After years in the business world, she is considering changing careers: she thinks she might like to become a teacher. High school English. So she asked me about it. “Somebody told me that if you love the students, you’ll teach high school, but if you love the subject, you’ll teach college.” She sets this sentence […]

He’s watching Popeye with the children, sipping his morning coffee. I am writing and hearing, in the background, the noises of Popeye: the music, the wail that is Olive Oyl’s voice (and why is her name Olive Oyl?), the interjections of sound that mean Popeye and Bluto are at it again. I am satisfied in […]

We all use them: product brand-names that have become synonymous for the product itself. Like Band-aids. No one calls them adhesive strips, even if one isn’t buying the Johnson & Johnson brand but have instead opted for Nexcare.Kleenex is another one. You can ask for a tissue or, if you’re really specific, a facial tissue; […]

At the end of the day these days, days that are full of teaching and planning and then reading and grading essays; days that, in their waning hours, are full of children and their homework and their piano practice and finding something for dinner and tucking people in and trying to find time for some […]

I should go to bed. I am going. But first I’ll write this, because my house smells like bayberry. I have always loved scented candles. I remember standing in front of the candle displays in the candle display sections of my childhood stores, selecting candles of different colors and sniffing at them until my smeller […]

I love this poem. I read it several times every Advent. I read it when it isn’t Advent. I nearly have it memorized. I posted it last year during Advent, and if I still have this blog next year at this time then I will post it again. But here it is now, and I […]

I left school on Friday afternoon after a week that felt like Friday should have happened on Tuesday.  How is it that five days off makes the return to a full week that much more tiring?  So I was glad to leave the building on Friday afternoon, anticipating a weekend and—special treat—beginning the Advent season at Duke […]

So I was in Sam’s Club a week or so ago, just doing the normal Sam’s thing. You know how it goes: a sample here, a sample there, two gallons of milk for under three dollars a piece, a large jug of orange juice, that large box of Honey Nut Cheerios. Stocking up in the […]

It is November 26th, which means, in my experience, steel-grey skies and a damp cold. Winter clamps down on Pittsburgh in November and won’t loosen its grip until mid-March at the earliest. The closets of my childhood home have, I am sure, already undergone the necessary exchange: all signs of summer and short-sleeves are replaced […]

I just spent the last half hour or so catching up on my blog-reading. It feels as though it’s been a long time since I spent time reading blogs. It seems a long time since I spent time reading anything at all—anything that wasn’t my students’ essays or my students’ journals or my students’ vocabulary […]