"Creating People On Whom Nothing is Lost" - An educator and writer in Colorado offers insight and perspective on education, parenting, politics, pop culture, and contemporary American life.
Disclaimer - The views expressed on this site are my own and do not represent the views of my employer.
Several years ago on this blog and in my column for The Villager, I told the story of “29 and 0!”. As I was just starting my high school teacher career, a colleague and I heard a voice booming through the doorway into the teacher lounge. It was Tom, a veteran history and government teacher who was also the head baseball coach and a bit of a legend around town for his gruff but engaging presence, as well as his state championships.
When my colleague and friend Jane asked, “Uh, what, Tom? What are you yelling about? What’s 29 and O?” Tom, the high school’s lovable curmudgeon, glanced sideways at us with a suspicious scowl that melted into a mischievous grin. “I’ve been teaching American history for twenty-nine years,” he growled. “I’ve taught the Revolutionary War twenty-nine times.” He paused for effect. “America has never lost! We’re 29 and 0!”
It's in that spirit of teaching history as a living, breathing thing that I am anticipating the long-awaited release of legendary documentarian filmmaker Ken Burns The American Revolution, which premieres on PBS next weekend, November 16. For many historians, history fans, and average Americans feeling a bit anxious about the state of the union, the release couldn't come at a better time. Jennifer Shuessler of the New York Times recently spent time with Burns, exploring the question: "Can Ken Burns Win the American Revolution?"
“The American Revolution is encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia,” he said. But his six-part, 12-hour documentary about the subject, which debuts on PBS on Nov. 16, will aim to strip that away — and hopefully bring some healing to our own fractured moment.
“We say, ‘Oh we’re so divided,’ as if we’re Chicken Little and this is the worst it’s ever been,” he said. “But the Revolution was a pretty divided time. The Civil War was a pretty divided time. Almost all of American history is division.”
Maybe storytelling, he said, can “help short-circuit the binaries we have today.”
The remarks were pure Burns — the kind of sunny all-American optimism that thrills his admirers, and draws eye-rolls among skeptics. But “The American Revolution,” which Burns directed with Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, is arriving at a moment when even attempting to bring a unifying story to a broad American middle feels like a radical act.
I don't believe that everyone will be a reader if they simply find the right book. That view puts me at odds with many of my fellow English teachers and librarians. Not every person will love to read books or choose to spend their time lost in a novel. However, I do believe in the value of putting a book in someone's hands that might pique their interest. That's especially true for kids.
And for teachers and school librarians, an excellent way to do that is an activity known as "Speed Dating with a Book." When I was an English teacher at a school with one of the best high school libraries I've ever known, I was introduced to the idea from one of our research librarians, and on numerous occasions I began taking my classes, especially freshmen, to the library once or twice a year. By the way, a great day to try this is on Dr. Seuss's birthday, also known as Read Across America Day.
This week I hosted several classes in my beautiful high school library for a few rounds of book speed dating. Basically, students are give three rounds of 10-15 minutes to simply try out a book. I began by setting up six tables with a selection of different genres: sports books, history and historical fiction, YA lit and coming-of-age, great stories, memoir, and action/mystery/thriller. I explained the idea and then "book talked" a couple titles from each table. I also pointed out several displays in the library, including "Great Beach Reads," "Faculty/Staff Recommendations," and "Classic Thrillers."
I would then set a timer and encourage the students to do the classic "book store dance" -- peruse book covers and titles, skim the back cover or flyleaf, and then find a comfy spot to give the book a chance. After about twelve minutes, I'd encourage them to pick a new book, perhaps explore a new genre. And then we'd do a third round. After about forty minutes, I'd offer them the opportunity to check out a book or just go back to class. Yesterday I was "matchmaker" for more than a dozen students who took a book home for the weekend, and hopefully more.
What a great way to spend a day in a high school library.
Here are some titles that went home with a new friend this weekend:
It's fall in Rocky Mountain region, and Elway is back in play.
No, I'm not talking about the Colorado legend and Hall of Fame quarterback, but I am talking about Denver. More specifically the smokin' hot Denver music scene and the return of the indie-punk band of the same name. Elway, a well-known punk group originally out of the hip music town of Fort Collins, just dropped its first album in years, and this release has a biting, sharp and fresh new angle with a tone for the sound of the times -- a blistering hot LP of political protest. And the band will kick it off with an album release party tonight in Denver at the renowned rock club The Squire Lounge on Colfax Avenue.
