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Showing posts from 2015

Continental Drift

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I got over New Year's Eve a long time ago.  There were some memorable ones along the way, but after a bit, they just got into expectations blown way out of proportion.  January is a tough time for many reasons, but tonight it'll get tougher because some folks will end relationships or come to the conclusion that they might think about that.  It just does that to people. I recall a few NYE's that stand out because of where I was.  A young man in South Texas, a middle aged man on the gulf coast in Louisiana, and one particular night in Berkeley, California. My friends and I  (at the time) came up with an idea for a New Year's Eve dinner where each guest would bring one part of an elegant feast that would take hours to consume.  The idea was to have each guest bring one dish that was particularly meaning to them and then "present" their dish  with an explanation of what went into it as well as the background detailing how they came to appreciate the item.  One

Cabin in the Sky

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I see it out the window of my upstairs bathroom.  It's a handy perch from which to see everything above street level.  It's been there ever since I moved in here about 7 months ago.  After all the rain, wind, and now sleet and snow it remains tucked neatly in the upper branches of an Alder tree.  From what I can tell, it's empty.  But the fact that it's survived tells me it cold easily be occupied again in a few months. It's a nest.  Probably a robin's nest because they were visible a while back from my upper vantage point.  I marvel how it remains secure in it's place tucked in tightly between branches and able to withstand all that nature has to offer. Some of the new apartment buildings going in all around this little cabin in the sky don't seem so well built.  Like the birds that occupy that nest when the temperatures warm, the people soon to move into those new dwellings are just looking for some place to land.  The battle for gentrification i

Good Lord Book Club

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I was looking forward to the meeting.  I't had been a few months since my old book group disbanded and I missed the possibility of discussing good literature with other people.  Yes, possibility, because some book groups don't talk about books.  I conveniently forget that. The old group was only a few people.  They seemed more interesting in drinking the oversized cups of tea and eating the enormous slices of cake that the little coffeehouse where we met was famous for.     I get that working people have difficulty reading whole books within a few weeks.  Especially books that are deemed to be assigned.  But if the people are friendly, and the conversation good, it doesn't matter much, does it? It does to me.  I want a book group that reads books and likes to talk about them.  Hell, my writing group could produce quality writing and do it while discussing books at the same time.  Am I being ridiculous?  Is it too much to ask for?  So...I was looking forward to the meeting

Weather or Not

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I just found out something that might be important.  The weather on the day I was born.  Apparently, on my birthday...the original...it was 54 degrees sunny but windy in Los Angeles.  I cannot substantiate that as fact, but the information came to me in the form of an advertising gimmick that offered the opportunity to punch in a few numbers on an web page and get this valuable insight.  Free! Now what.  Maybe there is a writing prompt here.  Maybe the weather on the day you were born says more about your personality than we think?  Maybe.  Where does that leave folks born in a storm or heat wave?  Am I to believe that my 54 degree first day make me rather moderate, with a bright attitude that is prone to be blown off course from time to time. Or could that be you too? Aside from savants who often remember the weather on every day of their lives, I wonder how many people would rely on this  data as anything reliable?  So how do we learn previously unknown things that might help us na

Humanity's Reminder

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Dark days get darker.  More shootings than days in the year gone by, more stereotypes, and the line between perception and paranoia diminishes to a slender thread. The nation readies itself for the holiday season as anticipation gets tempered by the varieties of pain and suffering never before imagined.  We are all waiting for another large shoe to drop somewhere...nearby. That a pall hangs over our planet is hardly news anymore.  And still we go to the well to find relief.  What do you do or where do you go for a reason to rise and do it all over again from day to day? Best advice I ever got was to go to what you know will always be there and what you know to be true.  The variety of filters we all use to comprehend our eternal predicament makes anything possible.  I go to the Blues.  If nothing else, it brings a smile, or a tear.  The polarization of my emotions.  The reminder of my humanity. We all need our escapes and there are an infinite amount of alternate universes from

givingthanks

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A pumpkin that is too small for anything else cowers near her front door,               She cobbles a holiday together from scraps of buttered imagination.

