What do I do now?

One morning last week as I was walking through the grocery store, the store manager passed me in one of the aisles, stopped, and asked my name.

“I see you in here almost every day, so I thought I ought to know your name,” he said.

I had to laugh about this later because then it occurred to me that in my retirement from the workplace, I am doing exactly what my grandmother and my mother did: I go to the grocery store almost every day.

What in the world initiates this activity? It isn’t…

Creating evidence that you were here and that your life mattered

When I retired from the classroom this past spring, one of the things people told me was that “it will take a while” for retirement to sink in. I have found this to be true in a qualified way: for example, until school started this fall, I simply felt like I was on summer vacation. Now that everyone is back in school, this retirement thing feels even more luxurious.

Perhaps “documenting” isn’t the right word, but I do find myself sort of “analyzing” the process of settling into retired…

As a teacher and as a grandparent of an elementary aged child in public school, I understand the anxiety about opening schools. But I want to reassure you; it is going to be just fine.

For the 2020–21 school year, my school district opened August on an A/B hybrid schedule that simply did not work well for anyone. It lasted about nine weeks. We also had a virtual option for students who needed to choose that route. But teachers? We were 100% in the classroom every single day as if there were no pandemic whatsoever.

Oh, make no mistake: I…

An age-old question with a surprising answer.

My son asked me this morning, “If you had a superpower, what would it be?” He said he thought I would choose flight, but no. I’m afraid of heights so that would not be it. I told him I’d give it some thought.

Sometimes I would pose this question to my students as a bellringer writing topic and while some had predictable answers, others were really creative and thoughtful in their responses.

So, I started thinking about it.

Immortality? Nope. I don’t necessarily want to outlive everyone I know. It is painful losing…

My answer to this question is evolving

How do you answer the question when people ask, “How does it feel to be retired?”

What is the right answer to that?

I retired from the classroom in May at the end of this school year. So, for me, when people ask, I just tell them it still feels like summer break. I mean, I taught for twenty-five years, and I always had about ten weeks off at the end of each school year. So, for now, it still feels like summer break.

But things are changing.

Right after the July 4th…

This is a post I wrote on my own blog in 2019. I am reposting it here because it meant something to a lot of people, but more than that, I believe that the lessons our community learned from this miraculous dog, Braveheart, are so relevant still. I’ve never in my life seen anything as impressive and memorable as the way this dog and his story impacted people.

“Just a dog” is a phrase I never want to hear again in my life. Ever.

Here’s the post:

Last week I was scrolling through Facebook when Braveheart’s page popped up on…

How many articles are on Medium about writing for Medium? A bazillion.

Is that a number?

I have been writing on Medium since January: I am a newbie. I have had a fairly successful blog on Blogger since 2008, but when I discovered Medium, I liked the interface; I liked the networking, and I liked the potential to make a little cash. I figured I would give it a year and see what happens.

What I have learned in this short amount of time boils down to this:

· There are a lot of people who write basically the same…

And no phone, no experience, no drivers, no facility…

The older I become the more I declare that the world has left me behind. My mother used to say this all the time; I would roll my eyes and wonder why it was so hard for her to just keep up, but now, I think I see what she meant.

So often I look at events in the news and in my community and I think, “What in the hell…?” And then I decide that moving to the country, out in the middle of nowhere, sounds more and more appealing.

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