Curiosity

If I were wearing a hat, I'd tip it off to you. He's referring to what we're doing—bridging the gaps between generations. Kids don't do this enough. I agree with him.

Ask John Sorensen what kind of kid he was, and he’ll tell you curious. Curious about everything. It's the closest thing to a self-portrait, and once you hear it, you’ll start to see it running underneath all the other stories he tells you.

JS was born in the city of Chicago on the West Side to immigrant parents. Danish on one side, pure Italian on the other. Giovanni le Bon, he says with a smile. His father came from Denmark at seven years old and became a bricklayer, building their house in La Grange Park alongside several other men. His mother came from an equally large Italian family with seven children, though she was the only one born in America. His parents married at eighteen and didn't have him, their first child, until they were thirty-two, giving them years to mature into the kind of parents who were, in his words, more interested and more mature to raise children.

I have to be honest with you, he says, when asked what growing up was like. I've never really grown up. I'm still back there.

One afternoon, just after fifth grade, JS came into the backyard with his bicycle, set it aside, and found his mother hanging laundry. She looked serious. You need to get a job, she told him, point blank. His first thought was, hey, mom, I'm only nine years old. For heaven's sake, what am I going to do, find a job? But you don't talk back to an Italian mother. So he asked a neighborhood boy to connect him with the news agency, and got himself a route—eighty newspapers, eighty homes, the Chicago Tribune, four blocks one way and four blocks the other.

He got up at 4:30 every morning to roll them. Summer was nice. Spring was nice. Fall, he put on a sweater. But the winters. Ten below zero, snowfall, and I had to deliver papers. I never missed a day. On the very worst mornings, his father would start the car and drive alongside him. But mostly, he did it alone, in the dark, in the cold, before school. I had money, he says, and his voice still lights up remembering it. I was independent. I wasn't dependent upon mom or dad to ask them. That was a great feeling. At the time, I would call it freedom absolute. Money of his own meant Saturdays of his own, and Saturdays of his own meant a bus ticket into downtown Chicago for fifty cents and a whole city to wander through, unsupervised, following whatever caught his eye.

That is where his curiosity flourished. He loved the medical bookstores. He spent hours at the Field Museum of Natural Science, standing in the Egyptian wing in front of a mummified boy so well-preserved he looked like he'd only just lain down to rest. That got me interested in Egypt. He hasn't been yet, but has a trip planned now, decades later, with a friend from Cairo.

In high school, that curiosity found a mentor. A biology teacher, Marion Barron, took him on as an assistant, and John spent his free hours running population genetics studies on fruit flies. He irradiated them and tracked which ones came out with red eyes, presenting his findings to a youth science fair at the Chicago Heart Association. He wanted to be a doctor then, following his desire to understand how things worked underneath the surface. It was, alongside baseball, football, and a job bussing tables at an exclusive Chicago restaurant, more than enough to keep a curious kid fully occupied. And, he’s quick to add, fully out of the kind of trouble other boys his age were finding.

He arrived at the University of Illinois pre-med, but by sophomore year the atmosphere had soured him. It was competitive in a way that felt valued competition over curiosity, and peers were more interested in beating each other than in learning anything. So instead, he studied language: German, then French. He'd grown up bouncing between Danish and Italian at his grandparents' homes, and picking up new tongues felt almost like coming home.

In 1968, JS graduated at the height of the Tet Offensive, high on Chicago's draft list, and the war was going to take him to Vietnam whether he wanted to go or not. I'm not a soldier. I don't want to kill anybody. I don't want to go out and wage somebody's war. I didn't believe in the war in the first place. He went looking for another way out—a way to make a better contribution to his country.

At a career conference at the University of Illinois, he happened into conversation with a recruiter for the LA city school system, who told him a liberal arts graduate could start teaching almost immediately in the inner city. Hey, I'm your man, he told him.

Within weeks, he'd packed his car and driven three days from Chicago to Los Angeles. He spent five or six years teaching elementary school in Watts, much of that time as, by his account, the only white teacher walking the halls. That was a great experience for me. I had a wonderful time. 

The togetherness of family stood out to him at a specific table, at a specific hour. His mother, father, his younger sister, and him, every night at six o'clock, no exceptions. I could be rolling around all around town, but I had to be there at six o'clock. I appreciated that, because families are on the run today.

He and his wife, Linda, met through a mutual friend from church who spent months failing to recruit him into a multi-level marketing pitch before finally getting him to stay at her house talking until half past one in the morning. The thing that made her different, he says, was that she studied me. You observe for a while, and you may be overwhelmed or feel pretty good about the person, but you've got to settle back and look at how they behave and what they say. 

Linda's own path to him was long and, by her own account, marked by years of being misunderstood before she found her footing—an eight-year relationship that ended when the man she'd waited on married someone else without telling her, ten years of praying and asking God whether she was meant to be single or married, caring for her aging father while working without vacation time to spare. Now, together, they mentor international students at the same church.

He watched a man walk on the moon from a friend's living room in Playa del Rey and still calls it one of the most incredible things he's ever witnessed. He's seen the Great Wall of China and, as always, there's still Egypt ahead of him. What worries him most about the world today is the opposite of everything curiosity ever taught him: kids glued to phones instead of bicycles, an entitlement he sees everywhere, people so turned inward they've stopped asking questions about anyone but themselves. Those people are interested in themselves. And if you're just interested in yourself, you're not here to help anybody else.

After two hours of answering my questions, he started asking his own. About my Spanish class. About college. About why I'd started collecting other people's stories in the first place. It wasn't politeness, but genuine curiosity. He really wanted to know.

Listening to him, it struck me that curiosity had taken him everywhere. Into museums. Into languages. Into a classroom in Watts. Across the Great Wall. Toward Egypt. And, even now, into the life and writing of a high school student. He's never really grown up. He's still back there, wondering, still finding something worth asking about.