Midlife Meditation

Shattered dreams. I'm so sorry, guys. I know how it feels. I know because I've been there. I've built my life around a single goal, allowed it to influence every decision, worked so hard for it that all other priorities fell away. For me, that goal was to be ordained an elder in the United Methodist Church. It took me ten years to achieve it, then just five for it to fall away. It was my second divorce that really drove the message home: it was unhealthy for both me and everyone I loved for me to continue clinging to that goal, and so I left ministry, initially on a leave of absence, but finally, two years later, as teaching began to open up for me, for good. Giving up on that dream was as painful as either divorce, and for similar reasons: it wasn't just what I wanted; it was, to a very large degree, who I was.\ So I understand what Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump must be feeling right now. All three of them staked their political legacies on ...

Endangered species. Kansas. Montana. Georgia. South Carolina. Four Congressional vacancies. Four special elections. Four opportunities for Democrats to turn President Trump's historic unpopularity into a warning to Republican leaders on Capitol Hill: if you value your job, start representing the majority of your constituents, rather than pandering to the wealthy few. But if those elections were referenda on the Presidency, the net result fell far short of those national figures: every one of them went to the Republican candidate. Democratic responses run the gamut of disappointment to despair to fury at party leaders. As understandable as those feelings may be, I think they're all misguided. Don't get me wrong: I very much wanted every one of those elections to go the other way, to send four strong messages to Congress that the American people are fed up with Republican efforts to kill the ACA and transform its funding into massive tax cuts for the 1%. But in every...

Lucky me: I got to have the same root canal twice in one week. You may sense some irony in that statement, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong. Last Monday, I endured one of the most painful dental procedures I've ever been through, and that's really saying something. All four of my first molars and cuspids--one in each quadrant--have been crowned, and all but one of them root canaled multiple times. I noticed in October that there was a lump on the gum below my right cuspid. I tried to get an emergency appointment before flying to Atlantic City for the AOSA National Conference, but wasn't able, and had to wait until after that horrible election. Then I was supposed to get a phone call from an endodontist. I waited another two months before finally calling myself. That means I was living with an abscess for three months. It didn't hurt, but I was worried about what it might be doing to my jaw, not to mention my breath. So last Monday, I got to have the canal on...

I'm thinking about buying a car. Actually, "thinking" may be too mild a word. "Obsessing" comes a bit closer. There's nothing in particular wrong with my current vehicle, a 2008 Hyundai Sonata. In the two years since I acquired it in a near-emergency (my Acura CL had had its second major breakdown, and I needed a reliable car for my then-new job of teaching band and choir at Banks High School), it has never given me a lick of trouble. I had an iPhone link cable put in, but apart from that, it came with everything I really need in a car. It even has a musical name, ideal for someone in my profession. It does have some niggling things that keep me from really liking it: a previous owner was a smoker, and on hot days when it's been shut up for awhile, there's a stale tobacco smell in the upholstery. It's the bare-bones model, no bells or whistles, just the most basic equipment. It doesn't get very good mileage. But these are really ...