For a while now I have been promising some friends that I would construct a hat that included a sort of wing or tag off to one side, a la Minnie Pearl. I envision this chapeau to be less flashy than La Pearl’s but following the same premise. The hat would have an appendage that…
It has become incredibly easy for me not to decide on things over the past 15 years. If you go to any website that addresses issues related to multiple sclerosis, you have to go way down on the list of issues to find anything about this problem, if you find it there at all. When…
Taking trains to get places is very instructive. The traveler gets to see firsthand decisions that were made, are being made, or are yet to be made at a pace and from a perspective that one doesn’t get while driving or walking. At the wheel of a car, one must pay attention. From the train,…
Communities emerge when people participate in common practices, depend on one another, make decisions together… For the past two weeks I have been posting about some of our common practices and depending on one another. I have noticed along the way that more often than not I draft my posts beginning with the antithesis of…
Especially during election season, it seems the use of the phrase social contract gets a boost in frequency. It is like watching 1,400 sales of Prince’s albums in the day before his death soar to .75 million the day after. One party is much more likely to use the expression, the other preferring words like…
Yesterday I told Albert that I have been worried about him. Most Wednesdays I see him in Chicago on the bridge at Adams between Wacker and Canal at 2:45 PM. But for the past two weeks he has been absent. Last week I was a bit early for my train, so I hung out for…
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…
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…
Creating Community for Everyone 