Look, I'm no hero. Will someone please accuse me of being a hero?

My friend and I are mentors to a couple of third-graders in East Baltimore. It's an afterschool program for kids with one parent (or both) in prison. Unfortunately, more than one-third of the kids in this school meet this criterion.

My kid is great, and it's a lot of fun. But my friend and I were thinking the other day: do we spend more time mentoring or talking about mentoring? Because, let's face it: we talk a lot about mentoring. Any excuse will do. The following topics of conversation may be deftly flipped into a monologue on my mentoring experiences: Baltimore, prisons, education, children, pancakes, Bill Parcells, Swisher Sweets, arboviruses. Awkward silences are especially nice opportunities for me to blurt out some self-aggrandizing mentoring story.