Midlife Meditation

Brett Kavanaugh and Lindsay Graham are angry about the same thing: a woman has challenged their entitlement. I love being a music teacher. It's physically, mentally, and emotionally challenging--by the time I leave school, my Apple watch tells me I've completed all my exercise goals for the day, and at the end of my commute, I frequently take a nap in the driveway before leaving my car--but it's the best work I've ever done, and it saddens me to imagine not doing it when I retire in a few years. The previous paragraph is actually a slight exaggeration: I'm rounding up from 96%. That's the percentage of children I typically see who, despite their many problems--and this includes homesick kindergartners crying for mommy, emotionally disabled kids hitting each other (or me!), hyper kids that literally can't stop wiggling, impulsive kids who can't keep themselves from touching and playing instruments without permission, anxious kids who hide in th...

More children are dead, and again, it's a boy who killed them. The place was a high school in Santa Fe, Texas. The killer's primary weapon was not, this time, an assault rifle--most likely, I think, because his parents didn't own one. Instead, he took their sawed-off shotgun into the school, and by the time his killing spree was over, ten people were dead, more wounded. That was two Fridays ago. Monday morning, as I was trying to get a rowdy fourth grade class to quiet down long enough for me to introduce the group improvisation activity that would be their lesson, one boy shouted across the room to another, "I'm going to kill you." I sent him straight to the office. He insisted he was joking, but as I explained to the class after he'd left, murder is never a joking matter, particularly in a school where, as happens in schools across the country, we hold lockdown drills to practice what to do if an active shooter ever enters the building. We d...