The Life Imagined

Every year, I make New Year’s resolutions.  I haven’t written them down in who knows how long, but I do make them in my head.  Furthermore, I generally make the same resolutions every year. . . which says something about how successful I am about keeping them.  Losing weight and doing a better job of being on time have been there for at least thirty years, and I’ve added writing goals over the past few: finishing my third book has been a thing for about six years now, and writing a blog entry every week has been on the list for the past three or four. We are now forty-one days into 2021. . . and for the most part, when it comes to these resolutions, I’m in epic fail territory.  (I wish I had added “Read at least twenty books” to that list because I’ve been on a major reading tear of late.  In fact, I may have already read twenty by now.) I’ve probably done a little bit better with not being as late to work, but that’s not saying much.   I have actually m...

(Credit for the graduation night photo to Jim Wallace, who gave both his permission and his blessing for me to use it. 🙂) As you may know by now (and as the other members of the Thomson High School ELA department and my co-teachers are tired of hearing), my last active day as a public school teacher is Wednesday, May 24, 2017.   I’m retiring for any number of reasons: high-stakes testing, excessive bureaucracy, and just an all-around educational philosophy that differs from mine.   (My mantra: “You can’t quantify teaching.”)   I have to admit, though, that the timing for leaving THS is actually pretty appropriate because I’m going out with the Class of 2017, and being there without them next year would be awfully strange.   These students have been a huge part of my life at THS. . . and even though the journey with them hasn’t always been a perfect one, life wouldn’t be the same without them if I were staying.        ...

The first time I dealt with the impact of a friend’s death on my students was in the winter of 1989.   The teenager who died wasn’t even a student at my school, but he had been years earlier – and he was still a close friend of several of the students whom I taught.   Even in the days before social media, the word of Travis Shedd’s death spread quickly. . . and while I’d like to think that my twenty-four year-old self was better than average at dispensing words of wisdom and comfort, I was also mature enough to realize that sometimes, there are no words.   I didn’t suffer a personal loss when Travis died, but I grieved for the kids who were grieving. During the more than twenty-five years since, I’ve experienced a number of student deaths. . . former students who had graduated, current students whom (like Travis) I hadn’t taught but whose deaths broke the hearts of students that I was teaching, and one former student whom I wasn’t teaching at the time but who was sti...

I have a theory that even though we grow up - and for some, that's obviously more a physical process than it is an emotional one - we still carry around with us to some degree little versions of ourselves at all of the ages that we've attained prior to our current one.  If I'm riding down the road and hear the opening strains of "Footloose," my 18 year-old self pops out and starts DWD. . . dancing while driving. :-)  When I ride by the site of the old Thomson City Pool, my 9 year-old self pines for the place where I first took swimming lessons and spent summer afternoons with neighborhood friends.  (If you've read Time and Tide , this shouldn't surprise you.  And really. . . if you haven't, why haven't you by now? :-))  And despite the fact that my single days are long behind me, hearing about anybody's bad and self-esteem wrecking breakup evokes my 26 year-old self and a particularly bad heartbreak that I went through that year - and although ...

So, about this "entry about every six weeks" thing. . . since our last episode of "The Life Imagined," I've been a busier-than-usual-these-days girl.  Around the time of my last entry, we were getting cranked up with one-act play at Thomson High School - I was directing - and the resulting daily practices.  Our competition play was Ford Ainsworth's "Persephone," which I directed at LCHS back in 1995 (aka around the time that Claude and I started dating. . . and come to think of it, before any of this year's cast was born).  Fortunately, the slew of bad things that happened toward the end of that production (too many to name here) didn't happen this time, and THS repeated as region champs!  We went on to state the following weekend, gaining experience that will come in handy next year as only three of the cast members were seniors and enjoying some INCREDIBLE plays.  (<--- This photo, courtesy of Johna Wright, was taken at the end of a ve...

Yes, I know. . . it has been a while since I've updated this blog.  It has also been a while since the end of summer vacation.  Coincidence?  I think not. :-) Given that my last blog was sort of one long rant (and also my most viewed post by far. . . go figure), I planned on writing something a bit more sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows this time about my new job and how it's going.  However, a conversation that I've been having with a young working mom this afternoon and evening has prompted me to save that topic for another day. Let me clarify something right off the bat:  what I am about to write has absolutely NOTHING to do with my own husband.  The fact that I am sitting at Panera Bread and writing is due to his encouraging me to go chill for a while after I dropped off a preview copy of my book to a local bookstore. . . hoping to consign and do a book signing there, but that's also another story for another day.  Everything I'm about to say h...

In my "What Is Your Faction?" blog, I promised to follow up on comments that I made in it in future blogs.  I covered the "Mom's Night Out" comment in my last blog. . . in this one, I'll explain why I think I was so grumpy that day. Besides the fact that they're famous American authors, what do Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Zora Neale Hurston have in common?  All three of them wrote what most would deem now great American novels ( Moby Dick , The Great Gatsby , and Their Eyes Were Watching God ) that didn't sell all that well during their lifetimes but were rediscovered later and became widely praised and often studied classics.  I was never sadistic enough as an English teacher to assign more than an excerpt of  Moby Dick - most print versions are over 500 pages - but I did teach and love the other two.  And I always found it sad that those authors poured so much of themselves into what they felt was a great accomplishment. . . and f...