For a few nerdy weeks between my junior and senior years of high school, I attended a Latin camp at Kansas University. I probably learned some Latin, but the big draw was being on a university campus several hours from home, surrounded by other nerdy kids. In other words, it was a trial run at leaving home for college. One of our teachers taught us a wonderful game. On Friday afternoons, he would give us the first lines of a few famous poems and challenge us to write a new second line. As an example, he recited the first stanza of a poem by Herrick: “Whenas in silks my Julia goes, / Then, then ..read more

“What did you do on your summer vacation?” It’s a reliable, if predictable, essay topic to assign when you want to get to know a batch of new high school kids. But in all my many years of teaching English, I never assigned it. Here’s why. In her first week of her first year of teaching, my friend Janet did assign the topic to her classes. This was in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in 1975, and what all her students had done over the summer was to see Jaws. Maybe a few talked about fishing on Grand Lake or going to summer camp, but most of them wrote about Jaws.  Janet hadn’t seen it. Nor had I ..read more

We retired people don’t need vacations for rest, the way we used to when we worked full-time. But most of us still crave the chance to change things up: to change the pace, change the place, and spend some time recharging. We need to vary things a little. I know I do. The Italians call it dolce far niente, a sweet doing nothing. (The “nothing” there means doing nothing unpleasant, or required.) And that’s pretty much my plan. So for the next six weeks, I’ll be kicking back. If possible, I’ll be heading to the cooler shores of Nova Scotia. But in in any case, I’ll be eating cold watermelon, fre ..read more

The other day, when a friend and I were chatting about the catastrophic heat wave out west, the talk turned naturally to more general environmental concerns. She’s a scientist and loves the ocean. “I’ve been thinking for years,” she said, frowning, “that I should avoid single-use plastics. So many of them are getting dumped in the ocean. I’ve just never had the time to do the research. Now that I’m retired, I guess I really need to do that.” Then she sighed. I agreed with both the sentiment and the sigh. Most pollution is industrial, on a scale that dwarfs our private consumer choices. And my ..read more

I grew up in a rise-and-shine household. The coffee (on a timer) started percolating just before 6:00 a.m., when alarm clocks buzzed in everyone’s bedrooms. My parents, my younger brother, and I rolled out of bed every morning to the delicious aroma of fresh coffee brewing. Years before I ever drank it, I associated its smell with jumping to it. When I was writing my doctoral dissertation, I didn’t let myself sit down until I was at my desk, with the computer booting up and a cup of coffee by my hand. (Otherwise, procrastination could extend until 10 a.m….) Later, when I was married, my stepki ..read more

When I told people last spring I was teaching a class on some postmodernist novels, a few shot me puzzled glances. Maybe they were wondering why anyone on earth would do that, but the questions they actually asked out loud were two: 1) What were we reading in the class? 2) What the heck is postmodernism, anyway? Answering the first question was easy. I had picked three of the books I’d enjoyed teaching to my bright high school students: Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo. My high school students had loved them. In the ..read more

The late, great Ruth Bader Ginsburg reported that, just before her wedding, her mother gave her some amusing advice for marriage: “Sometimes it helps to be a little deaf.” (She added it was also excellent advice for dealing with colleagues.) I thought of that story last year when I got asked by StoryWorth about relationship advice. (It was framed as advice for one’s kids and grandkids; hence the photo of our grandson and his special daycare friend. She’s adorable. She also bites.) The weekly format of StoryWorth inclines one to come up with short, on-the-fly, off-the-cuff pieces. So that’s wha ..read more

“Only connect”—that’s as much as many of us remember about E. M. Forster. (It’s true even for those like me, who read his novels in my twenties with real pleasure.) By itself, the phrase sounds trite and way too earnest, in the gag-producing vein of Richard Bach’s “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” In the context of Forster’s life and novels, though, “only connect” conveys grit, depth, and complexity. Here’s the full passage in Howards End: “Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.” It ..read more

My step-daughter has spent this week moving into her first house. During the process of unpacking, she’s sent us pictures of the little islands of order she’s created, each one surrounded by a flotilla of boxes. Her experience has made me think of the whole process of making a house into a home: shoving the furniture around until it looks right, picking paint colors, figuring out to fit your pots and pans into the cabinets. (And wondering why in the world you packed that hideous thing rather than dumping it at the local recycling table…) I do all those things, but first I set up little shrines ..read more

Yesterday I cried about Nova Scotia. Or rather, I cried about the very real prospect that this summer, like last summer, we won’t be allowed in to Nova Scotia. At this time of year,  I would usually be humming a happy song while I plan the move to our cottage up there—which is not just our summer home but our happiest of happy places. But this summer, like last summer, the Canadians are reluctant to open the border. (Probably sensible, given the behavior of many U.S. citizens this past year. But massively disappointing.) Even if the national government opens the border, Nova Scotia just a ..read more