Justin Criado, a prolific music chronicler of the Colorado Sound and the local scene, caught up with lead singer Tim Browne to talk about it in this new profile for Westword Magazine, Denver's alt-weekly: Denver Band Elway Goes Deep on New Album
At long last, after eighteen years, Elway put out a politically charged protest record.
But the latest from the Fort Collins-born indie-punk crew — Nobody’s Going To Heaven, released on October 10 via Chicago label Red Scare Industries — isn’t as obviously in-your-face as you’d assume from a genre known for telling Nazi punks to fuck off. It’s a more nuanced approach, with political undertones that highlight the chaos and carnage surrounding the Western world, while still offering an optimistic outlook overall.
Original vocalist-guitarist Tim Browne didn’t necessarily set out to make a record fueled by such fire and fury that went into Nobody’s Going To Heaven initially, and considers it “an indignant dispatch from within the walls of the crumbling empire.” It occurred naturally, he shares; he had no choice but to reflect on what he believes will ultimately lead to a “post-American world.”
“We’ve not really been historically a very political band,” Browne says. “There are some songs about politics, but generally, I’ve tried to avoid it just because I feel like it’s really easy to slide into tropes and platitudes. I’ve always been hesitant about writing about politics and tread lightly when I do.
I am excited for this new album, especially because I wrote a profile on the band about this time last year when the group was in town to record the tracks and played a rare Denver show, their only time appearing in their home state in 2024. At the time, I was a casual fan of the band, but had not yet explored their sound in depth.
While it has no connection to John Elway, the punk-rock band Elway was once sued by the local football hero, who wanted to block the use of his name. But it’s never advisable to tell a bunch of punks they can’t do something, and the band has been doing what it wants for nearly two decades now.
The boys are back in town this month to record a new album and play a show at the Squire Lounge on Friday, August 16, and Elway fans should take note: This concert will not only showcase new music, but it could be the band’s only local performance in 2024, according to lead singer and songwriter Tim Browne. “We figured everyone is going to be out here, doing rehearsals and pre-recordings through the fall, so let’s do a show,” he explains.
Originally based in Fort Collins, the bandmembers are now spread around the country, with Browne in Denver, guitarist Brian Van Proyen in Johnstown, bassist Joe Henderer in Chicago and drummer Bill Orender in Philadelphia. The group also no longer does nearly 200 shows a year, as it did in its early days.
Elway has been hinting about new music on its Instagram page, and the new LP will be its first album since 2022’s Best of All Possible Worlds, which New Noise magazine called “a musical journey…of melodic punk songs that add elements of rock and roll, pop-punk, [and] skate punk.” Still with the label Red Scare Industries, Browne says the band is “happily marooned.” For the imprint’s twentieth-anniversary compilation album, 20 Years of Dreaming and Scheming, Elway recorded an old song from Red Scare band Sundowner. “We covered the 2006 song ‘Traffic Haze,'” Browne says, an acoustic punk song that “is really beautiful and gorgeous, and we turned it into a Propagandhi-style thrash banger. It’s the first song with blast beats on any Red Scare release.”
While Elway has a classic late 90s post-punk sound and a catalog of songs about the vicissitudes of life and growing up, the group had never been so unapologetically political. But it seems that Browne and the guys have decided they have something significant to say about what's going on in the world, and they are not holding back. And despite the title of the Album "Nobody Going to Heaven," there is definitely a hopeful tone in the criticism. In that way, the album reminds me a bit of my guy Henry Thoreau and my characterization of Thoreauvian Punk.
I first ran across Marion Nestle in a documentary film. Supersize Me, the Academy-Award winning film from the late Morgan Spurlock, featured a bizarre experiment and simultaneously delicious and torturous experience eating nothing but McDonalds for thirty days. And like any good documentary, it was filled with commentary and testimony from a variety of players, including nutrition expert Marion Nestle. A longtime professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at NYU, Nestle is the sort of calm, pragmatic and infinitely knowledgeable voice that gives deep credibility to any discussion.
For more than three decades, Marion Nestle has been telling people what to eat.
