MY CAREER PURGING HAS BEGUN. It is time to begin sorting through my four tall classroom file cabinets and three closets and discarding manila folders full of old lesson plans that I’m now, at last, certain I will never need again. I will retire at the end of the next school year. I had planned […]
A Different Drummer: Breakfast
JOHN SAT ALONE AT A WIDE REAR TABLE at Gray’s Diner sipping his second cup of coffee. He still sported a sore ankle from stepping off the curb two days earlier trying to move out the way of four girls coming the other way who insisted on walking side by side. The bell above the […]
A Different Drummer: The Paw’s pause
I’M SITTING HERE IN MY CLASSROOM WITH MY JOURNALISM STUDENTS. It’s 6:15 p.m. in the evening on a Tuesday. We have gathered here tonight to do what we generically call Late Nights. These are the nights where we do our desktop publishing for the school paper, The Paw. There simply isn’t enough class time between […]
A Different Drummer: It’s not like wine tasting
I TOOK A TWO-PART TOUR OF SOME BAY AREA CRAFT BREWERIES and taprooms ranging from San Leandro to El Cerrito over the last two weeks. In Sacramento and the Bay Area, the world of craft beers is expanding like the head of a good craft beer. Both my son, Adam, and my son-in-law, Chad, are […]
A Different Drummer: Toast to a life
Good-bye, Joe. I lost another friend to the death specter. One’s age truly shows when one’s friends begin dropping dead around one. The calls from home aren’t all about who is getting married any more, or who is having a baby, or who got a nice job recently. They are, “Guess who’s dead?” Death is […]
A Different Drummer: Old ways die hard
I TEACH TECHNOLOGY AND ALL, but as for my own home equipment, it’s funky old. I have a habit, which I tout as a strategy, of owning something until it is completely worn out. I wait for holes or bad reception before I trade things out. When I buy electronics, I buy the latest models, […]
A Different Drummer: Conclusion to never-ending story
To add layers to the tangled web of coincidences I began last week, let me share how my freshman English class and the novel “Candide” by Voltaire played into my previous column in which I recounted the deaths of two friends of mine, my father-in-law, Don Wagerman, and my rafting buddy, Wild Bill Gallagher I […]