Learning to ride, falling down, getting back on
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Unmailed postcards, phantom siblings, buried Barbie dolls
In the moonlight, I study the face of the woman I’ve loved for eighteen years. I’m thankful the moonlight traveled such a vast distance tonight, just so I could see her sleeping.
My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever; it was simply dragging a child’s soul through the dirt. George Bernard Shaw
My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever; it was simply dragging a child’s soul through the dirt.
George Bernard Shaw
Schools get the Zap Me labs for no upfront cost, but they have to guarantee that children will use them for so many hours a day. And guess what: the browser portal has advertising on it. This means kids’ ability to do their schoolwork is contingent upon their viewing advertising.
I had known Hector for several months as his teacher, but up to that time I had never really seen him, nor would I have seen him then but for the startling puzzle he presented: he was gate-crashing with a fully paid admission ticket in his pocket. Was he nuts?
I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I remembered that wonderful line of Blake’s — that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love — I took a long, deep breath and forced these words out of my strangulated throat: “Thank you.”
I glance sideways at my hospital roommate. Sonya sits erect as a queen in her cranked-up bed, gazing ardently at the goings-on in Julia’s kitchen. Cooking shows are Sonya’s favorite, and she is relieved that I profess to like them, too.
My father never played catch with me when I was a boy — a tomboy, that is. I played catch for hours after school with Skipper, Evan, and Sammy, my friends from the neighborhood. And when they moved away, I played catch with myself, bouncing a tennis ball against the garage wall. But my father never played catch with me.
To me, my brother was his letters home. Even now, his lucid, correct handwriting remains more vivid in my mind than any picture.
Girlie slid out like a hot buttered noodle on that Indian-summer night in October — her father’s birthday, in fact.