I’ll start with a confession. When faced with a choice between reading a professional book (professional = an education-adjacent text) vs. a novel or memoir, I’ll opt for the latter. It was true even before I retired, but I had to keep that impulse in check then to remain current. Make no mistake, there are many books in the field that have left a deep impression on me. They were central in...

In recent years we’ve tried to get as close as we can to watching all the movies nominated for Oscars. It’s a lot easier now that most of those movies are available on the streaming services. One that we were especially eager to see was the Iranian film “It Was Just an Accident.” I’ll explain the eagerness in a minute but first let me tell you about this movie. A group of Iranians living in a...

I promised to continue my account of the way our lives have been infused with theater experiences at every stage. Before I move on to our extended – and happy – years in Houston and Chicago, let me stay in New Hampshire a bit longer to add something important that I forgot to include last week. For six years, I was the teaching principal in a small NH town. Many of my parents worked in a paper...

There’s nothing like a good performance that sends you home with a glow of satisfaction. I’m thinking about plays here, but the same can be said of musical performances, that either tickle your funny bone or activate your tear ducts or – even better – both. That was the case on a recent night for Eureka Day, a play about a progressive school whose sense of community is shreddedby a lack of...

Having friends of mixed ages is valuable for so many reasons. It keeps you tuned in to cultural references that would be lost to you if you never left your age ghetto, for one. For another, it invites you to reflect on where things stood in your life at various points on the age continuum. That’s the one I’ll be focusing on here. We recently invited two delightful people to dinner. L. had been...