Nestle, now an emerita professor at NYU, says her time in government opened her eyes to the multi-billion-dollar food industry’s enormous influence over Congress. By the early 2000s, she became a critic of the food industry and an advocate for major food reforms, which she made the case for in best-selling books.
Over the years, Nestle’s blunt nutrition advice, sharp criticism of food companies and frequent media appearances made her one of the most recognizable names in nutrition. In 2006, she published one of her most popular books, “What to Eat,” which showed consumers how to navigate supermarkets and improve their health by deciphering food labels.
And, in a related piece, The New York Times recently published a feature on
How to Eat for a Long and Healthy Life. If you've followed this blog for a while, you know that I have been a critic of fast food and a proponent of healthier, more natural eating for ages. Some people note the advice of food writer and social activist Michael Pollan who say, "Eat food, mostly plants, not too much." And there is much wisdom in that simple sentiment. Too many people are eating things that aren't really "food," at least in a natural, organic sense. My first instinct at the store is to flip a product package over and read the ingredient list. And too often these are filled with mystifying materials unnecessary in food production. Like Red Dye No. 40.
These diets prioritize a variety of unprocessed or minimally processed foods, including plenty of vegetables, whole grains, nuts and legumes, Dr. Hu said. Beyond that, he added, there’s a lot of flexibility in how to eat for healthy aging. “One size does not fit all,” he added.
Many people are coming around to the idea of a four-day workweek. But if you ask Henry Thoreau, one day should be sufficient. It's not quite theFour-Hour Work Weekclaimed by ideas guru and motivational writer Timothy Ferris, but it is a challenge to the daily grind that left so many Americans, in the words of ol' Henry, living "lives of quiet desperation."
Thoreau challenged the idea that man's life must be consumed by work and the pursuit of wages that would allow him to purchase what Adam Smith called "the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life." Whereas Smith and his theories about the new capitalism of the early 19th century used the exchange of labor for that trio as a measurement of a person's "wealth," Thoreau countered that a "man is wealthy in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone." Or, in other words, there are two ways to be wealthy: acquire more or require less.
The way Thoreau phrased it according to his experiment of living life at Walden Pond for two years was:
For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found that, by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living.
And in the reference I made to the one day of work, he sardonically -- and in some people's estimation blasphemously -- asserted about the Sabbath:
The order of things should be reversed; the seventh day should be the day of toil...and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul, in which to range this widerspread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature.
The idea of work, and what we are giving up in the constant pursuit of a paycheck was the subject of a piece of commentary in the Washington Post "We should be living in the golden age of hobbies. What happened?"
It’s a first date. The drink in your hand is mostly ice. You’ve talked about your jobs, your days, your dogs. The conversation lulls, and you can feel the question coming. “So,” the person across the table asks, “what do you do for fun?” The answer should be easy. We are supposed to be living in the golden age of hobbies. Great thinkers of the 20th century believed that innovations in technology would make work so efficient that leisure would eclipse labor. In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted 15-hour workweeks by 2030. This would leave people the opportunity to “cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself.”
But the golden age that Keynes predicted has not come to pass. Though productivity has grown dramatically since Keynes’s time, the most recent American Time Use Survey found that full-time employees still work eight hours a day, the same workday that the National Labor Union demanded in 1866. Workers enjoy just under four hours of leisure time, and the bulk of that brief window is spent watching TV. The odds are stacked against hobbies. “Work has been supercharged with meaning and purpose and identity, a charge that it never had, at least for the majority of people,” Hunnicutt said. The seamlessness of streaming and the narcotic effects of scrolling make every other activity feel effortful. To pay the bills, huge swaths of Americans take on “side hustles” during hours that earlier generations might have spent building model trains or singing in a choir.
“This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! …It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.” -- Henry Thoreau
These thoughts from Henry Thoreau's essay Life Without Principle might seem to suggest Thoreau was a bit of a layabout, a "Do-little" as he was sometimes referred to around his hometown of Concord. And that mis-reading of his words and his tone is a part of the misconception that Thoreau -- "the hermit in the woods" -- was opposed to work. In fact, Thoreau was quite the opposite and was almost incessantly active doing one job or another for most of his short life.
