of a culture shock for me was I was teaching on the south side of Chicago at this school called Visitation Catholic School.

It was 100% African American school.

And my first day, I mean, literally I wasn't an education major, I was an English major.

They gave me summer school teaching in the summer and then they threw me in a classroom with 30 kids.

And I was a seventh grade homeroom teacher and I was the only white person in the entire room.

And I was aware of the dynamics that I was the one in control to.

It felt a little weird, but it was just too busy.

I taught eight classes a day and then as soon as class ended, I would go to practice.

I coached flag football and then basketball and track.

And it was just a very, very busy year.

We were exhausted.

So then Books and Hoops came around in the summer.

And so it was a time for a little bit more relaxation, have a little fun.

We were doing this academic camp and I was trying to get kids involved.

And especially I know as a camp counselor, when you can get the quieter kids in, then you can really build that camp spirit.

And there was this girl there, Jade Green, and she was this redheaded black girl who had these observant eyes, was quiet.

And I started just getting her involved in things, getting other kids involved in things.

And she was one of the quieter ones and I was just talking with her about things.

And I found out that she was interested in art.

And I said, "Oh, there's this program in the city called Gallery 37 for high school kids."

And I was like, "You should totally do it."

And she's like, "Oh yeah, I might be interested in it."

So the week came to an end and we had a great week, but through the week there was a little, even though it was a great week, it was kind of punctuated by some tragedy because we found out that who we had for our closing speaker was Ricky Birdsong, who was the black head basketball coach at Northwestern University.

And he was supposed to come and give our closing talk at the end of the week.

But a week before camp, he had been killed in a random racially motivated killing spree.

Guy just went around and Ricky Birdsong was just jogging in his neighborhood and a guy came by and shot him and killed him.

So the organizers were scrambling.

They were trying to find somebody and then they found this community organizer with kind of a funny name and he was interested in basketball.

And so they got him, he stepped in and he gave the closing talk.

It ended and as soon as it ended, I went up, shook his hand, whatever.

And then I went and was saying goodbye to the campers and I found Mrs.

Green, Jade's mom.

And I said, "Oh yeah, Jade's interested in this Gallery 37."

And she's like, "Oh yeah, well, we don't have a car.

I can't really get her there and everything."

And I said, "Oh, that's fine.

I can give her a ride down."

And she said, "Okay."

So a week later I picked Jade up and took her down to go to this camp.

And it was amazing to me.

Jade had lived her whole life on the west side of Chicago.

We drove down to Navy Pier, that's around where Gallery 37 was.

There was the Ferris wheel there and Grant Park and everything like that.

And Jade turned to me and she said, "Are we still in Chicago?"

And it was just eye-opening to me that here I was new to the city.

I'd been there for a year and I'd been down to Navy Pier for a dozen times already.

She'd never been there her whole life.

And I just realized we came from totally different worlds.

So anyway, so she applied for the program and I went back to teaching at visitation.

Anyway, so after that, sorry, I just got to keep track of where I am, the story.

After that, then I was taking classes at Northwestern because part of the program was that we would do part of our master's degree.

So I was taking classes at Northwestern and I took an adolescent development class.

And my professor said, "I want you to go and meet with a teenager and journal everything about meeting with the teenager."

And I was like, "Where am I going to find a teenager?"

And she said, "If you don't know any, just go and observe them somewhere in the wild and just write a journal about it."

Anyway, so that was part of her assignment.

And then I thought of Jade and so I contacted Mrs.

Green and said, "Hey, would it be okay to see if Jade was interested in this?"

And Jade was.

And so then it started a thing where I would go once a week to the Green household and Jade and I would sit in the living room and she would tell me about her life.

And she told me about which houses on the street were trap houses and how the police knew, but they didn't care and they just let it happen.

She told me about when she was a young girl and her father had been dehumanized by police on the side of the road.

She told me about summertimes when they would open up fire hydrants and play out in the water there.

And she told me about block parties.

She told me about this guy that they all called 40 because he often had a brown paper bag and a 40 ounce around in the neighborhood.

