One of the great benefits of writing daily is how the practice fosters memory, helps summarize and encode recent experiences, and challenges one to make sense out of the serendipity of life. Since late 2015, I have written 300 blog posts. Exactly. This writing stems from encouragement I got from an English professor in my…
Yesterday I counted on the train to show up, the clerk at the station to be on time to sell me some tea, and the traffic lights to work. I relied on the gates to be opened by the staff, the train to have been cleaned others, and my ticket to be scanned accurately. I…
Counting on one another is a critical feature of community. We count on each other to keep traffic moving at a reasonable pace, to stop at red lights, to wait as pedestrians cross. We count on each other to mow lawns, prune shrubs, and pick up litter. We count on each other to pay our…
A big part of our common activity in local, regional, ethnic, racial, national, and international community has become watching. We watch television, video, movies, concerts, plays, fights, presentations. We watch celebrities. We watch a 90-year old Queen and a 57-year old Prince. We watch Michael, Whitney, Diana, David, Janice, and…
Samuel Barber’s aching melody for James Agee’s prose poem, Knoxville: Summer 1915, brings me back to the fall of 1969, when I was a student teacher at Lincoln Junior and Senior High School near Downtown Milwaukee. Leontyne Price’s recording of the song captured for me how unanswerable was the question I could not quite bring…
Some things happened to me between first and eighth grade over which my parents and family had little control. I have written elsewhere about my exit from heterosexuality. As daunting as that process was for my parents and me, its most obvious manifestations, its bumpiest ride, happened in adolescence and young adulthood. But in many ways,…
Toni Morrison exhorts us to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, Between the World and Me, by just putting it out there: “This is required reading.” The only way I could expand on that perfect direction is to possibly add, “Then, re-read.” I hope over the next many months to come back to Coates’ writing and thinking…
In many ways our common practices, those things we do year in and year out, define us as a community or communities. In political stump speeches, national and local candidates ask rhetorical questions like, “What do we stand for as a nation?” and “Are we unified by greed and fear?” Then, depending on the candidate,…
Advanced warning: I am not a religious person, but I have history. Lots of it. My family was Catholic during my childhood and at least for a generation before that, but has Jewish roots on one side and quite possibly on both. As a young boy I found great solace in church and its beautiful…
On Facebook I recently posted my annoyance with people who seem to require five or more feet of space around them while waiting in lines. I see this regularly in coffee shops, convenience stores, and ice cream shops. In the case of this last one, I saw a person next in line who was so…
Creating Community for Everyone 