The caveat is Thoreau's questioning of why people work, how much they should work, what they exchange or give up because of work, and how to balance the all important distinction between "making a living" and "making a life." And that conflict has been central to Americans' love-hate relationship with work for most of the country's history. It's of course an interesting conundrum, especially for a nation ground in the Puritan work ethic, (or Protestant for that matter), and it's the heart of a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, America's Long Love/Hate Relationship with Work."
To understand how Americans feel about work, consider two often-cited, but seemingly contradictory, philosophies. First, there’s the American dream—the belief that hard work can bring prosperity. And second, there’s the chart-topping country song “Take This Job and Shove It.” They are two sides of the same coin: The hope that work will move us above our station, and our disappointment when it doesn’t happen as promised.
Ever since the founding of the country, Americans have defined themselves by their work, and by the wealth and status it can bring. Benjamin Franklin argued that hard work was essential for success. In the late 1800s, there were the Horatio Alger stories, extolling the idea that the new country was the land of opportunity, where people could go from poverty to wealth because of what they did for a living.
That has never been more true than in modern America. In recent decades, work has taken on even more importance—promising not just money, benefits and a sense of identity, but also community, purpose and belonging. Millennials were told to follow their passion in commencement speeches by Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs and Jim Carrey; anything less would be considered a disappointment. A larger share of Americans, responding to the World Values Survey in 2017, said work was important in their life than those who said religion—79.7% vs. 60.7%.
Little wonder, then, that in a recent Wall Street Journal-NORC poll, about 70% said they believe the American dream doesn’t hold true, the highest in nearly 15 years of surveys.
I started this blog back in 2008, and at that time the web log, or blog, was a relatively new thing to many people. This blog has never really centered on a theme or developed a regular publishing schedule to build an audience. It's just been a place for me to practice writing commentary and sharing my thoughts on whatever is on my mind. At one point, early in the game, I had this idea that the blog would become a thing, a business, a brand ... all that stuff. Alas, that has never really come to pass, as I have never really committed the time and energy to it.
Over the years, however, I have come across a few professional blogs that I regularly come back to or check in with. And the range is broad and rather quirky, but as far as blogs go, these writers generate a steady stream of interesting information and commentary in the vein of the newspaper or magazine feature.
Austin Kleon is a "writer who draws" or perhaps "an artist who writes." He became a well-known and best-selling writer years ago with his breakthrough workSteal Like an Artist.His website is much more than just a blog -- it's a fabulous resource for creative inspiration. His first book originated out of a speaking engagement, and it's kind of a cool story:
In 2011, I was a 27-year-old copywriter. My first book, Newspaper Blackout, a collection of poems made by blacking out newspaper articles with a marker, had been published the year before. Like many a poet before me, I kept my day job. W.H. Auden once said, “It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.” This wasn’t a sad fact for me: I was very happy to talk to anyone who would listen, and I was even happier if they threw a little scratch my way.
I had recently accepted an invitation to give a talk at Broome Community College in Binghamton, New York. The college asked if I had a title for the talk. I told them it was called “How To Steal Like An Artist.” On one of our morning walks, I asked my wife Meghan what I should say. She said the best talk she ever heard was when an author named Mary Doria Russell visited her high school and simply listed 10 things she wished she’d known when she was a student.
“That’s perfect,” I said, “I’ll steal that.”
Another unique online writer with a great story is Maria Popova whose site "The Marginalian" is a treasure trove of links and commentary on the great artists, writers, artworks, and literary pieces across the ages.
Well, that was an incredibly thrilling World Series, a true manifestation of the best side of America's national pastime. It was also an glaring example of what is wrong with baseball -- massive economic disparity in league. The Number 2 payroll that has a $700 million player contract (Ohtani) beat the Number 5 payroll.
The era and idea of Moneyball -- the Michael Lewis book and movie that explored the rise of sabermetrics in sports and the hope that small market teams like the Oakland A's could use logistics to compete with big money behemoths like the Yankees -- is over, as if it were ever really valid. Major League Baseball has needed a salary cap, profit sharing, and economic parity since at least the 1994-95 lockout. And it needs it now more than ever.
OF ALL THE things to cause outrage, to intensify the bleating that baseball is broken and the Los Angeles Dodgers are the culprit, the signing that generated the most consternation was that of a relief pitcher.