And she said about how 40 always looked out for her mom because she was raising her and her sisters and 40 would always make sure like their groceries got in the house without anything happening to them, you know, and they were going back and forth.

And 40 also actually, she told me there was a dad who was not welcome around the neighborhood anymore and he used to pay 40 in Schlitz and Miller High Lifes to report back to him how his kid was.

It just was eye opening to see how much of the streets that I, I had no idea what it was like living on, in, on the west side of Chicago.

And so it was, it was an eye opening experience to hear what Jade had to tell me about it.

And I got to see like the really the beauty and the harshness, you know, of the city in so many ways.

She also told me about Mama Anders who one day they were all in their houses and they heard screaming and they all came running out and she was raising her three grand babies and somebody had come flying up the street and hit one of them and killed her, killed her and ran off and they, but that was a memory for Jade that she had growing up.

Well, time went on.

2005 came.

I taught, I'd been teaching for seven years and my girlfriend and I moved out to Seattle and, and then 2008 we moved back east and we got married.

And 2009 came around and it was the 10 year reunion of Books and Hoops.

So I went back to Chicago for the 10 year reunion.

Had a great week at the camp and the closing speaker was the executive director.

And he did a retrospective.

He was like, "Well, the camp's been going for 10 years."

He's like, you know, "10 years ago we were worried about gas prices and they were a dollar cheaper than they were then."

He's like, you know, "10 years ago we were a bunch of 20 something kids that were hyped up on junk food, just making the camp run on enthusiasm, you know, and now it had gotten a much smoother camp."

And he said, "And 10 years ago, we had a closing speaker named Barack Obama, who was the, was our first closing speaker who stepped in."

And and I was like, "What?"

I said, because I was there.

I met him.

I shook his hand.

But this is 2009, so he's the most famous person in the whole world at this point, you know what I mean?

He'd just been, just been elected president in the United States.

And it just blew me away, you know, like that, that like, I wouldn't even have put that together, you know?

I just, and, and then while I was there in Chicago, I, I contacted Jade and we met for lunch and I told her, I was like, "Oh, do you know who the closing speaker was?"

And she was like, "I don't know.

Some, some random guy, you know, whatever."

I was like, "It was Barack Obama."

And she, and she was blown away by it too.

We both were, were so stunned by that.

It's just a weird thing to have like your memory played like that where you have, you have, you know, you have, you have an idea of what you think, think, you have an idea of what you, who you think somebody was and then it can change.

But, but so, so then I, I went back to Virginia and I adopted two girls and, and was busy working, teaching, raising two girls.

I'd hear from Jade occasionally.

She became a project manager at an engineering firm and she was living with her boyfriend, raising their kids.

And then she, or his kids, not their kids, and her mom became a cafeteria worker at, you know, at a school.

And then 2016, I ended up getting a divorce.

And 2021, I was coming back to Chicago for a wedding and I contacted Jade and said, "Hey, you want to get lunch while I come back?"

And she said, "Yeah."

So we met up and, and we were laughing because her mom who was in her late 50s was trying to do dating sites and, and Jade was trying to get her dating site all set, so we were just laughing about that at lead lunch.

And then I, I left and then I got a text from Jade later and she said, "I showed your picture to my mom."

And my mom said, said, "You're handsome."

And I said, "Oh, well, that's why she's going to be hot stuff in the dating site throwing around compliments, you know?"

And then Jade said, "Actually, it's weird to disclose this, but actually I said, Mom isn't Dave handsome."

And I didn't know how to respond to that.

And I texted back and I said, "Thanks, you're a beautiful person too."

And then we texted back and gradually we started to realize that maybe it was possible to change this relationship into a relationship of love.

I mean, there was always love, but to change it into a relationship of Eros love.

And hope started to creep in and we started to think, is this possible?

Can we really do this?

And, and then we said, yes, we can.

And we ended up a month, month and a half later, she ended up coming and it started the most improbable love story of our lives.

Thank you.