Happy Birthday to My Husband

 Memories of those days long ago 

have become a bit blurred around the edges.

You,

the focal point of my life when I was sixteen,

and you were seventeen,

embodied

 all that my young girl's imagination

 desired in a young man

 to whom she could give her heart.

We were young,

but we had our dreams for the future.

You were so steady.

Always the good 

student, 

you were popular with your peers and your teachers.

You,

the student athlete,

thrilled my heart,

as I, sitting on the grass at Runyon field,

watched you play first base with such confidence and skill.

You, King of the Sock Hop,

a senior,

big man on campus,

brought me,

a sophomore girl, with absolutely no self-confidence,

to that dance where you reigned as king.

You were genuine.

A real gem.

I wasn't the only one who realized what a great guy you were.

All the other girls in the school voted you as king of the sock hop.

Those long ago days left me with such sweet memories:

prom,

movies,

drives in your car dragging Main,

City Park, where we would ride the merry-go-round,

picnics in Beulah, 

and your graduation from high school.

You told me the night you graduated what you would do with your life.

You said you would teach when you finished college.

You said you wanted me to marry you when we were done with college.

I was only sixteen.

You were seventeen.

I knew you would accomplish all you said you would accomplish.

You did.

You worked hard to pay your own way through college.

You taught German and English.

You became a high school counselor.

You became a high school principal.

You even married me.

That took a bit longer.

I never had the good sense to marry you until thirty years after that first proposal.

I carry many images of you in my head.

Yours is my favorite face to photograph.

In this one,

you are in your element.*

Presence,

that intangible aura of leadership,

is captured so well in this, 

one of my favorite photos of you.

This photo captured so much of you.

Your sparkly brown eyes framed by scholarly looking frames on your glasses,

are focused on the student to whom you are so intently listening.

That's you.

You are engaged and engaging.

The smile on your face reflects

your kind, fatherly heart,

and your sense of humor,

and of how much you love being with young people.

You are dressed in your black jacket South High School that you wore to all those football games.

The Colt emblem,

strategically placed over your heart,

speaks of your love for and devotion to the school where you served as principal.

You, the son of refugees, had donned this warm jacket for the ferry ride over the cold choppy waters to Ellis Island.

This place, a gateway for so many of the ancestors of your students,

was not the gateway for your family.

Your parents were refugees from Germany.

They escaped the Holocaust.

They had such dreams for you,

the son born on American soil,

the son born after your dear parents had taken such an arduous journey from Nazi Germany.

Your father wanted you to be a teacher,

"It is a noble profession," 

he said as he advised you during one of those treasured talks you would have with him on the front porch of your home during your youth.

He died during your first year of teaching.

He did not live to see you flourish in that noble profession.

I am the one able to see you come full circle from those days of 

hope,

dreams,

promise,

and

youth,

to this one moment in time 

when 

you

in your element,

fully engaged with the student toward whom

your head is slightly bent

give credence to the school motto which has become your legacy:

Do Right.

Be Kind.

***************

Tomorrow is your birthday.

When I look at your kind and loving face,

I know how blessed I am to have you in my life.

You, my dear husband,

have kept those traits that I recognized so many years ago.

Your faithfulness towards me is never in question.

Your love for me and your family has remained strong and supportive through so many storms of life.

You continue to make me smile and laugh at your great sense of humor.

You are so down to earth and loving.

You send me cute, loving little notes and emojis from you latest gadget, your Apple watch throughout the day.

You make me smile.

You bring joy to my heart.

So here we are in seventies.

How did we get here?

You never seem to age.

You continue to work at your new career at the Apple Store.

You come home from work full of enthusiasm and energy.

You are not one to retire.

When you are home, your favorite thing to do is to walk our dear Boston.

You love your boy.

Our lives are rich in love and companionship.

Your life has been a gift to me.

All those characteristics and traits that I hoped for in the man I hoped to marry someday when I was just a young girl

truly are embodied in you, 

my dear and cherished husband.

I love you beyond measure.

Happy birthday.

Credits: * I did not take the photograph of you on the ferry to Ellis Island.  It was captured by the mother of a student, the gifted writer and photographer Cathy Ames-Farmer.  

Thoughts on Blogging and Retirement.