Not Shohei Ohtani's $700 million contract in 2023. Not the $325 million guaranteed to Yoshinobu Yamamoto a few weeks later. Not the $182 million that added two-time Cy Young winner Blake Snell last offseason. Not even the drastically under-market deal signed by Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki that winter.
There was something about the four-year, $72 million contract given to left-hander Tanner Scott in January that infuriated fan bases in every market outside of Los Angeles -- even the only one that dwarfs it.
But this much is clear: the small market teams and owners should outright refuse to ever enter into play with organizations that have Amazonian power over small indie bookstores. It's just silly, unsustainable, and not good for "love of the game."
I can still recall my first Billie Eilish concert -- it was the summer of 2019 at the hallowed music grounds of Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison, Colorado. I didn't actually attend the show, of course. I was the chauffer to my tween daughter and three of her friends in the summer after her eighth grade year.
As a music fan, I quickly became intrigued by the sound of this new singer who had not been on my radar. In fact, she was on most people's. Granted she was was well known enough to play a sold out show at Red Rocks. The show that summer evening was a wild one -- crazy rainstorm complemented the hauntingly beautiful sounds of Billie's voice, especially the song "When the Party's Over," which I believe she sang from a floating bed prop on stage.
At the time, I sort of casually started an article titled "Who is Billie Eilish and why we should care?"
Well, I never wrote that article, much to my chagrin. For, it was less than a year later that Billie (she's kinda reached the one name only rock star status at this point), she was gracing the cover of my copy of Vanity Fair magazine, and it was clear this young woman was a pop culture force to be reckoned with. That's the spirit of a great Wall Street Journal profile "How Billie Eilish Rewrote the Business of Pop Music."
At just 23, Eilish has already accumulated 44 Hot 100 hits, nine Grammys and a pair of Oscars. Her most recent record, Hit Me Hard and Soft, was the fifth-most popular release in the U.S. last year, earning over 2.2 billion streams, per the data company Luminate. She followed the album with a tour that has sold more than 383,000 tickets and grossed more than $55 million in the past nine months, according to Pollstar.
Eilish has racked up these triumphs despite the fact that she is allergic to writing carefree pop hits, and many in the music industry did not believe her downbeat approach would be palatable to a wide audience. “It’s so funny to think back on all of the criticisms that were like, ‘The songs are too sad,’ ” she says. “So many people and companies wanted us to make happier songs.” Even when writing “Birds of a Feather,” she made sure to add “something dark” so the song wasn’t just “rainbows and smiles,” she says. “We wrote about the idea that you’re going to die soon, and let’s make it last.”
Of course, we can't ignore the reason for the WSJ doing a profile on Billie -- WSJ. Magazine’s annual Innovators issue recognizes groundbreaking talents from a range of disciplines. Billie Eilish is this year’s music innovator. And at the Innovator's Award ceremony, Billie made a bit of a stir with her comments about billionaires (with one prominent billionaire in the crowd)
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike They've all come to look for America All come to look for America
Paul Simon sang about it, John Steinbeck took his dog Charley on the road and wrote about it, Charles Kuralt filmed a popular TV series about it. For as long as the United States of America has existed as an idea and a location, we've been endlessly "looking for it."
In doing my work on Henry Thoreau and the American punk rock ethos, I have been doing the same. That has included reading quite a few individual "takes" on Thoreau and what his thoughts were about the nation. Truly, I believe Henry's entire body of work was about exploring and exposing America's failure to live up to the promise of its premise. Yet, even as he drew that conclusion, Concord's favorite son was also filled with hope about what America can be.
So, in taking a look at some of my Thoreau explorations, I was pleasantly surprised to find a grand experiment from Clay Jenkinson called Listening to America. The Thoreau connection came from a reflection called "Reading Walden and Wrestling With Thoreau." Published last year on the final day of 2024, Jenkinson spent some time with Thoreau's magnum opus, Walden, or Life in the Woods, and found the work both challenging and inspiring. Which is good because that's exactly what it should be.
Alone on the northern plains, I have the whole day before me and several important books to read. The principal task of the day (how can I call it a task?) is to read much of Thoreau’s Walden. Yesterday and on Christmas Eve, I read “Economy,” the first and longest chapter of Walden and the one that causes the most frustration. Here’s why. If you add up all the passages in that opening chapter about Thoreau building a cabin near the shore of Walden Pond, they occupy only a handful of pages, maybe four or, at most, five. The rest is “argument” in several senses of the term. Most readers of Walden chafe at the complexities of “Economy” and just want Thoreau to build the damn cabin and start observing Nature. Ah, but Thoreau is not in any hurry to do that.
