Email from Hannah CdeP 2013 mid-week: “Can Brittany and I come by to see you Saturday? She’s home on fall break, and I’m coming up for the weekend.” Of course. They knocked on the door late morning, bounded in for hugs, beelined for the kitchen. Both girls—ok, young women–had been part of my Golden Trout […]
Are those mountain lion prints?
Pre-dawn, and I’m hiking the Forest Cooke solo. My dog won’t go with me anymore, since her best canine buddy dropped out of the picture last June. Karleanne isn’t here today either; she’s packing for a week-long Development/Alumni trip to the East Coast. So all I’ve got for protection on the trail is my “Get Big” consciousness and my Exerstrider poles, which, held up to make the get-big bigger, might (come to think of it) look sort of like antlers to the cougar, which would make me look a little like a deer. Am I thinking too much or too little like a mountain lion? […]
I’m sitting in a narrow, windowless room off the Ventura County Hall of Justice, three days before the pre-season athletes and riders return to Thacher for the start of the school year. Officially, I’m in the “Telephone Room”–and there is, in fact, one AT&T pay phone attached to the oddly carpeted wall. Two bare places […]
At the start of July, a particularly sporty friend–the kind who believes a vacay-day is squandered if it doesn’t include at least two athletic “adventures”–asked innocently what my goals were for my time here in the Tetons. “Goals? Are you kidding? I come up here to get away from goals!” Guilt–mine–set in before I’d put […]
Kitchen demolition is slated for next week, and my job is both simple and formidable: empty the hub of the house of everything in it, down to the last pieces of stray dog kibble in the pantry’s far corner. (Some mouse’s stash, no doubt. Bummer when he comes for it.) Knowing how good Rae will […]
“OK, we need some dogs–specifically, ‘a wolfish troop of watchdogs.’” “Me! Me! I’ll be a dog!” “Me, too!” “OK, but the text is clear that you’ll have to fawn on Telemakhos when he arrives at the hut.” “What’s ‘fawn’?” That fawning might be a deal-breaker on my assigning roles for our acting out a scene […]
You never really plan on Plan B. When I told Michael a couple of months ago that my idea of a perfect camping trip would be to backpack with only my own gear and food (OK, I’ll take the med kit, too) and some experienced packhorses schlepping the rest (stoves, tents, tarps, group food, cookware, […]
There’s an unmistakable buzz on campus during the run-up to Senior Exhibitions–the undercurrent invisible but powerfully felt, especially by those who’ll soon be behind the podium. This would be enough to tell the campus community that SrExes are fast approaching– but there’s more. Rehearsal sign-up sheets posted on doors rise and then fall back in […]
“Write what’s in front of you,” Natalie Goldberg advises in Writing Down the Bones, a book I use selected chapters from in my English IV Honors class. And on a day when I’m still trying to imagine the unimaginable–backpack bombs detonating in a crowd gathered to cheer runners and celebrate some April sunshine in Boston–I […]
Confirmed: my strong sense of school-as-home in terms of shared values. The proof: two recent events, neither unusual at CdeP, but both, I think, worthy of pen-to-paper. First, an email from a freshman to the whole School, this past Saturday night: Swiss army knife found near Upper School after the pig roast. Has a large […]