Knock Knock Knockin'

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Trouble in mind.  I recently read that a new poll reports that 29% of the American people still doubt that their President, Barak Obama, is not a muslim.  Though he regularly identifies himself as a Christian, so do they.  I feel like conjuring up the ghost of Woody Guthrie to deal with this one.  Political and religious denial of the worst order.  What would Woody do, I keep asking myself?  Aside from a few clever retorts in the form of barbs, the great American folk interpreter would no doubt have a few unusual ideas. "Get these here folks in a room together and then bring in the Pres, " he might say.  "Let them talk face to face with the man they try so hard to ignore.  I'll bet they find they have more in common than not." What a great idea.  Demystify the cloak of separation and be required to tell a lie to someone's face.  Oh the psychopaths will do just fine, but the one's with a heart and soul might have difficulty.  It could be the start of

Dark and Darker

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The temperature is changing.  In every way.  One minute we are dealing with air conditioning and then it's the concern over freezing pipes. One minute it's the solid red Starbuck's cup and the disappearance of holiday symbols and the next we're on high terror alert. The President of France declares, "We are at war."  Ten U.S. governors simultaneously say they will not accept any Syrian refugees.  A few of them conveniently forget they once were refugees who fled the political consequences for their families in difficult times. The sabres are rattling and the machine is crying for oil.  The bombs are already falling and as the season of Peace on Earth Goodwill towards mankind approaches, we have collective PTSD. If our hair and beards are darker than most, we have cause for concern. As a culture we like our wars to be the "good war" variety and our warriors to come from the "greatest" generations.  After the recent events in Paris (N

Disconnection

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This week has been full of disconnects.  I finished reading Michelle Alexander's important book The New Jim Crow about how the Drug War is the new form of racial caste system in this country.  Her research and statistics are impressive.  Simply put, she argues that we have gone from slavery to Jim Crow laws, to mass incarceration.  All are a form of race control. Fascinating too how she quotes both Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin in her final chapter.  Would that both were with us today to provide additional insight. So then, the day after I finish the book, I sit down for the best entertainment of the week, the next Republican "debate."  Of course these two hour "watch me talk over you and get my time" telecasts aren't really debates, but they are fun to watch because they expose just how polarized our politics are these days both within and without our political party affiliations. No mention of racial issues anywhere.  Not even connected to the

Face Facts

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It's been about 9 years since I wondered onto Facebook for the first time.  I'd been retired from full-time teaching only a couple of months and I was trying to track down an Amnesty International petition so I could keep up my involvement.  Amnesty had gone to Facebook in an attempt to use social media to reach more people.  Without thinking too much I filled out some information via my new laptop and suddenly I was confronted with the challenge of filling out a profile.  Literally within minutes of this initial log on, I began to receive "Friend Requests" from former students.  The first one came from Paris, France. In my 30+ years in the classroom, I must have had a few thousand students.  Suddenly, they began to return to my life.  This was heady stuff.  Of course I wondered what ever happened to so many and now I began to find out.  I soon realized that as I accepted new Friend requests, I was getting more exposure.  As the class of 2004 began to find me, so too

Water Signs

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The clocks are re-set; Halloween is over.  Rainfall graced the streets with a few ponds and made the curbs small versions of the bigger dams that surround the local rivers.  The calendar page reads November and a brief glance out my window makes clear the reason that Portland, Oregon was named after Portland Maine. Orange is ubiquitous.  Butternut squash, pumpkins and candy corn, Indian corn, popcorn, persimmons and a new crop of navels. Leaves...many leaves. Fall is inevitable. It means I must stow away all my fishing equipment until Spring...except for that travel rod which offers hope when snow is on the ground.  I reluctantly remove all the gear from metric and wonder where the chains I think I have might be.  Time to think about holidays and winter travel and of course, time to take stock of the previous year. I've heard this is the time when some folks think the moon is in Scorpio.  I don't follow astrology, but history shows us that strange things do happen between th

