During my thirtieth year as a school-teacher in Community School District 3, Manhattan, after teaching in all five secondary schools in the district and crossing swords with one professional administration after another as they strove to rid themselves of me; after having my license suspended twice for insubordination and covertly terminated once while I was on medical leave of absence; after the City University of New York borrowed me for a five-year stint as a lecturer in its education department; after planning and bringing about the most successful permanent school fundraiser in New York City history; after helping a single eighth-grade class perform thirty thousand hours of volunteer community service; after organizing and financing a student-run food cooperative, securing more than a thousand apprenticeships, and directing the collection of tens of thousands of books for the construction of private student libraries; after producing four talking job dictionaries for the blind, writing two original student musicals, and launching an armada of other initiatives to reintegrate students into a larger human reality — I quit.

Sam is the only kid he knows who goes to church — who is made to go to church two or three times a month. He rarely wants to. This is not exactly true: the truth is he never wants to go. What young boy would rather be in church on the weekends than hanging out with a friend? It does not help him to be reminded that once he’s there he enjoys himself, that he gets to spend the time drawing in the little room outside the sanctuary, that he only actually has to sit still and listen during the short children’s sermon. It does not help that I always pack some snacks, some Legos, his art supplies, and bring along any friend of his whom we can lure into our churchy web. It does not help that he genuinely cares for the people there. All that matters to him is that he alone among his colleagues is forced to spend Sunday morning in church.

On TV, Julia Child stands beside the butcher block, her face radiating indulgent interest, as a young chef chops celery and tells us how to make shiitake-mushroom soup.

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.