Most of us adults don’t have bedtimes imposed on us by other people. We go to sleep when we decide to. That’s even more true of us retired adults; we’re less likely to have to get up at a fixed time, so why go to bed when we don’t feel like it? True, there are…
A friend of mine recently read some of my articles and told me that though he enjoyed reading them, he wondered why I didn’t sound angrier. He and I belong to the People’s Music Network, a group of people who are hoping and working, through music, to have major effects on what happens in this…
Sometimes a child comes up to me and tells me, with conviction, something that simply isn’t true. As a teacher, I used to make a big thing of it. After all, truth is pretty important to us teachers. Colleges print “Veritas” on their flags and stationery – even etch it on to their stone buildings….
I’m writing this article the day after Independence Day. I realized, as I woke, that the word “independence” contains a prefix. We have a holiday to celebrate something we aren’t. In fact, on July 4, 1776, all we did was publish a document that said we weren’t dependent. It’s kind of like Groundhog’s Day; we…
Once in a while, somebody creates something that’s really good – so good that people like it even when that somebody isn’t around any more. Then it’s called a classic. Some classics start to seem sacred; you aren’t supposed to change a word, note, or stroke of it. You’ve got to keep it exactly the…
They say that we should be very careful what we wish for. Some of our wishes, they say, could end up coming true. I never used to catch the drift of that warning. On one level, I understood what it meant – that a poorly conceived wish, if granted, could bring on unforeseen disaster. We…
I recently had a conversation with a friend who had a stroke a few years ago. She is paralyzed on one side of her body, and like me, has to do things more slowly than she used to. That can be quite frustrating. It takes her longer to do simple tasks most people take for…
I give children piano lessons. I won’t accept money for it, because I don’t want to have to think about whether I deserve to be paid. I’m retired, and I don’t have to deal with that any more. And my approach to teaching piano is unorthodox enough that most parents could easily raise eyebrows about…
We expect people to do the jobs they’re hired to do, and do them well. If we elect someone to political office and she/he doesn’t do the jobs involved the way we want them done, we try to get him/her to shape up, and if that doesn’t work, we elect someone else. We can’t all…
The Pat I’m writing to is a fictional character – a composite of all the people who, for one reason or another, didn’t think I was doing a very good job teaching. Pat may have been a parent, a teacher, an administrator, or a child. There were more people who thought that way in 1969,…