Music is the Medium

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"There's only two kinds of music, good and bad." I'm not sure who said that, but it's been attributed to many.  I rather like the story that Duke Ellington's father imparted it to a young, gifted, son.  Duke certainly got the message because he made so much of the former kind of music. Most of us have our favorite genres.  A quick look at someone's playlist or Pandora radio stations will reveal much about the person.  For those who have stacks of tape cassettes, or boxes of vinyl records even more knowledge and experience shows through.  Case in Point:  I went to a popular breakfast place the other day only to be greeted by the voice of Blind Willie McTell.  A record was playing...a real record making circles under a needle arm.  Felt like I'd walked into a Texas roadhouse.  I think it even made the food taste better.  I may have been the only one in that room who knew the voice, or even cared, but the music was the medium in that moment. I'v

The Right Deal

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I planned on a two hour wait time while my truck was getting serviced this morning.  The Tacoma I drive is getting on in years and has reached the age when there are really no surprises, just unplanned for expenses.  That's why I spent almost 3 hours in the waiting room today. I can do waiting time.  I read, check email, read some more, do a crossword puzzle and finally get some alone time to just think.  Sitting there with a dozen other people, all of whom drive newer vehicles, I'm sure, I make a little time to check out who is waiting along with me.  Today it was a few retired folks, and a tech wiz, who was plugged in to a few devices, and a couple of folks whose loud phone conversations informed everyone in the room that they had just returned from Canada or that they had no idea how much money was in their checking account.  Ordinary stuff. And then there was that TV that flashed constantly while no one in particular watched.  With no volume on, most folks just ignored

Time Out

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Shakespeare used to write about a time when things were "out of joint."  When the music of the spheres was out of tune and the concord of the heavens was discord.  This is that time of year.  Some would say when the moon is in Scorpio while others simply feel that it's all another version of what goes around, comes back...comes around...or represents the myth of the eternal return.  In any case, we seem to be in such a time these days.  It's raining inches and inches in one part of the country while the drought persists in the other.  It's 100 degrees in L.A. with November on the horizon.  Trappers in Alaska can't get to their lines because there has been very little snow for the past couple of years, and this year the Yankees were one and done and the Chicago Cubs have dispatched the Cardinals, perhaps the best team in baseball, and have a chance at the World Series.  Out of joint or simple just time?  Any real baseball fan has got to be smiling right now.

Postcard to a Beginning Teacher

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I was asked recently by a former colleague to share some thoughts on the work/life balance for teachers.  My colleague is teaching in the school of education at UC Berkeley and originally asked me to be part of a panel discussion.  I wold have loved to do it but my work in Portland makes that impossible for now.  We settled on some written thoughts she could share with her students.  Those appear below.  Because I seemed to explore other pursuits while teaching 33 consecutive years I guess I had a reputation of figuring it all out.  Hardly.  I invite comments from other teachers, especially beginning teachers because I know full well that it's intensely personal and the job will take over your life if you let it.  Here's my postcard: Teaching is all consuming.  Most of us in the profession could work 16 hour days is we allowed ourselves to do so.  For morning people, like me, it is self-defeating and unproductive to keep at it when I should let go to rest or simply lighten

Body Politic

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After all the initial reactions to the regularity of mass shootings in this country, the comments seem to divide themselves into categories.  It's the gun culture...it's mental illness, it's it entire history and totality of violence in this country's past, it's our lack of adequate health care, it's all these things, it's none of these things. Some folks don't like the pressure put on mental health acknowledging that mentally ill people are no more violent than anyone else.  Others want to regulate guns while some think that arming teachers will be just the ticket.  It seems to me that teachers will not carry guns...at least most of them.  I'm sure some already do, but then there is a wide variety of personality types in the profession in case you hadn't noticed. I favor the gun obsession argument.  Chickens do come home to roost.  Think about how much exposure a typical citizen in this culture has to violence.  It's revered.  It has en

