Julian Gets Lucky/Big Picture Goes to Church

Well, it looks like Julian got off easy last night. The cops let him go without giving him a court date since they couldn't find any prior record on him. Thank God.

I saw him this morning as I was going to church. He said hi to me, but the walls felt pretty high up.

"Hi, Julian, how are you?" I said. I wasn't clicking into the events of last night. Then it clicked and I said, "You OK?"

He paused for a minute, like he wasn't going to answer, then said, "Yeah."

"All right," I said, with a strong overtone of "we'll talk more later."

The Big Picture gang went to Holy Cross today to elicit community support for the school and get a meeting with Fr. Bruce. It was a busy day at the Holy Cross 10--Willie Cochran, who is challenging indicted Ald. Arenda Troutman for her seat, introduced himself and his family at the end of Mass. But they did give time for a rep from Big Picture to let people know there would be a letter of support for people to sign in the back. Plus, our intrepid voter registrars were out back for the last day of registration before the elections.

After Mass, there was food in the hall, so everybody went over there. I saw Oscar sitting down to a bowl of pozole. He asked about the NHS meeting last week and told me he's pretty free tomorrow, so I'll call him and hopefully we can go talk to Julian's parents.

So I got a lot of food for the Big Picture strategy session for nothing, since most people had eaten in the church hall. But the meeting was very good, and the number in attendance was up I think--from eight last week to 12 this week. They are meeting with Fr. Bruce on Wednesday, we planned some more key people to target and who was going to do what. Watch for stories about the school coming pretty soon in the Chicago Reader and the Tribune.

At the end of the meeting, one of the teachers told me she was very excited that Julian's exhibition last week was a marked improvement over the one before. Hurray!
I went over to their house for a while this evening. He was in the kitchen and I called out, "Hey, Julian, I heard your exhibition last week was really good."

"It was better," he said, "but it was still too short. I'm going to do better this quarter."

I hope so. We're going to talk about electricity this week.