Every Good Morning

  For almost 8 years, I have been out of the classroom, out of my high school, out of the all consuming act of teaching, away from its 10 month pattern of fierce concentration and my machine-like routine. At the beginning of August I became an engine that did not shut down until mid-June. Those 36 years were accompanied by bouts of exhaustion and a delirious kind of ardor. Now […]

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  This morning, driving in a morose mood (to which I have no right, but unsmiling and gloomy nevertheless), the red fox ran across the road 30 yards ahead — a bright red ruff and head, a white-tipped tail stretching out behind his sprint — . Two seconds from seeing to disappearance …  and with that ocular incantation, my day changed. The fox gave me a levitation bump, the push […]

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  I began to chant “M***********. M***********” when the video arrived of the smirking white boy in the MAGA hat, appropriately unnamed (for now) and his mob of laughing white boys and the lone Native American, Nathan Phillips , veteran, water protector, singing, surrounded, dignified, continuing to sing while the crowd shouted “Build the Wall” two days before Martin Luther King’s holiday. I felt as if I were looking into one of […]

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  The anxiety is akin to a low level fever — the 2 year strain so unbroken it is only in its rare absence that I notice its unremitting presence. What will he do today? Will new revelations of corruption emerge? What new abuse of justice will one of his stooges commit? While his 63 million voters* yawn and laugh, will I awaken again at 3 A.M., the catalog replaying […]

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