Brainstorms
That My Dad Wouldn’t Yell At Me
Asked my kids to pause for a minute today and consider their highest wish, the thing they want more than anything else. No judgment. No suggestions. No names. Just a bucket for their answers, which I would share and read…
While Another Flame Starts Burning
After more than a decade in the classroom, it’s not often that I go home with headaches. Maybe a handful of them in August, sure, trying to set routines and deal with new challenges. But midway through October, I’ve had…
A Conversation Worth Sharing
So this morning, I was sitting in a dealer lobby, drinking coffee, working on lesson plans, and waiting for my car to get serviced. The gentleman who came to give me the estimate on costs leaned down to show me…
After a Long Day
That feeling when you’ve worked a long day, drive home through the rain, see her car in the garage, a light on in the bedroom, and you smile because you know you’re about to kiss a beautiful woman and tell…
Let’s Be That Stuff
Where we were. What we saw. How we felt. Who we lost. None of these things will ever be forgotten, regardless of how much time passes, be it twenty, forty, or sixty more years, as is natural. But I do…
This Pursuit of American Ruth
Yes, indeed. American Ruth. That’s not a mistake or a missing T. In the absence of a “less”er suffix, it simply means compassion, empathy, and heart. It means care, forgiveness, and love. It means I need to say a word…
Whatever Greatness We Like to Imagine
There’s nothing terribly profound about the things I have to say below, nothing too deep or unfamiliar, but I’ve been thinking quite a lot this year about the way we talk of people, of groups, of all the things we…
The Spirit of July 4
When our people agreed to fight for independence, there were colonists who stood with the king and said no. But still, Jefferson wrote. When our people agreed to fight for independence, our barely existing Congress failed to cover the soldiers’…
At the Foot of Hollywood
Nearly four million people populate the City of Angels, almost forty million in the greater Los Angeles area. Over the last several days, I drove through and around, above and below so many parts of the city, interacting with so…
Daunted by Homelessness
Fifty-three years ago this month, Robert Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles. Over time, the hotel was torn down and replaced by a school and a park to remember Kennedy and his soaring, hopeful rhetoric.…