In what seems a lifetime ago now, I taught high school English and English as a Second Language.  I loved teaching English.  I especially loved teaching English as a Second Language.  Towards the end of my career as a classroom teacher, an opportunity came along that allowed me to expand my professional experience by going to the local University to create a program to train teachers to become ESL teachers.  While this meant that I would have to leave the secondary classroom, a place where I dearly loved being, I changed the course of my professional life  and left the classroom. 

Sally teaching high school English
at Centennial High School
Pueblo, Colorado

At the Colorado State University-Pueblo, I wrote curriculum  and developed a program that would lead to an endorsement in Linguistically Diverse Education.  I loved the diversity of my new position.  I researched. I wrote. I recruited students. I taught classes.  I became a part of the larger community of others across the state who worked in the Linguistically Diverse Education field.  It was all a wonderful experience.  

Then, I retired.

I began this blog as a way to keep me writing as I began retirement.  I had no idea what direction the blog would go.  I even had a hard time naming my blog because at the time the only identity I could come up with was that of a retired English teacher. 

I had visions of using the blog as a place to record my thoughts as I launched into a new phase of my life.  I had established a consulting business and began to do a bit of professional development in the area of helping content area teachers teach English language learners.  That was my passion at the time.  Even in retirement, I did not think I would ever want to give up working with teachers who wanted to learn how to best serve their linguistically diverse students.  I hoped my blog would reflect my passion for my field of professional experience and expertise that I hoped to continue throughout my years of retirement.

A funny thing happened on my way to working after retirement.  After a few years of doing that, I didn't want to do it anymore.  I wanted to spend more time with family.  I didn't want commitments.  I wanted to read, to write, to garden, and I wanted to do all of that in my own way on my own time schedule.

My blog became a place where I wrote about random thoughts, memories, and experiences.  It had no focus.  That seemed to be just fine with me.

Now, having been retired nearly ten years, I have thought of renaming my blog.  I question how much my writing reflects the persona of  "retired English teacher."  I sometimes wonder if the title puts a lot of pressure on me when I write in a more public format.  After all, I really have to focus on my grammar, my punctuation, my sentence structure and all of that. Sometimes, I groan out loud when I see the mistakes I didn't catch before I published a post.   

When I began this blog, I had no idea how my world would expand as I began to read blogs and to make blogging friends.  Blogging opened up a new world that many of us never knew was out there before we started blogging.  I love reading the posts of my other blogging friends.  They keep me interested because they are all so  interesting.  

At times, I wax and wane as a blogger due to family demands, health issues, and other interests, but as I don't plan on abandoning blogging anytime soon.

Perhaps, blogging, as one form of writing, is important to me because of the reflective piece that goes with it.  As teachers, as learners, as writers, we find that we are most effective when we practice reflection.  I recently came across Peter Pappas' work on what he calls the Taxonomy of Reflection. 
His model really speaks to me as I think about blogging and retirement.

… to reflectively experience is to make connections within the details of the work of the problem, to see it through the lens of abstraction or theory, to generate one’s own questions about it, to take more active and conscious control over understanding. ~ "From Teaching With Your Mouth Shut" 

by Donald Finkel

 Certainly, retirement is an ongoing field of exploration for me.  One way that I make sense of my journey through retirement is by writing as a reflective practice. 

 
Most of my writing takes place in my journal, but I also appreciate that I can reflect upon, write about, and read about retirement though blogging.  This blog continues to serve as a place where I explore the public expression of my private writing.

I can't imagine my retirement life without blogging in it.  

Housekeeping - A Book Review

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Reviewing this book is a difficult task. It is a book that many times I wished to toss aside because it is not an easy book to read. Having said that, I can't think of another book with more beautiful prose, nor can I think of an author other than Marilynne Robinson who writes with such brilliant, sparse prose while capturing the essence of the themes about which she writes.

It is a book about families and difficult family relationships and how family stories that impact generations. "Families are a sorrow, and that's the truth." It is about loss. "Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it." It is finding and having connections when on feels cut off and isolated from the rest of the world. "Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house." It is about identity and isolation.

The setting of the story speaks of such isolation. There seems to be no reason why anyone would be drawn to live in town where the story takes place. The house where the main characters live is perhaps one the most memorable houses I have ever read about. Odd in its location, design, and livability, it mirrors the oddness of those whom have lived there.

