Forty Seven Octobers

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My husband, Mike, once took one of those personality tests at work. When the results came back the psychologist announced that he was a quite an interesting man. He noted that Mike was highly principled and that he would maintain his ethics even in the face of unbearable peer pressure. Interestingly his profile also showed that he was a man of few needs who actually enjoyed working alone. The psychologist joked that if the company gave Mike a cardboard box with a lightbulb in which to do his work, he would be perfectly satisfied. In other words, Mike is the strong silent type. He’s John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Gregory Peck all rolled up into one person. He is who he is and he doesn’t worry a bit about what others may think of him. He’s a great foil to my uptight, worried, sometimes easily swayed tendencies. Together we have somehow managed to forge a partnership of forty seven years that works beautifully. I suspect that if I were allowed to enter a time machine and relive all of them I would eagerly repeat our life all over again.   Continue reading “Forty Seven Octobers”

Walking Uphill

i282600889612672971._szw1280h1280_As we grow older we often romanticize our youth. This doesn’t just happen with those of us who are sixty something, even adults as young as thirty or forty are often guilty of viewing the newest generation as being far less industrious than ours was in “the old days.” We all know the kind of thinking to which I am referring, “When I was a kid we had it hard! We got up at the crack of dawn and walked a mile to school in the snow, uphill, both ways! Kids today are spoiled!”

The truth is that the world is constantly changing and children learn to adapt to things as they are. During my long tenure as an educator I often heard my fellow teachers complain that the quality of students was declining with each passing year. In fact during my first few years in the classroom a very sweet older woman mentored me and her mantra was that I might consider another profession because the students that we had were the absolute worst in her memory. Since I had no basis of comparison I saw them differently. In my mind they appeared to be mostly polite, hard working, and eager to learn. Even until the very end of my career I saw that the young men and women with whom I interacted were teenagers not so different from me and my friends when we were in high school. They simply faced a completely different set of challenges from the ones that were ours.  Continue reading “Walking Uphill”