we made a depositat our local food bank 524 pounds of groceries math doesn’t do much for poetry, but here arethe numbers: they need112,329 pounds of foodeveryday – every day we had eight ninth gradeboys who unloaded the truck and then stood on the scale together one ton of teenagerwho had brought halftheir weight in…
“History is written by the winners.” So wrote one of my students in a list of ten quotes that were meaningful to him that I had asked him and his class to find and explain. His take on the quote was: “If you win, you get to be important.” Perhaps. Or at least you get…
I’ve been staring at the screen for a couple of hours now. I had a couple of ideas I was chasing, but my mind kept coming back to the sadness that has marked my day because it was one year ago today that I got the call that my dear friend, David Gentiles, had been…
300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 No, that’s not my salary offer to pitch next year, nor is it the number of Cheetos I have consumed in my life time. 300 sextillion is the latest estimate of the number of stars in the universe, which is three times what astronomers had previously thought. As we learned from Hubble’s “Deep Field”…
I can show you a cup of flour, or a pound of sugar, but I am at a loss to quantifyhow much grief weighs, how long a heart stays broken, how far it is to forgiveness, or the speed of the sound of loneliness —even as I strain to comprehendhow a heart like yours can…
On this Sunday of Joy during Advent, our children led us in a Posada, which is a tradition from Mexico and other Latin American countries. We had three “inns” set up around the church and the children traveled, following Mary and Joseph, to each door. They knocked and said, in unison, “We must find a…
I spent the afternoon at a Mushroom Workshop with my friends from Bountiful Backyards and I came home with a couple of shiitake logs and a few words. log work we took oak logsand drilled small holesfilled them up withmushroom spores andsealed them shut withbeeswax so we could take them homeand wait to eatflavorful fungiin…
This evening we gathered around our dinner table with friends, as is our Friday night custom, and one of them, John, said, “I have a poem to read.” What followed were words full of flavor and sustenance by a poet named Thomas Centolella, who was a new name to me. I would be remiss if…
We’re beginning to make the turn towards home in To Kill a Mockingbird in my American Lit. class. We had a discussion today about the way in which a crisis exposes both the things that tie us together and the things that tear us apart. Maycomb, the little town where the story takes place, had…
John Lennon was killed thirty years ago today. (I know, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.) Here is the poem I found digging through his words tonight. words with john there are places I rememberall my life though some have changedhold on world, world hold onIt’s gonna be alrightyou gonna see the…