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A lawyer who sees kids in their worst moments found a way to bottle joy

2021-12-14 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

On one of his most difficult days, Jon Krell walked into a hospital to meet a 5-year-old client for the first time and found medical professionals shaken by the boy’s condition.

“The nurse told me, ‘I’ve been doing this 20 years, and I’ve never seen anything this bad,’” Krell recalls.

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For the last 16 years, Krell has worked as a guardian ad litem in D.C., a job that pulls him into the lives of kids who have been neglected and abused. He goes to foster homes, homeless shelters and, yes, sometimes hospitals to meet toddlers who are too young to talk and teenagers who don’t want to.

It falls to Krell to represent their interests in court, and, to do that, he needs to know what they’ve experienced. Sometimes, he learns the details through paperwork. Other times, adults fill him in.

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For that child in the hospital, Krell watched a video of the police interviewing one of two people charged with harming him. He listened to the man confess, he says. Then he witnessed the man do something surprising that acknowledged the awfulness of his actions: He thanked the officer for not beating him as he divulged how he hurt the child.

“I came home and sobbed uncontrollably,” the father of three recalls of that day.

Out of respect for that child’s privacy, Krell can’t reveal much about the case, and I wouldn’t ask him to. But knowing what he has witnessed as an attorney for the Children’s Law Center and through his own practice offers important insight. You have to understand how he spends his days to appreciate how he has been spending his evenings and weekends.

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While working with children during their worst moments, Krell created a toy that aims to bring gleeful ones.

“My job is wonderful, but also miserably sad for everyone involved, including me,” he says. “So, this was about bringing joy to the world.”

“Spread bigger joy” reads the mission on the website he created to let people know about the toy and how to purchase it. If you ask him about the details of what he made, he will talk excitedly about the formula and the market for it. But if you ask why he chose those words for the mission, he probably will veer into the philosophical. Is it possible for a toy to spread joy beyond those who use it? he has asked friends and himself. If people can pay good deeds forward, causing kindness to grow exponentially, can joy spread from one person to the next?

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“Jon is a tireless and creative advocate for kids involved in the foster care system,” Judith Sandalow, the executive director of the Children’s Law Center, said when asked about Krell. “It’s no surprise he’s found a new way to bring joy to kids.”

Right now, if you are a parent of a young child, you are probably dizzy from researching toys. STEM toys. Slime toys. Toys that make you wish you were a kid again, and toys that confirm the ones from your childhood were better. A toilet-trained flamingo does what?

This holiday season, Krell’s creation won’t be competing with those toys for space under your tree. He tried to make it available before December, but production delays forced him to miss that window. He now expects to get the product to people early next year. When that happens, he hopes people find joy in not only using it but also in knowing where some of their money is going.

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Part of the proceeds will be donated to after-school programs in underserved neighborhoods of the District.

“One thing I have seen with my own eyes with my clients is that good after-school programs are what it’s all about,” Krell says. “It’s so important for kids in poverty to be able to go from school to something fun and then go home for dinner.”

The toy Krell created may at first glance seem familiar: It makes giant bubbles. The kind of giant bubbles performers have used for years to dazzle audiences. The kind of giant bubbles that have gained certain TikTok users followers. The kind of giant bubbles that Krell — before creating his own product, before even becoming an attorney — used to awe kids at the Boston Children’s Museum. While in college, Krell worked at the museum, which has a beloved bubble exhibit.

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But making giant soap bubbles at home usually requires space and skill, Krell says. Products on the market require mixing ingredients in buckets and using large ropes or hula hoops to form impressive bubbles. Krell’s “Inormo” bubbles are different. He worked with a physics professor at Emory University to create an already mixed, soap-based solution and used it to fill containers small enough to fit in children’s hands. Each container comes with string and small wands made from recycled ocean plastic that can be used to make different types of bubbles — even bubbles within bubbles.

In other words, he found a way to bottle joy.

“I wanted to democratize giant bubbles,” Krell says. “I wanted to make it so that everyone can play with giant bubbles out of just a little bottle.”

The bubbles, he says, are not about him: “I haven’t gone through anything. It’s really about the inspiration I get from my clients every day.”

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Krell often comes into children’s lives when they have been taken from everything they know and relatives are working to get them back home. He describes parents telling him of their visitations, “It hurts so much — I get to hug them and then I have to give them back.”

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He has found that most of those parents aren’t bad people. “They are overwhelmed by substance abuse, poverty and mental health issues,” he says.

After law school, Krell worked for several years as a labor attorney for a large D.C. law firm. In 2005, he left that job and took a pay cut to work for the Children’s Law Center. He now works with children through the organization and his own practice.

A few years ago, he also started a side gig — hosting bubble shows for camps and school programs. For those performances, even before he started working on his own Inormo formula, his favorite part came at the end when he would ask, “Who wants to go in a giant bubble?”

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A photo taken at one performance shows the moments after he uttered those words. A long line of children stretches toward the door. Several children watch with their mouths open, and one girl’s hands press against her head, as if to contain her mind-blowing awe.

“This toy is a portrait maker,” Krell says. “It’s an Instagram filter. You get kids inside a bubble and everyone has a different facial reaction.”

While working as an attorney and a toymaker, Krell also wrote a novel. It provides a fictional backstory to the bubbles.

In it, a teenage girl and her brother, who are staying in foster care while their mom goes though a 28-day drug treatment program, meet a scientist who owns a toy store that holds only one dusty product. It’s, of course, a bottle of bubbles. After the siblings and a group of homeless children they befriend learn that the toy supposedly holds magic, they try to figure out if that is true.

“The whole story is all about hope,” Krell says. “It’s not a happy-go-lucky story. It’s more like a lot of darkness and this girl and her friends are seeking out some happiness from it.”