Stamped

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The postal clerk hands me a sheet of Maya Angelou stamps.  We both hear his radio.  Breaking news tells us of the latest school shooting.  This time in our state.  This time only a few hours down the Interstate.  This time more people reported dead than usual. The postal clerk is hardly empathetic. "Criminals will always get guns," he spits at me. Any gun control will just keep the good people from their right to own guns." I don't respond; just take the stamps and walk away. We don't see eye to eye.  In fact I can't begin to fathom how he sees this issue. But we both know the drill.  Deflections cobbled from "mental illness" a twisted version of the 2nd Amendment, or anything that fits the bill. These folks want to kill terrorists.  Their lens is clouded because they hardly realize thousands more have been killed by our home grown variety than by any from another country, culture, religion, or organized group. We've perfected the lon

Hard Talk

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Been wondering about the value of having conversations with people whose politics can only be described as delusional.  I't's really a waste of time.  Just this week I found myself privy to social media discussions on a number of things from the current presidential race to education reform.  In most cases the thread of the dialogues involved people trying to maintain civility while completely disagreeing with one another. Fascinating how the U.S. Constitution can have such divergent interpretations.  Add to that the Bible, and most of the spewings of political candidates.  People mask and rationalize their racism, their nativism, and their empathy or lack thereof. I've even come face to face with some folks who will always believe that Barak Obama is a Muslim.  Paranoid delusion is the only explanation I can manage.  I suppose this denial is something they really need to hold onto.  Another "friend" of mine continues to bash teacher's unions in his desire

Consumed

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A friend of mine is putting together a panel about work/life balance for a teacher education class at UC Berkeley.  I had to sadly decline an offer to be on the panel because I won't be in town but it got me thinking.  In some way I was the poster child among my colleagues for someone who seemed to have the balance figured out.  That's because I had a few very specific passions I incorporated into my life throughout my 33 year teaching career.  After about 7 years in the books, I had what amounted to an "Is that all there is" moment.  I was fascinated by oral history and teaching both history and literature through traditional and contemporary music and began to think about a project where I could combine these pursuits.  What resulted was a radio program I produced for a listener sponsored Pacifica radio station in Berkeley.  I had been involved in a traveling show about the life of Woody Guthrie (another work/life balance adventure) and had some contacts with the ra

Talk To Me

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We all know that the impact of ever changing technology is having a dynamic impact on how we relate to one another.  The contradictions are glaring.  We are supposed to be closer to one another than ever, but the reverse is often true.  People walk around tethered to their phones sneaking looks at the small screen.  They often walk into things, lose concentration, and probably most significant of all, don't relate to other people.  They drive around with personal soundtracks booming, sometimes with earphones on blaring something else into ears assaulted with multi rhythms.  I was once reminded by a student who seemed disconnected, "we can do more than one ting at a time."  So can I but is that always a good thing to do? Out of all tis came the comment from a friend the other day about a sports team from a high school traveling on a bus.  The driver had remarked how quiet his passengers were, and that was only recently the case.  Connected to phones, I Pads and ear buds l

Loss of Sense

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Sometimes time seems frozen.  I'll see a picture of a friend or acquaintance that I've not seen in person for decades and their image from days past is fresh in my mind.  It hardly seems like years since we last hung out or saw one another. If the person means more than just a passing friendship, the effect of stopping time seems more vivid.   Perhaps a defense mechanism, or another manifestation of holding on to something ephemeral. The technology we now have incorporated into our daily lives adds to this phenomena as well as creates additional twists of reality. Scroll through a host of Facebook posts or even a lengthy list of Facebook friend pictures and experience most of the people in your current and past life all flashed before your eyes in a mass of slideshow moving parts.  Most likely most of these people know a limited few of the other faces they are on this moving billboard with.  Yet the juxtaposition of their smiles and grimaces makes for a fascinating kaleidosc