So what is he asking of us? Above all, he wants you and me to look closely at our lives — along Socratic lines, on the principle that the unexamined life is not worth living. Thoreau wants you and me to ask ourselves what we surround ourselves with and at what cost. And “cost,” it turns out, is not merely the number of dollars you had to lay out for whatever it is, the number of days you have to work for your _______ (boat, home theater, lake cottage, Mercedes, jet ski, wedding ring, etc.), but for the larger and more important “costs” — the opportunity cost (what else might you have done with your finite time and money), the cost to the poetry in your soul, the cost to your happiness, the cost to the principle of distributive justice, and (now) the cost to the planet Earth.
Beyond that reflection, however, I sort of went down the rabbit hole and explored more of Jenkinson's site, which is focused on the important task of "listening to America."
This blog post is a reprint of one from several years ago that was first published in The Villager, where I wrote a weekly column for several years. As October comes to an end, and we begin November, the month of Thanksgiving -- and hopefully more than just a day of feeling grateful -- I wanted to repost this piece.
Each year in November, I introduce my classes to the practice of keeping a gratitude journal. Research suggests that people, who take a few minutes each day to reflect and write down good things in their lives, and who do so consistently for at least twenty-one straight days, will feel and exhibit improved mental health and well-being. Thinking good thoughts and being grateful for positive aspects of our lives, no matter how small, actually makes us feel better. It improves our attitudes toward ourselves, our communities, and the world at large.
A few years ago, Cherry Creek High School implemented a student-led program called Sources of Strength, which focuses on building and sustaining positive school culture. In the first year, students were encouraged to identify positive influences in their life, from mentors and friends to healthy activities and mental health. Through advisory classes, each student was given the opportunity to keep a gratitude journal. It’s a mindfulness practice, and for three weeks each November, my students get settled and prepared for class by reflecting quietly and writing down three positives in their lives – as a class we take a few moments to voluntarily share out loud.
I am grateful for so many things in my life, and first and foremost are the many people who mean so much to me. My wife of thirty years and my wonderful children who are wise beyond their years are sources of joy and strength in my life. I also value my colleagues at Cherry Creek High School. The daily sense of collegiality and professionalism that I encounter is truly a source of good fortune. From engaging professional conversations to thoughtful and supportive discussions to silly chats about the most random of things, the people of Creek fill my day with positivity.
I’m also honestly thankful for my students, all of them over a thirty-year career. The young people I have the pleasure of working with continually improve me. When I think about the greatest accomplishment in my life, it’s undoubtedly my teaching career and the kids who make it a fulfilling vocation. As much as I try to educate them, these hardworking, fun-loving citizens of Generation Z teach me a great deal as well. And at a place like Creek, I regularly encounter ordinary kids doing extraordinary things. From top-ranked academic achievements to inspiring athletics to stunning fine arts performances to dedicated participation in a vast collection of clubs and activities, the kids these days amaze me. One particularly gratifying aspect of Cherry Creek High School is the Unified programs, which pair special needs students and their mainstream peers in theater productions, sports leagues, activities, and adaptive classes. I am truly grateful to work in such an inclusive environment.
I am also grateful for the simple unsung conveniences of contemporary life. I appreciate all the technologies that make life so much more efficient. From digital music platforms like Pandora and YouTube to simple web applications and software like GoogleDocs and even wireless projectors in the classroom, tech just makes life nicer. I also value my home, my short walk to school each day, and the community of Greenwood Village. From the city workers who maintain our parks and guarantee well-plowed streets to the Parks & Rec department that offers regular enrichment activities, my village is a wonderful place to live.
Finally, I am thankful for the arts in all their beautiful forms. Music is an indispensable form of joy in my daily life. From the cool jazz I listen to each morning to the pop, rock, and country I hear throughout the day to the lo-fi chill hop in the background as I write to the punk rock that energizes my workouts, music brings a rhythm to my life. I also appreciate simple culinary pleasures like pumpkin pancakes, St. Louis specialties like toasted ravioli and thin crust pizza, and of course, coffee because, well, … coffee.
