This past Wednesday, I went in to Mountain View to pack up the last of my things. I wept my way through the San Gabriel Valley, grieving my many losses. Each August for the past…well… 22 years, I have been starting fresh with new notebooks, new pens, new books, plans and goals for what I will accomplish in the coming year and how. And now, instead of the blank slate of a new school year looming before me, I am shutting the classroom door (at least for the time being).
Now don’t get me wrong, every year that I have taught has been difficult in some way; there have been days, though fewer each year, when I wished I could find a way out of teaching. The first few years, I dreamed of the day when having a family at home would keep me out of the classroom, anticipated the glories of stay-at-home-motherhood. I imagined taking an eight- to ten-year sabbatical in which I would shine in all my domesticated ways, baking daily from scratch, filling our home and our children’s closets with home-made-ness, volunteering in our community, gardening, and being satisfied. There would be no hurry to get back into teaching, not in this imagined world of mine. Read the rest of this entry »
All my life, I have wished for the gift of music. I realized early on that I was not born with a beautiful singing voice, and in high school when I tried to teach myself to play guitar, I discovered I also was not blessed with the ability to create music by instrument. Somehow though I knew all the chords to a song, when I put them together, all I could hear was my strumming, jolting from one note to the next. I decided then that I could claim the gift of music appreciation in the absence of all other musical giftings.