Lost and Gained

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I think it's the Woody Allen movie, "Play It Again Sam," that features a scene where Tony Roberts character is telling Woody Allen's about how he can feel better about the loss of a relationship.  No matter that the relationship in question is the wife of Robert's character.  Allen is having trouble with accepting loss (what else is new?) and Roberts reminds him that there are certain things in this life that will always be with you.  In fact, he goes on to say that when you feel particularly depressed about the human condition for any reason, these things will always be there.  A Louis Armstrong trumpet solo, a dynamic sunset, great works of art, or even just places you like to visit, foods you enjoy, or the sound of wind, guitars with harmonicas, or a child laughing.  Simple as it is, just knowing these things will always be there makes it possible to endure some of the dark times we all must experience. I can't remember how this impacts the

Bonus Word

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“The bonus word is paraphernalia,” Mrs. McCarthy said.   “Para..what,” someone yelled back. “Par a fen al ia”   Mrs. McCarthy stood her ground.   All five feet 11inches of her Irish school teacher self.   Her mother of the brood, warm, stern, no nonsense self.   We loved her 7 th grade English class and especially the bonus word on spelling tests.   If you got the bonus word right, it counted in place of a missed word somewhere else on the test.   The bonus word came with all the anticipation of a mystery.   Even a word like paraphernalia was fair game.   The trick, of course was that it was para …pher…nalia, not para… fa… nalia.   We knew this because paraphernalia had been the bonus word a few times already.       So, most of us at Sun Valley Junior High could spell paraphernalia, but we never used the word.   It wouldn’t come into heavy usage until the word drug preceded it a decade or two later and we were not in the habit of discussing our “camping paraphernalia,”

Stationery Story

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  The back to school commercials start in late July now.   I don’t feel the pull until the second week of August.   This is the exhilaration time for teachers, and even after retiring from the full-time routine the pull is always just as strong.   I begin to think about stationery stores and then quickly lament that they don’t exist any more.   Or if they do, they hide in plain sight.   We have the big and getting bigger box stores and that seems to be about it.   Now the two giants, Depot and Max or Club, or whatever it’s called today, have merged.   Then there is Staples but they don’t even have decent staples.   I miss a good stationary store.   Once upon a time I found things like file folders in unusual colors or wood grain.   Many choices of pens, pencils and the thing I love most, college-ruled, easy on the eyes, light green writing paper.   I remember how just putting 5 sets of essays to grade in crisp new folders lightened the task.   I still employ that method for th

Jump Back

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Last night I lost a post I'd written due to a poor internet signal in Central Oregon where I am currently spending a few days.  The irony of this jumps high in my face like the huge rainbow trout I also lost,  That fish was the subject of the post. My thought was to get a written description down somewhere because it just might have been the fish of a lifetime.  Of course, for a fly fisherman who dutifully practices catch and release, I will always have the memory.  That's all we ever have anyway, isn't it.  I'll go out there today but it wont be like yesterday because no two days are alike.  Perhaps a few hours on the water will help sharpen my description skills.  More to come... The second day arrived a bit cooler with very few clouds and fewer people.  I took my camera along mostly to tempt the fates, but was rewarded with a nice pic of the landscape, a surprise selfie, mostly from boredom, and a nice rainbow who pounced on my fly as I was floating peacefully eati

Picture This

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I spent some time this morning looking at a slide show of photos from the 1930s.  Most of the work in this collection was of African Americans.  Having taught about The Great Depression many times, I'm familiar with many of the books and photos from that crucial time period. Visual literacy is a subject that always played a role in the curriculum I created.  Who doesn't love to look at pictures.  Granted, there are historical photo essays that are difficult to look at, but in the long run, they are, in my view, always worthwhile. One particular photo caught my attention. This picture of a man walking up stairs to the segregated section of a movie theater wouldn't leave me alone.  As I've often done, I asked myself what I see first... and then what?  There is an artistic symmetry to the photo; a dualism from black and white to shadow and light, to have and have very little.  Lots of symbolism too.  The clock the Dr. Pepper message and of course the ladder that a