Midlife Meditation

When I work out, I greatly prefer the work to be literally out. Outside, that is. Running and hiking, my favorite sweaty indulgences, cry out for fresh air, even when the weather is wet and windy. I may come home drenched, but I'm always more vibrantly alive, and I know I've accomplished something. I've gone somewhere. That matters. Unfortunately, at 53, my feet can no longer handle daily pavement pounding, so for the last two years, I've added a bicycle to my exercise regimen, and here I have to admit to being a fair-weather exerciser. It's not that I can't ride in the rain, and if the temperature's not too low, I frequently do. When it's also windy and dark, though, I begin to worry about whether the other vehicles on the road--those weighing tons, rather than the few pounds of my bike--can see me, or avoid me. On days like those we've been having lately, I take my workout indoors to a spin class at 24 Hour Fitness; and if there's no class t...

He's a little bit on the too old side, but I think the physique is about right. Kindergartners say hilarious things. They say them with utter candor, their eyes wide, the expression in their faces so pure and passionate they would be the envy of many a thespian striving for realism. They confuse "Mr." and "Mrs." all the time; in fact, when I'm teaching kindergarten music, I am probably "Mrs. Anderson" about as often as I am "Mr. Anderson." More often than either, I'm "music teacher." Today, however, was a first: as my first class of kindergartners filed into the room and took their places in the opening circle, one of them looked me in the face and said, "Hello, Mr. Awesome!" I was, of course, flattered, enough so that the ensuing half hour--which featured an inconsolably sobbing little girl and a sneakily violent boy punching his peers when I wasn't looking--was far more tolerable than it would ha...

"I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven, and will give to your offspring all these lands; and all the nations of the earth shall gain blessing for themselves through your offspring." (Genesis 26:4) The promise to Abraham appears throughout both testaments, reworded by each writer to mean whatever will support the point being made. At times Israel is seen as a blessing; at others times as a conquering horde; but always, there is the assumption, whether explicit or implicit, that all this came out of one patriarch who had only two children, and abandoned one in the desert, then nearly killed the other to prove a point. But I digress. This essay is not about that rabbit hole of scripturally-sanctioned child abuse. Or maybe it is; we'll just have to say whether that point gets revisited at its conclusion. What I'm writing about here is the ripple effect. Last night after the Comedy Sportz show, Scott Simon, who performed our wedding, asked u...

In all honesty, when I learned I would have to spend an hour a week at Four Corners School, I was not happy. I walked into the library at Margaret Scott at the end of August for our first full staff meeting thrilled to know I would be in a classroom, rather than the gym, and that I would not have to divide my year between Scott and Hartley Schools. Then I started to hear rumors about Four Corners, a school I'd never heard of. There was talk that my time would not, in fact, be undivided, that this other school had laid claim to some open space in my schedule and that the decision had been made, without consulting me, that I would have to teach there, as well. All these rumors proved true: on Mondays and Tuesdays, the last half hour of my work day was open. The administrator of Four Corners, an alternative school for high-needs children with major behavioral issues, had learned that music was being restored across the district, and had invoked state law to get some music i...

The sign worked: Beaverton passed its school bond.   This is not my school, though I do drive by it daily on my way to work (it's Sunset High School, in case you're wondering). In 2013, Beaverton voters passed a bond measure that accomplished what this parent (also the principal of Sunset High School) hoped to achieve. Class sizes went down, elementary schools restored music and PE, and teachers, students, and parents all breathed long sighs of relief. I work in a district that also features large classes, reduced services, and crumbling buildings. Unlike Beaverton, Reynolds hasn't passed a bond in over a decade. That bond expires next spring, when the district is putting another capital improvement bond in front of voters, expected to pass because it won't increase taxes at all. These improvements should bring class sizes down simply by adding classrooms to buildings like Scott Elementary, where my music room shares space with a computer lab, art classes are...

No, but I do love this shirt. And I'm also fond of this one. It's true: I wear that orange shirt a lot. I don't wear the green one quite as often, mostly because it doesn't have a pocket for my phone. But since landing in Portland July 1, I've probably worn one or the other of these shirts at least twice a week, probably more. At this rate, they'll be threadbare by the time I have to start wearing long sleeves, which is a shame, because they're the first garments I've had custom-made for my measurements since probably about 1988. I love the shirts because they fit better than anything else I own, they're incredibly comfortable in the warm weather that's just about to let up this week, they get me plenty of compliments and, most of all, because they remind me of where I was not quite four months ago. I wear them so often that Amy asked me two days ago, as I put the orange one on yet again, "So are you African now?" Har...

First things first: there are few things I enjoy as much as my weekly dose of Bill Maher. Real Time , Bill Maher's politics/celebrity chat/comedy hour, appears every Friday on HBO. Maher has been playing this game for two decades, putting together panels of pundits, politicians, and celebrities to discuss whatever current events are of interest to him, mingling them with comedy bits, and closing out the hour with a commentary that is always thoughtful, often hilarious, and occasionally moving. When it aired on ABC, the show was called Politically Incorrect. Then Maher took things too far, insisting that the 9/11 terrorists may have been many things, but cowards they were not. Soon after that, he moved to HBO, where he was given much freer rein not just to say unpopular things, but to sprinkle them with four-letter words. There are times when the show devolves into a shouting match, as liberal and conservative voices try to talk over each other, and I find those moments frustrat...