On January 1, 2012, California extended foster care past the age of 18. Foster youth in California previously set to “age out” of the system are now given the option to remain in-care until the age of 21. Today, in The Time of the Readiness, the first set of youth to participate in extended foster care saw the erratic walls of youth collapse—and aged out. The Time of the Readiness refers to the time caretakers, social workers, probation officers all scramble to complete paperwork to prove foster youth are no longer dependents of the state. Yet, foster youth have already long learned not to depend. This is the first lesson . One day in the spring of panic and want and emptiness, my partner brought home a baby sparrow. Home is Atwater Village, a place along the L.A. River between Echo Park and Glendale, where young families settle and a posse of desperate people sometimes come to steal the copper piping and wiring from abandoned homes and cloaked by night scuttle under Toyota trucks for ...