“I touch the future. I teach.” A quote in one of the applications for the Excellence in Teaching Awards. Teachers are on strike in many areas of the country. And justifiably so. I began teaching in 1965. There had just been a teachers’ strike two years earlier. The county had finally come up with the […]
The descendants said it best themselves. The English at Jamestown were the first Illegal Immigrants. Recently, a friend with whom I share membership in the proud Granaderos de Gálvez asked me to speak to her Jamestown Society. As a topic I suggested the impact of the Spanish on Jamestown, a rarely mentioned topic. The speech […]
It is easy to become a recluse in retirement. Flatbottom has done it successfully. He says he spent all his working life being sociable and he won’t do it anymore. He enjoys my brother-in-law but has lost touch with his own brother. He will go to Dalia’s Christmas Party, but it’s the only party he […]
A number of years ago, when we first arrived in the United States, wide-eyed and amazed at the wealthy new world around us, a friend bought us our first television. Thank you, Mario Gottfried. Or not. We could lie on the couch or lounge in the arm chairs and watch hours of TV at a […]
Yesterday a dear friend, Raul Avalos, and I spoke about Immigration to the ladies of the United Methodist Women. Not a topic one would normally associate with them, but they were game, and curious, and willing to try to understand. Like Marines in Afghanistan, however, if you’ve been there, you don’t need an explanation. If […]
There were 180 of them. One hundred eighty seventh and eighth graders from our local Middle School. Short, tall, thin, fat, happy, sad, friendly, unfriendly, walking in clumps or alone. Verging on adulthood, staring at high school in the Fall, and after that, who knows? And we volunteers had agreed to help entertain them for […]