Robinson often weaves throughout the story a tale of the great loss that happened when a train derailed and plunged into the lake. The lake is one of the centerpieces of the setting for this book. The shock and grief of that event and the tragedies that followed the train wreck are woven throughout the book. The book is about the deep waters of emotional trauma that the survivors continue to cope as the go about the living out their lives. Each character seems to be alone in a below the surface place of turmoil.

I was relieved, as other readers have said, when I finished the book, but I am also glad I read it. There are so many facets to this book. I will have to re-read it to grasp the depth of it all.



View all my reviews

Vashonista Celebration

On the first of October, I flew to Seattle, Washington to spend five days with blogging friends that I first met in October of 2012 when we rented an old farmhouse on Vashon Island.  Since that first meeting, this time together at Lavender Hill has become a yearly event.  This year, since all of us are now retired, we decided to spend five days together rather than three.  We also decided that we would spend the time writing.  Deb from Cat Bird Scout was our facilitator for our writing.

During our writing time we worked from Pat Snider's model of workshop writing. We wrote eleven prompt writing during our time together.  We all agreed to share our last prompt writing on our blogs.

The Prompt

Deb read to us Mary Oliver's Poem The Summer Day.  If you have never read this wonderful poem, I am included it here:



Once Deb had finished reading the poem, she gave us the last line of this poem as our writing prompt:

What is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

A Reflection on The Prompt

Sometime assigned writing prompts bring up feelings which the writer wishes to not address in writing.  Such was the case for me that day.  This particular poem had been used on the funeral program of one lost too soon, of one I had loved and admired greatly.  I cut the poem from the funeral program and framed it as a reminder of the importance of that last line when considering the days we have left in this life.  

On this particular day when we were given this particular writing prompt, I had just received word that two men I had gone to school with had just passed away.  One had been married to a friend from my high school group before her untimely passing five years ago.  The other I had not know well, but my husband had, and he was the much loved older brother of a friend of mine.  Needless to say, the poem, the last line, and the prompt hit a very somber note with me.  The deaths of two from my school days seemed to prompt a reminder that I have fewer day before me than I do behind me.  

I decided to look back to my youth and see how I had used the days I have been given up until this point.  Had I used my time wisely?  What were my early goals for life?  How did the goals I had from my early days influence the decisions I have made through seven decades of living?  

The Writing Piece

Trees lined the sidewalks that led from the college dorms to the main campus.  Those canopy covered walks lead to the future for which I am preparing, I thought as I headed out that first day towards my very first college class.  Reality has hit.  I'm here for real.  Frosh orientation is thankfully over.  It seemed so silly.  I guess we are stuck with wearing these horrible beanies for a few days yet. I really hated the silly games we had to play during orientation.  Who thought we would like to play "Pass the orange under your chin to the guy behind you."  That, and high school, are all behind me now.  I have actually matriculated.  How's that for using a real college word?  I have my college map, and I know where Bru-Inn is.  I'll get a coke there after class.  Maybe I will make a new friend or two at the student center, but it is a bit scary to walk in by myself.  Maybe my roommate will meet me.  Thankfully, she and I are walking to our first classes together.

I belong here.  It took some doing.  I won the scholarship which is paying my tuition.  I convinced my father that I would make good on the investment he is making in my future.  Seventy dollars a quarter is covered by the tuition scholarship I won.  The board and room of $150 a quarter will partially be paid by the salary I will make working in the dining hall two meals a day.  I worked all summer to buy my clothes and help pay for books.  I know this is a sacrifice for my parents, but I am working and helping all I can.  

I will be a teacher.  I am here to prepare for that profession.  I'm not in any hurry to get married.  I will someday, but not now.  I want to be independent.  I want to rely on my own ability to make my way in this life.  

Later, when the preparation for a profession is done, and I have met the right person, I want to marry. I want to teach after I am married, but I also want five kids.  That means I hope to also have house, a garden, a place where my children and children after them will come for family dinners when they are grown.  I have my future all planned out.

The vision from those long ago days wasn't too far off.

The vision served as a blueprint for the decisions I made as I moved into the future.

I accomplished those goals.

Life has sent me many curves along the way.

Certainly, I never saw many of them coming, 

but

in the end,

if today were the end,

I'm happy with my life.

I've lived this wild and precious life well.

Read the posts from other Vashonistas at:

Deb at Cat Bird Scout

Sandi at Flying Into the Light

DJan at D-Janity

Jann at Benchmark 60

Linda at Thoughts of a Bag Lady in Waiting