While shoveling snow from my driveway today, I had plenty of opportunity to reflect. The drive is long and wide and, even though I get it plowed by a service, getting it right can take me an extra hour. When I was about eight years old, I started shoveling snow for neighbors. By that point…
On August 21, 1983, Ronald Reagan was in the White House. The idea that The Police were monitoring Every Breath You Take had a very different meaning than it might today. The virus that causes AIDS was just identified, and the average life expectancy post-diagnosis was 18 months. My friends and I were generally operating…
After a recent awards ceremony, I approached a fellow recipient and extended my congratulations and my appreciation. The former was an acknowledgement for her outstanding performance in achieving excellence in her work. My appreciation, however, was more personal. It was my heartfelt thanks for how her institution — a library — was a part of…
In the mid- to late-1960s, I did what many of my friends were doing. We grew our hair long, met over coffee, sang folk songs, went to rallies against the war in Vietnam, and marched for housing and racial justice. Sometime during that decade, I met the Berrigan brothers in an apartment near Marquette University.…
I have been thinking about this date almost daily for months. Last July I wrote, When hundreds of Brown and Black LGBT people went to a nightclub in Orlando last month to celebrate Pride, graduations, new jobs, new loves, recent successes, the weekend, and old times, they had already been taking the pulse of many other…
My late husband Paul was an artist. When we were alone, I sometimes sang to him these lyrics that Joni Mitchell penned sometime before 1970: Oh I am a lonely painter I live in a box of paints I’m frightened by the devil And I’m drawn to those ones that ain’t afraid I remember that…
My students are familiar with my comments and jokes about my not being easy. I expect, for example, that they challenge themselves to identify as students in contrast to merely being “in school” (identity vs location). I expect them to interact with the 40 other people in the room. Shy? Me, too! Tough. Get to…
By age 10 I had become pretty adept at taking the pulse of a room. I knew when my dad had too much to drink, when a holiday was in danger of being cancelled, when the cake would go uneaten, when my mom was fed-up and overwhelmed. Most of the time I tested a space…
Col. Chris Austin Hadfield, a retired Canadian astronaut, is perhaps best known for his cover of David Bowie’s Space Oddity from outer space. Born in 1959, Hadfield recalls his early dream of space travel beginning at about age 7 during a TED talk he recorded in 2014. After his dream became reality, he has been remarkable…
Most semesters I get at least one student paper that questions, “Who am I to interfere (ask a question, interrupt, intercede, protest, and so on)?” For fear of being “inappropriate,” these young adults take the role of bystander in the situations they describe. I suspect that aspects of these reactions to life events are developmental;…
Creating Community for Everyone 