Tick tock! Tick tock! We live in a world that is a hostage to time. We have clocks on our stoves, our microwave ovens, our phones, our wrists, our radios, the dashboards of our cars, our computers, our televisions, our mantles, our bedside tables. Reminders of time are everywhere and we seem to always be rushing from one place to another, one task to a different one. We time ourselves when we exercise, when we take tests, when we cook. Tick tock! Tick tock! We rush around all day long, in bondage to schedules that seem to dominate every waking minute of our lives. We tell ourselves that we must be here, be there, do this, do that within a certain time frame or we will fall behind. The moments when we are not near a time piece of any kind are rare. Our lives seem almost to be a competition to see how much we are able to cram into a day, an hour, a few minutes. We measure the success or failure of a twenty four hour period on how much we are able to accomplish. Tick tock! Tick tock! Continue reading “Tick Tock”
Author: Sharron Burnett
Renewing Promises
Many years ago a priest at St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church asked Mike and I to be mentors in a marriage preparation course. I’m not quite sure why he selected us nor even why we agreed to take part in the program because we were still rather young and finding our own way through the art of building a happy marriage. I suppose that it was the hubris of our youth that made us think that we had much wisdom to offer people who were contemplating matrimony. Continue reading “Renewing Promises”
Begin With a Single Step
I’ve been working the summer school session at Cristo Rey for a couple of weeks now. It’s a kind of dreary affair. The students arrive each day with a demonstrable lack of enthusiasm. They would rather be anywhere but in school attempting to recover credit for courses that they failed during the school year. They are generally well behaved but mostly just resigned to their fate. They are motivated by a desire to finish their modules as quickly as possible so that they might actually begin to enjoy summer. Some of them dug such deep ditches for themselves that they will be working until the end of July. They will be lucky to get a couple of weeks of holiday before the daily routine of the new school year begins again. Continue reading “Begin With a Single Step”
His Heart Will Go On
I so love movies! My idea of a perfect day would involve watching one favorite flick after another without a care in the world, no laundry, no bills to pay, no cooking, no worries whatsoever. I suppose that it is not at all surprising that my granddaughter has been completely taken by the prospect of working in the film industry. She comes by her love of movies naturally. I suspect that it is in her DNA. At this juncture in her young life she is mostly fascinated by the art of learning about all aspects of the trade. Landing a starring role is secondary to her love of the process. She is just as happy with working all week long on a set only to be featured for a split second as she would be if she were one of the major characters. She so enjoys watching the anatomy of a presentation unfold and she imagines herself one day working as a production designer, a career that would use her creative and artistic abilities quite well. She has already done a research project on the job and knows which universities in the United States offer the best educational programs for learning more about the filmmaking trade. As of now she is most interested in one day attending NYU or Northwestern University but I suppose that in the next seven years there will be many changes in who she is and what she wants to eventually do with her life. In the meantime she is having great fun learning about all of the facets of movie making. Continue reading “His Heart Will Go On”
Attacking Ignorance
Mike and I discuss current events constantly. He always puts an interesting spin on most topics because he has been a voracious student of history for most of his life. As a boy he read the encyclopedia for fun. His tastes evolved to a study of the social sciences and finally to a concentration on the stories of our past. We have both been distraught over the events of the past week in Charleston, South Carolina. Even as an educator who has seen some very sad cases of young people who have gone off of the rails it is still incomprehensible to me as to how someone becomes so filled with hate that he becomes capable of murdering innocent people based solely on race. I asked Mike what he thought was the root cause of such horrific behavior and his response was interesting, measured, and in keeping with his background in Sociology, his major in college and graduate school. Continue reading “Attacking Ignorance”
