That summer, the hot months after my freshman year in high school, I take a volunteer job working for Project Head Start, in the old barrio downtown. I get up early, when the streets of our neighborhood are still, and walk under the rinsed blue dome of the six A.M. sky, the moon paling in the first flush of desert dawn. I walk the eight blocks to Speedway and catch the bus there. I don’t mind getting up early; there’s something appealing about the silence, waiting for the bus alone, riding down the long strip of fast-food places and shopping centers. Past the movies and the car lots, past the old adobes around the university, with its rows of olives and palms, into the warehouse district, the gritty edge of downtown.

Head Start’s a chance for preschool kids to play, listen to stories, practice whatever the teacher thinks important, which in this case involves learning the names of things in English: numbers and colors, body parts, and articles of clothing, drills in following directions she turns into elaborate games of Simon says. She is blond, rounded, kind. Every child in the class is Hispanic. My job is to follow the teacher’s instructions; I am her adjunct, but I come into my own on the playground, which she doesn’t like much because of the heat. I love it; I am to supervise and to play along and to talk with Antonio and Mercedes, Lourdes and Guillermo; they like my glasses and my long legs (good for hanging on to), my curiosity about them and my let’s-see-what-we-can-do-now attitude. And they like that when we walk across the street each noon, to a public school lunchroom where we’re fed on pink plastic trays, I am forever passing my tacos or half my fishwich or my beef-burger-on-bun-with-dill-pickle to these skinny, endlessly hungry little boys. I’m not supposed to do this—Head Start rules—but their need is irresistible; there’s no mistaking the reality of their hunger.

One day the teacher’s planned a field trip. A bus chugs outside our little cinder-block classroom; we are going to the Valley of the Moon! I’ve never heard of it, but the teacher says it’s a tradition, a place kids have visited for years, and she’s been lucky to get us an appointment.