Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

I've known Anna since I started dating her daughter Laura back in 1985. It was clear to me before I became her son-in-law how much she gave to her family out of love (caring for her parents and parents-in-law, caring for her children and grandchildren, and in the last years of his life caring for her beloved husband Donald); it was not surprising then in talking to her about her career as a teacher to hear how much she cared for her students. Her life was one of living her love and her faith and I am glad that I knew her.

I think that we name things "battles" to pretend that conflicts have well-determined beginnings and endings, all of history to the contrary. In particular we do like to celebrate victories even though none are perfect and without long-term implications. I lose track of this frequently. I was happy when Obama was elected twice (and still am very happy that he was) but the celebrations did not prevent the racist backlash that Trump took advantage of. I was saddened when Trump passed his so-called Muslim travel-ban and yet who we allow into our country has always betrayed our bigotries of the moment. This is one of the reasons that I like to read (as an amateur) histories, to see past arbitrary delimiters around struggles. Two eras in particular help me as I yearn for a less debased Congress, for two political parties that champion the values in our constitution, for Trump to go to jail for any and all of the crimes that he has bragged about over the years. The first is the Revo...

My wife and I have been married for 35 years, so I have very much adapted my lifestyle to having a loved one (or more when the kids lived with us) under the same roof. I am a break of dawn morning person, so I have learned to be quiet and am quite good at dressing in the dark, given that I select my clothing the night before. I cook mindful of things that others do not eat (how could one of my children hate the inoffensive pea is beyond me but that is another story), moderate my use of hot peppers, etc. I put my things away when I am done and am pretty good about treating common space as common. My wife and I, empty-nesters that we are now, have a pretty good division of labor for household chores. My love of cooking (while my wife enjoys cooking she doesn't enjoy it as much as I do) means that I handle grocery shopping and other related things. I am OCD in many ways with all my checklists so I'm the one who checks the oil in the cars, the tread on the tires, the smoke alarms, ...

https://www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog/2402/index.html#x240203B Michael always has an eye for nuance and an aversion to rationalization.

A long-time retired colleague passed away recently. I hadn't kept in touch but I have good memories of working with him on some projects. One thing that's been on my mind recently was a component of some professional development workshops he led for department chairs decades ago. The workshops exposed us to different organizations such as Disney, the military, etc. to abstract out some principles that would be applicable in our context. I didn't start wearing a uniform because of it nor did I start wearing Mickey Mouse ears. The discussion was on a more subtle level. The component that stayed in my mind was a list of readings of US Army and Marine training documents about leadership, and in particular what it means to give a good order. People give orders all the time although some folk shy away from that terminology. I am told what is expected of me as a faculty member in terms of office hours. I assign problem sets to my students. In our context the penalties for disobeyi...