Between Us

Only 30% of students enrolled in liberal arts colleges graduate in four years Some years before the term “helicopter parent” insinuated itself into the lexicon of higher learning, a father and mother took to the road. Among the flotsam and jetsam of “college necessities” crammed into the Ford Country Squire station wagon was their son and heir who, perhaps for the first … [Read more...] about The $40K Binge

The notion that simple solutions exist to knotty problems should trigger a host of red flags. I have a bone to pick with “just,” because in at least one of its permutations, it lies. My dictionary defines “just” in its adverbial sense as ”simply; no more than,” which, when you think about it, “just” seldom is. Consider, for example,  Nike’s admonition to “Just do it,” … [Read more...] about Just Don’t Do It

Porches are, like summer, are sloth-inducing and community-inviting The American poet Robert Frost is famous for—among other things—penning the line, “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” Frost’s lines concern a stand of birches observed in winter, bent down, as those trees tend to be, by snow and ice. It is as if, Frost observes, a small boy had shinnied … [Read more...] about Porching It

Rather than “low self esteem” being the culprit of every societal ill from thumb-sucking to murder, it is an overweening sense of self-importance that encourages many of us to conclude we can do no wrong. “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”               George Eliot (nee Mary Anne Evans) Middlemarch 1871 Item: Monday, March … [Read more...] about The “I” in the Devil

It is the absence of the “fine” in our kids’ lives---deliberation and discernment skills---that worries me:   To the ever-expanding pile of words denuded of practically all meaning, I’d like to add “fine.”   Witness the range of synonyms offered, for example, by my Macbook onboard thesaurus: “very well,” “well,” “all right,” “okay”: which is a little like saying “thriving,” … [Read more...] about “Fine, and You?” (Or maybe not so much)

To dwell in a space means, I think, to combine a spiritual relationship with a spatial one. “Space” is a concept that has been omni-present for us over the past four months, because in August we sealed our lives up in reinforced cardboard, loaded kit and caboodle, and traded old space for new. After living nowhere but New England since forever, I and mine find ourselves … [Read more...] about Thin Spaces