Ultimate frisbee team is coming

This is the day Joel's vacation starts, and he and eleven friends from his Ultimate frisbee squad are coming to crash at my house! They bring sleeping bags and presumably their own towels and wash cloths, but they'll fill the house. I'm putting up a big pot of spaghetti (shades of the old pre-meet track team dinners). Looing forward to seeing Joel: I'd rather see him alone, I guess, but I also enjoy seeing him in context, meeting some of his friends.

Snow and Good teaching day

Thursday morning, Coalition meeting to plan, snow on the ground! I hope the last of the year? We are in spring! (I exclaim this just like everyone else, indignant that we should get weather that doesn't fit our categories: if it's spring, there must be pink blossoms and bunnies!)
Meanwhile, I had a sterling but exhausting day yesterday in my teaching: maybe because I had the least orderly class first thing in the day, and they were both extremely orderly and extremely engaging kids, and maybe because I was party to a situation where an excellent veteran teacher was having a struggle with a good but disrespectful kid (and this was what he called himself in a piece he wrote for me, which became part of the whole exchange, so I felt part of more than just standing up and entertaining), and maybe it was just that the kids were glad to see me two days in a row, and maybe because it was a more-or-less new lesson that I was intent on figuring out how to deliver (on writing monologue– not that I've never done that before, but I haven't featured it in a while, and this is leading to the presentation for the school later in the year). And then the evening novel class was excellent–I'm beginning really to like the intimacy of the small class, and of course having strong students, strong personalities, a lot of the teaching comes from them– I was very satisfied with the day.
And the tiredness didn't seem a negative, but a positive, until my mind started rushing over all the things I have to do, have failed to do, will never do. Meanwhile, I have to prepare my monthly Coalition meeting. And tomorrow the Ultimate team arrives to eat spaghetti and sleep in our house! Twelve kids, but at least Joel is one of them. If we want to see him, we'll have to go watch him play ultimate frisbee down at Rutgers forty five minutes away!

Beings Unvisited by Angels--George Eliot's World View

Here is a sample of George Eliot's sad, brave humanist agnosticism from her novel of Florence in the time of Savonarola:

Beings Unvisited by Angels

....No radiant angel came across the gloom with a clear message for her. In those times, as now, there were human beings who never saw angels or heard perfectly clear messages. Such truth as came to them was brought confusedly in the voices and deeds of men not at all like the seraphs of unfailing wing and piercing vision,–men who believed falsities as well as truth, and did the wrong as well as the right. The helping hands stretched out to them were the hands of men who stumbled and often saw dimly, so that these beings unvisited by angels had no other choice than to grasp that stumbling guidance along the path of reliance and action which is the path of life, or else to pause in loneliness and disbelief, which is no path, the arrest of inaction and death.


George Eliot, Romola, in The Best-Known Novels of George Eliot (Modern Library edition: New York), p. 1163.

Beings Unvisited by Angels

Here is George Eliot's sad, brave humanist agnostic view of the world from her novel about Florence in the days of Savonarola, Romola


....No radiant angel came across the gloom with a clear message for her. In those times, as now, there were human beings who never saw angels or heard perfectly clear messages. Such truth as came to them was brought confusedly in the voices and deeds of men not at all like the seraphs of unfailing wing and piercing vision,–men who believed falsities as well as truth, and did the wrong as well as the right. The helping hands stretched out to them were the hands of men who stumbled and often saw dimly, so that these beings unvisited by angels had no other choice than to grasp that stumbling guidance along the path of reliance and action which is the path of life, or else to pause in loneliness and disbelief, which is no path, the arrest of inaction and death.


George Eliot, Romola, in The Best-Known Novels of George Eliot (Modern Library edition: New York), p. 1163.

St. Patrick's Day

St. Patrick's Day, and I planted peas! I lived today like a retiree– that is, I gathered seeds and garden catalogs and I went down, just to see how the garden was, and dug a little, and raked, and set in one of the bean towers– and I planted peas! Super sugar snaps and Oregon Sugar Pod II's, and a new one, Sugar Lace II!! I also thinned the cabbages now under lights, still in their egg carton, not peat pots yet. It was sunny and 40 ish today, and I kept thinking, This is what I want to do, I want to be retired for a while, and garden and write memoir (I'm finishing up a short piece about poor old Miss Shreve to submit to Maggie Anderson's book about schooling.)
Also cut lettuce from under the umbrellas and dug up parsnips and carrots planted last April, baked them with potatoes, had salad and ham, a funeral gift.

Family photo

March 16, 2005
This is an unusual picture of my sister, my mother and me. My father passed away a week ago after several years of being sadly disabled, and we were gathered in West Virginia for the funeral and remembering and celebrating him. The celebration came largely in the form of many of his former students who came to the funeral home and the funeral to say he had been their best teacher.

Nightline Bloggers

We stayed up past our bedtime to watch the Nightline show on bloggers which had a quick background view or two of my husband Andy's brother David Weinberger.
The Nightline reporter was all portentous and pompous about this new phenomenon while appearing to remain remarkably clueless about the impulse to communicate and participate in this enormous amorphous thing of proto-democracy on the Internet.

Week-end at Brown

We just got back from an overnight in Connecticut at Andy's sister's Ellen's. She went with us yesterday up to see Joel and Brown, and then we slept at her house. When we were dropping him off after dinner on Federal Hill in Providence, Joel said, "Aren't you going to get out?" and of course I wanted nothing so much as to hug him, so I got out and did.

His demands have always told me what I want to do. Well, I'm thinking about when he was a baby and I was an ignorant old mother. Then there was a message on the phone when we got back, from him, asking if he could bring twenty or forty ultimate player friends to sleep on the floor before a tournament at Rutgers! Mercy upon us.

I'm thinking about how first there is imagination; then there is experiencing; then there is memory. I"m good on 1) and 3), and less good on the experiencing. I'm thinking about Italy, and about yesterday, and how already yesterday has started to glow: when we arrived and saw Joel coming toward us with his skully on and Ellen yelling "The Chia pet!" (for his hairstyle) and Joel's room very neat with the Indian blanket cover over his comforter, and the floor clear, and shirts hanging in the open closet. And really good omelettes at Rue d'espoir. And a kind of bronzed gentle hanging out in his room, him showing us books, things on the Internet, Phil and Kyle in and out. Walking around campus, always so beautiful even in dirty snow weather, eating dinner at theBombay Club and driving around busy gay Providence, some big event at the Performing Art center or else the Dunkin Donut arena.

And fast fading some of the actual experience: an upset stomach, no place to sit, feeling hot, sleepy, at different times. But it smooths out in memory–I guess Italy did too, but it's so far now that I really have to stretch and make an effort to recall the discomforts, the squabbles

In looking for some online pictures of Brooklyn for my biography page, I found a nice painter named Ella Yang who paints a lot of things, but I especially like her paintings of Brooklyn. She responded promptly to my e-mail and gave permission for me to use her work on my website as long as I gave the title and a link. Take a look at her website!