Daily Blues & Views

 Last weekend I met up with a former student of mine.  He graduated high school in 2007, so it had been a good 20 years since we'd seen each other.  He was visiting a sister in Portland and looked me up.  We met for coffee.   David was always one of my most memorable students.  He was in a Jr. Honors English class with me and then took my Intro Psychology class too.  Aside from being highly motivated, and intellectually curious, David was a good athlete and quite a good looking young man.  His father is Jewish and his mother is Japanese, so he has that striking quality that bi-racial kids often do.  It occurred to me once that I had his mother as a student in my first year of teaching back in 1973.   We spoke of many things, especially world affairs.  David does geo-political analysis for a tech company, reflective of his educational background which includes degrees from UC Berkeley and Georgetown.  The conversation was heady,...

 Meet my friend Patty.  She's striking because of 3 things.  First, she always has a kind word and a smile.   She often has thin, brightly colored ribbons streaming down her  shoulder length hair.  And then there is her posture, or lack of it.  Patty is one of those folks who walks all bent over.  It might have been scoliosis, but no body asks.  On top of all this, Patty has been battling cancer for the last few years.   I met Patty in the Tai Chi class I've been taking for the past couple of years.  When she can, she shows up.  Sometimes she goes through the motions while sitting down, but more often than not, Patty keeps up, doing the best she can despite her physical limitations. Patty is inspiration incarnate.  When many of us older folks in the class are feeling tired, or sore, or just not our sharpest, Patty is there.  She shows up.  If she can, certainly we can too. Patty likes a good joke and is a faithfu...

 Maybe it was his eyes.  They certainly were wild.  It was as if he were living in a dream and trying to wake up.  But the voice was kind.  Want to buy a song?   For a dime or a quarter he's give you a live performance.  For those that did, it was either "Merry Go Round" or "Linda and Laurie."   He was a character found along the streets of LA and in 1968 most often on the UCLA campus.  He'd join the throng on their way to a class along this sprawling campus and peddle his songs.  His hair was curly long and contributed to the name he acquired, Wildman Fischer.   In the Spring of 1968, that most decisive and formative year, I was a Junior at UCLA.  Seeing Wildman Fisher was a daily occurrence.  I may have even given him a dime or quarter.  I had just submitted some poetry to a professor who selected 10 students for a seminar.  When I was selected to join that elite group, I fancied myself a poet even more.  ...

 I thought they might work.  After all, these folks didn't learn to write the way we teach now.  They probably came out of English classes with 5 paragraph essays, literature anthologies, and grammar Nazis. Most of us did.  So, perhaps many of the teaching strategies developed after 1970 would be liberating, doable, and most of all welcome.   So, I proposed the idea of teaching a writing class for older folks to the director of my local community center,  As luck would have it, Portland Parks and Rec already had a "Writing From Memory" class on the books.  It just hadn't been taught for a while.  I interviewed.  I developed some curriculum.   I taught the class at one of the 5 week sessions.  Slowly, it gained un popularity andI went from3students to 8.  Perfect.  With i hour sessions once a week, that is barely enough time to review something, teach a skill, and have the people read and get feedback for their work.  ...

                I am still every age that I have ever been                                             Madeleine L 'Engle When I look in the mirror now,     my grandfather looks back, Makes me laugh until the next person I meet    calls me "sir," with that "Hello in There"look, Did you know, I think, that the class of 1990 voted me      "Best to be stranded on a desert island with, that on my 40th birthday, I swam, at dawn in the Pacific Ocean with       a 25-year-old woman  who wore  a red bikini? Were you aware of the fact that I once owned a horse,       a beautiful chestnut mare that you could have ridden too. When I smile and say hello, you often look away.      I get it. Can't be too careful with those easy smiles these days,...

 She was only 16, that hot summer of sixty something,     I was not much older, I met her parents and a stern  warning from mom,     Do not go to the drive-in. No problem, I thought, the  magical summer movie was playing everywhere, When Jimmy, the double date driver asked if a drive-in was OK, She yelled "Yes" before I could answer. How's mom ever going to know? I waited for the right moment, Inching my arm closer to, over, and around, That was my decided limit. Before I could complete the task she pulled me over by the neck and planted a big wet one on me. The rest was easier.