Where Joni and I part company

It was in late August that I first felt the happy dizziness of seasons spinning, doubling back and oddly moving ahead at the same time. There, topping the list of my Sierra campmates, was Nan, senior prefect to the 9th grade girls who’d be trekking together for five days (six, if you throw in the […]

The Big Warm

Remember three decades ago, The Big Chill, a breakout film for Glenn Close, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Jeff Goldblum, Meg Tilley, JoBeth Williams, and–as the dead guy whose face no one ever sees, Kevin Costner? (Clearly, I’m beyond worrrying about dating myself.) The first morning the old college friends are together, each comes into the […]

Cambridge Reconnect

In Boston a couple of weeks back, as a break in the conference action–the annual meeting of The Association of Boarding Schools–Michael and I went cross-town, over the Charles, and down to Bertucci’s on Harvard Square, there to meet a handful of CdeP’s most recent grads. Over pizza and salad, Leeah (Northeastern), Trevor (MIT), Steffi […]

What goes around

. . . keeps going around. There’s probably no sense in even trying to find the first link in my personal chain of Shared Lit (not an academic course you can sign up for, but, rather, a course of action, a version of call-and-reponse, of good-reads-as-boomerangs). The latest chapter goes this way: Jackson–a senior–and I […]