The practice of journaling is a positive act and practice which has thousands of years of evidence to validate its benefits. From the meditations of Marcus Aurelius to the reflections of Michel Montaigne and St. Thomas Aquinas to the journals of Henry Thoreau, taking time to write and reflect everyday, or at least regularly, is a valuable contributor to overall mental health and well being. And a good place to start is writing a gratitude journal for the next twenty-one days.
“There are only three things that America will be remembered for 2000 years from now when they study this civilization: The Constitution, Jazz music, and Baseball. These are the 3 most beautiful things this culture ever created.”
Washington University professor and cultural critic Gerald Early delivers that assessment in Ken Burns fabulous baseball documentary, and it seems like a pretty reasonable conclusion. Even in a sport-crazy country where football and basketball seem to garner more attention, fans, and money, baseball remains the hallowed national past time, and this year's incredible World Series is testament to the significance and staying power of our game.
And no sport has produced as much beautiful writing as baseball, the American pastoral game. That sentiment is perfectly summed up in Edward Hersch's recent New York Times guest essay "With Baseball, I don't Even Care Who Wins Anymore." It could easily have been titled "The Sounds of the Game," for there is nothing so resounding in sports as the crack of the bat. And that's particularly significant for Hirsch who is writing from the unique position of no longer being able to watch baseball, as his eyesight is failing.
For the past 10 years I have been gradually losing my sight, not totally, but steadily, irreversibly. These days I can’t see much in the dark, but I can still make out things in the light, especially if they are right in front of me, and a baseball outing to a day game seemed like a good challenge, an overdue pleasure.
So, on a sparkling afternoon last month I took a field trip with my office mates to watch the Mets battle the Padres for a playoff spot. At the stadium in Queens, I was reassured by my first glimpse of the field. There is something timeless about a baseball diamond bathed in sunlight. Sure, there’s a pitch clock now and enlarged bases, but the basic pastoral feeling is the one I had as a kid. When you watch a ballgame, the outside world disappears.
For someone who grew up listening to Cardinals baseball games on KMOX radio, I can truly appreciate having a love of the game simply through the sounds of the game. Each spring, as I walked home from school across campus I would listen for the crack of the bat. I loved that in our community wooden bats are still part of the game. For there is nothing like the sound of the ball hitting that sweet spot. The chatter of baseball is also like birds chirping in springtime.
"Come on, kid." "Hey, there, let's turn two." "Good eye, get your pitch."
Baseball is pure poetry. And honestly, this year's World Series is one for the ages. I didn't watch the incredible 18-inning marathon the other night, but I truly appreciated this description I read online:
That Dodgers win right there is why I love baseball. 18 innings. Ohtani on base, going 9 for 9 at bat. Freddie Freeman the first player in MLB history to hit two walk-off homers in the World Series. Clayton Kershaw coming in as a reliever at 37 years old in extra innings and saving the Dodgers from bases loaded. Will Klein throwing twice as many pitches as he's ever thrown in a single game. That game was layers and layers of history being made.
Baseball is also "poetry in motion," which is the primary focus of Hirsch's commentary. As he can no longer follow the ball clearly, he took notice of the choreographed movements of the players in what is so perfectly called "The Show":
The performance begins with the pitcher. He winds up, cocks the ball, strides forward and whips it to the plate, and the hitter instantly responds — he swings or doesn’t swing; he connects or doesn’t. Say, he slams a hard grounder to the left side of the infield. The third baseman dives to his left and misses, the shortstop goes deep into the hole, stabs the ball, pivots and throws while the runner races up the baseline and the first baseman reaches for the ball. I have seen first basemen who can practically do the splits. The umpire hovers nearby to make the call: an infield hit.
Now the runner dances off first. The right-handed pitcher looks over his shoulder; he turns quickly and tosses to first. Safe. The runner glides off the base again, only this time he takes off when the pitcher throws to the plate. The batter steps forward but doesn’t swing, the catcher gloves the ball and throws all in one motion, the second baseman darts to cover second, the runner slides headfirst into the bag. The fielder tags his hand, and the umpire raises a clenched right fist — it always seems to be his right fist. The runner is out. The third-base coach runs onto the field to protest — it’s almost required — but the call stands. The runner jogs back to the dugout, the infielders toss the pill around and the dance begins again.
