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I was reading an article about why older people need more friends and suggestions about how to find them (do something different, take up a hobby or join a club) when a woman we met on the beach a couple of times this week and chatted to, rang our garage doorbell and offered her contact…
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When I was showing dogs back in the 1970s, we had an unpopular bloodline, an unpopular “type” of Afghan Hound. Our dogs were descended from early imports out of Afghanistan and specifically from a Dutch kennel, van de Orange Menage of Eta Pauptit who was a horsewoman to start with. She cared about soundness. She…
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I took guitar lessons in my teens, and that was a long time ago. The late 60s. I still have the guitar, an unusually sweet Aria nylon-string that I haven’t played in fifty years. Gary cares for it. My lessons from Cathy Mack at Shoreline Music focussed on Childe ballads that Joan Baez was singing.…
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I witnessed a baby seal playing in a tide pool. I was too close when it came to the surface from swimming in forward rolls. I backed away fast as I could. Mamma would be out fishing. A while back a woman refused to put her dog on leash. The dog chased a baby seal…
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During my next-to-lastone of my MFA residencies an Advisor commented, to me and another student, that he thought people who believed in the Bible were “stupid”. Though I am not a literal believer, I was both shocked and offended. “It is a beautiful and important book,” I think I said, though this was seventeen years…
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I had thought I would stop running after last year’s Bridge run—a 10k over the Columbia River. But even before I completed that run, slower than I’d hoped, I knew I wouldn’t stop. I love running and I’ve missed it terribly in the past when injury kept me walking. Then, after nearly four years of…
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Depending on when they went to school, elementary teachers were taught different methods of teaching reading. The approach they choose in their classrooms and the terminology defining it keeps changing. They are given a package to teach, proscribed minutes to devote to this effort, and schools often pay a lot of money to provide direction…
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I recently read an insightful article about what can be learned from regret. Before I started reading, I thought of past regrets and how they informed future actions: failing to respond to the cruelty on the bus, failing to confront racism, as a teacher teasing without malice but also without sensitivity. Each of those events…
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Everything I know about promotion, bias, and lies I learned from television ads. The pain reliever that claims to alleviate most headaches when taken with a glass of water? My dad pointed out way back in the 1950s that most headaches are caused by dehydration. They only needed the water. My dad taught me habits…
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