Daily Blues & Views

 Moving! Just the sound  of the word brings stress.  Moving over age 65 is even more stressful.  Trust me, I know.  The body can cagey less and requires more rest.  Never have I felt so inept, so weak, so ill prepared to complete this project.  But, as I keep telling myself, all in due time.  It has become my mantra. In this economy, the price of moving is astronomical, too.  But, a great ex-hale, an enormous satisfaction, a lengthy respite awaits.   I will learn a new city too.  In past moves, I found myself returning to old favorites often.  Restaurants, post offices, coffee shops, and of course neighborhoods.  That might happen again, but now in this time of life, I will put more energy in learning my new surroundings,   While I will miss my friends and neighbors of the past 20 years, there will be new people to call friends and neighbors.  That's always interesting.  At this older time of life, I love me...

 Looking back now, I think I saw the beginning.  Yes, I saw it coming but wasn't sure what form it would take.  Now that the hue and cry about the dangers of social media is heard internationally and that the  call to limit the use and handling of "devices" in our lives is widespread, I feel sure I saw it coming.  In what was supposed to be an added dimension of learning and positive support, I saw what we were in for. I'm sure of it...now. It was simple enough at the beginning.  I tried a little experiment in my Honors English classes.  Not a social engineering project, but rather an activity designed for students to extend class discussions, engage one another in a non-threatening, supportive way, and extend their writing skills.  Here's what happened. Originally, I learned of an activity beginning to be used in  literature and writing classes called "Anonymous Team Journals."  Frustrated by the lack of oral participation by some stude...

  It makes me so angry I could...displace that anger.  Take it out on something.  But hearing the Vice President say that "Democrats don't like America," with such a serious tone, makes me furious.  A split-second decision allows me to quickly realize that hitting something, or yelling something, or otherwise displacing that anger onto something else won't do anything.  I swallow the emotion.   Emotion...I'd say I'm an emotional person.  More than many.  I see it as being passionate about things.  Many things.  People, politics, some sports, definitely about music, and of course food.  All those passions can bring about anger.  A flippant comment from a lying politician, a bad call by an official, something outrageously unjust, arrogance combined with ignorance.  These are all part of our daily lives.  Many of us have lived with them all our considerable lives.  So, how do I handle anger?  One thing I cons...

 We never had much money.  This I knew.  We had a home, most of the comforts of life and enough to eat.  But it seemed like everyone else had a bit more.  Maybe it was because we didn't have a car.  Last in the neighborhood to get a television sit too.  But I always had some new clothes at the start of every school year, and decent shoes.  But money...No. Still, in the 1950s, as a child growing up in Southern California there were ways to get a few coins to rattle around in my pocket.  Bottles meant pennies. Pennies filled parking meters with time and mouths with bubble gum. We hardly had an ecological consciousness, but knew that every soda bottle brought back to the little Mom and Pop store in the neighborhood was worth two cents.  Two shiny pennies that could become 10 with a few more empty bottles.   Beck's was that little store.  They had a few shelves stocked with canned goods and kitchen supplies.   A mother section...

 Have you ever had to provide a distraction?  Guiding someone, or a group of people, from seeing or hearing something for the common good.  It can be a noble pursuit even though it sounds like there is the possibility of deception.  But remember the word is distraction.   People who can compartmentalize their mind are good at this.  They provide the necessary shift from one thing to another because there is a significant reason to do so.   Case in point:  One summer, I was teaching in a special summer program for high school students at U C Berkeley.  I'd had some success with the I-Search paper, a kind of saturation report where students interview people to find answers and information about a question that they need to have answered.  In this format, I taught various journalistic writing and interviewing skills.   I had about 15 kids in this class and they ranged in age fro 11-17.  A couple of middle-school kids with pushy pa...

 I've been dismantling my personal library over the past few weeks.  At its height, I must have had about 500 books in all.  Collected from the time I first entered college all through my years as a teacher and up through the last 20 years of retirement, I liked to surround myself with books.  Among the more valuable volumes were those signed by authors at various bookshop readings, and a few things I traced down while doing specific research on the radio programs I produced.  I once counted up 15 different courses I taught over the years, mostly Literature and social science classes. All has specific titles connected to them.  Some of the most interesting or rare volumes in my library were gifts from people who knew my passions.  So there were lots of history titles, fly fishing books, blues autobiographies, novels and non-fiction about thoroughbred race horses, and of course, lots of poetry.   I recently decided I didn't need to own these becaus...