It’s end of the semester and time for the dreaded red pen. My U.S. History class at Lone Star Community College in Conroe ended last night. All the exams are given, papers corrected, grades posted, students gone. Have they actually learned anything? All I can do is hope. Maybe, a few things. I feel like […]
“I touch the future. I teach.” A quote in one of the applications for the Excellence in Teaching Awards. Teachers are on strike in many areas of the country. And justifiably so. I began teaching in 1965. There had just been a teachers’ strike two years earlier. The county had finally come up with the […]
The descendants said it best themselves. The English at Jamestown were the first Illegal Immigrants. Recently, a friend with whom I share membership in the proud Granaderos de Gálvez asked me to speak to her Jamestown Society. As a topic I suggested the impact of the Spanish on Jamestown, a rarely mentioned topic. The speech […]
It is easy to become a recluse in retirement. Flatbottom has done it successfully. He says he spent all his working life being sociable and he won’t do it anymore. He enjoys my brother-in-law but has lost touch with his own brother. He will go to Dalia’s Christmas Party, but it’s the only party he […]
A number of years ago, when we first arrived in the United States, wide-eyed and amazed at the wealthy new world around us, a friend bought us our first television. Thank you, Mario Gottfried. Or not. We could lie on the couch or lounge in the arm chairs and watch hours of TV at a […]
Yesterday a dear friend, Raul Avalos, and I spoke about Immigration to the ladies of the United Methodist Women. Not a topic one would normally associate with them, but they were game, and curious, and willing to try to understand. Like Marines in Afghanistan, however, if you’ve been there, you don’t need an explanation. If […]
There were 180 of them. One hundred eighty seventh and eighth graders from our local Middle School. Short, tall, thin, fat, happy, sad, friendly, unfriendly, walking in clumps or alone. Verging on adulthood, staring at high school in the Fall, and after that, who knows? And we volunteers had agreed to help entertain them for […]
Yesterday, as I ate lunch with two friends, a young woman came into the restaurant with a scarf covering her head. No need to ask. Cancer and its dreaded attendant–Chemo therapy. Still she smiled a cheerful smile, laughing with her friends as they ate lunch. With courage, she was fighting to live as happy a […]
One thing my 98 year-old mother did not do in her life time was to collect anything. Well, maybe books. The CBS Sunday Morning show did a story on a man who collected washing machines. He had started his collecting late in life but had managed to accumulate warehouses – plural—full of every form of […]
Who knew there was a 300-acre paradise hidden down at the end of Old Fish Hatchery Road? I was looking for places that our new Sam Houston State University faculty had never been. I wanted to create a practical tour with places that the faculty might need – license plates, driver’s licenses, both post offices, […]