The Cheap Seats

My favorite home project to periodically tackle is interior painting. No priming, no taping, no drop cloth. Two coats - done. Fresh, clean, new. Before a job change back in the late 90’s, I abhorred painting walls. Tedious and time consuming - with all that prep work, edging and rolling - a tobasco enema was preferable. And then I started teaching middle school. Teaching, especially middle school, is a career with no start or finish. Oh sure, there is Labor Day and Memorial Day, with its alleged “break” in between, but I’m referring to something less tangible. Students enter our classroom in September half-formed. Hormonal and oily, they show growth and progress in fits and starts.   By late May kids are scratching the surface of  their mid-summer daydreams, measurable learning having ebbed to a low tide. Painting, interior or otherwise, has a defined beginning and ending. With that last brush stroke or roll comes the satisfaction of a ...

I can't speak for anyone else, but answers about Eternity are harder to come by the older I get. Never a churchgoer - much less religious - I have had to content myself with uncertainty after all of the fun here on Earth is over. Sometimes this lack of a focused faith is troubling, but not often. It's a big planet after all, full of billions of other people striving for the same answers. Many have found a peace that suits them; still just as many others like me, not. Remarkably, human morality has never been bound within any one race, border or continent. Over more than two millennia, the major faiths that have emerged memorialized independently of each other an eerily similar code of good conduct. I find this universality extremely comforting, even as my own search continues. This search, however, may lead towards unexpected ends. Words, something I once routinely put my trust and "faith" in, have begun to lose th...

I'm not much of a dater. Like most skills, dating requires a certain amount of repetition in order to show improvement and comfort. The following story (which is completely true and includes absolutely no embellishment) may be a contributing reason why. Jane (not her real name - which I honestly can't remember anyway) and I were set up by a mutual friend during the summer of 2012. Date #1 was a quick meet and greet over beers at Sweeney's in St. Paul, punctuated by easy banter in which neither of us had to carry the conversation. And even though both of us were probably thinking meh , we agreed to get together again the following week. I arrived first at Crave or Flame or Fire . Something heat-related. Whatever that place is on Grand and Victoria in St. Paul's Highland Park neighborhood. Not being a big drinker, I nursed whatever craft beer was on tap and waited. Jane walked in 15 minutes later, flustered and out of breath. Aft...

For the past 17 years I have been a Chieftain. No, not a real chieftain. I am a teacher in a Wisconsin school district (Osceola) that has resisted multiple statewide efforts to eliminate its American Indian mascot nickname - Chieftains. As other dominoes have continually fallen across the state and nation over the past two decades, my employer has stood stubbornly firm. But Chieftain is a bit of a gray area, isn't it? After all, the Florida Seminole Osceola , for whom the town is named, was a nationally admired American Indian chief from the first half of the 19th century. We aren't the Fighting Chieftains , the Warrior Chieftains or the Red Chieftains . Just the Chieftains. No ethnic insult is implied or intended. Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending my employer's steadfastness. But I do understand it. The town was intentionally named to honor a proud, persecuted man. Chieftain - a resolute leader - seemed like the...