Years ago, when I was teaching at Charlestown High, we got in to a class discussion about fighting. It had nothing to do with the book we were reading. There had been a fight in the school that day and I asked the kids what happened. As we talked and I continued to ask questions,…
Ginger and I went into Boston today for doctor’s appointments. Mine was in Copley Square and hers in Kenmore, so she dropped me off and took the car with her. The point of my trip was to talk to my doctor about my antidepressant and whether or not it was doing what it could or…
I’ve had a simple goal since I wrote last Wednesday: read a novel. There are times when a small act of defiance reverberates in larger ways; reading a novel from beginning to end for the first time in a couple of years felt like a profound gesture for me. As we headed into Boston yesterday,…
In a different chapter of my life I was a high school English teacher. I started as a building sub at Charlestown High School in Boston and worked my way into a job, staying there for seven years. I loved being with the kids, but the bureaucratic tag team of the School System and the…
When the room gets too dark to see, the best thing I can do is stack up the words of others so I can climb up to look out the window for little flickers of light. In these days when I’m daunted by books, I’m even more grateful for poems. Small as they are, they…
I learned something new about the impact of my depression yesterday: I’m not reading. I’ve collected books around me like CDs for as long as I can remember. I wanted to be a writer because I was, first, a reader. I learned about the power of language from writers who knew how to focus that…
Soon after Ginger and I moved to Boston, we were walking in the Cambridgeside Galleria one evening when we were stopped by a local news reporter who said he was doing a story on married couples and money. He asked us who handled the finances in our relationship and Ginger said, “I do” at the…
Think Tank Pundits are messing with my mind. I keep trying to imagine what songs are on their record. I think the first single will be “Cheney’s Fools”: “Che, Che, Che/ Cheney’s fools. . .” I could go on, but I won’t – for now. I was helped on my semantic sojourn by the linguistic…
I don’t know much about the architecture or the geography of the brain. I know the left and right brain thing (I would favor the right side) and I know a couple of names for different regions. My favorite is the hippocampus, not because I know what it does but because it has the word…
Ginger and I moved to Boston in August of 1990 and settled in Charlestown, the neighborhood of Boston that is home to Bunker Hill and the USS Constitution. We had not been in town long when we started going to neighborhood meetings about the impact of The Big Dig, which was the nickname given to…