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The Corner Store

A man in a stained shirt and dirty brown pants stumbles out of a mud-brick building, fiddling with his zipper. Giggling, but sober, he shuts his fly and fishes a cigarette from his breast pocket. Approaching a woman grilling brochettes over a fire, he places a hand on her thigh and swipes a skewer of meat from the grill. The woman doesn’t move or speak, just clucks her tongue disapprovingly.

Forgetting

On the nineteenth of April 1989, one of the huge gun turrets on the battleship Iowa blew up, killing the sailors who were manning it. Debate about responsibility for the explosion continued long afterward, but lost in the emotion of the tragedy was a curious aspect of the story.

Graduation

A secret admirer, a new mother, a kind motorist

The Beat Goes On

During the Vietnam War I asked one of the wise men of the peace movement, a kind of renegade Jesuit, if there was any force on earth that could end our love affair with war. “Only education,” he replied. “There has to come a time when they beat the drum and no one marches.”

Sunbeams

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

Henry David Thoreau

Attempting The Impossible

At Saint Vincent’s, every class period began with a simple prayer. “Let us remember,” I would say, and the class would reply, “that we are in the holy presence of God.”

School’s Out

An Interview With John Taylor Gatto

The first thing I discovered was that the types of learning that are measured by standardized tests are not real learning at all. To do well on a standardized reading test, for example, does not mean that you read well. There are approximately 150 categories of information that a complex passage of reading delivers, and the standardized test covers approximately six of those categories over and over again.

The Day I Got Buck-Naked With A Daisy On My Ass

Linda Hoag of the Los Angeles Free Clinic writes that “denial can be a healthy survival and coping technique. Often, those chided for denial have fought best and lived longest. . . . Denial and hope are two sides of the same coin and no one but the patient can know which side of that coin is face up at any given moment.”

The Big Red Book

As Isaac Thomas walked jauntily down the bright, wide sidewalk at midday, he felt the weight of the book against his thigh, his wrist, the palm of his hand.

Rats

In the seventies, over a period of five years, I killed approximately two thousand rats. That’s four hundred rats per year, a little over a rat a day.