Journey: Advent Word 2

Posted on December 4, 2017 by Boz

Journey (n.)
c. 1200, “a defined course of traveling; one’s path in life,” from Old French journée “a day’s length; day’s work or travel” (12c.), from Vulgar Latin diurnum “day,” noun use of neuter of Latin diurnus “of one day” (from dies “day,” from PIE root *dyeu- “to shine”). . . . In Middle English it also meant “a day” (c. 1400); a day’s work (mid-14c.); “distance traveled in one day” (mid-13c.), and as recently as Johnson (1755) the primary sense was still “the travel of a day.” From the Vulgar Latin word also come Spanish jornada, Italian giornata.
                                                —Online Etymology Dictionary

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Awaken: Advent Word 1

Posted on December 3, 2017 by Boz

This year, I have decided to participate in the daily discipline of #AdventWord, a project of the worldwide Anglican  Communion  designed to create a global Advent calendar where we can share images and meditations that reflect the spirit of this season of preparation and contemplation. Today, we begin with #Awaken.

I am seldom awake to see the sun rise, but when I am, I often want to take a picture. Occasionally, circumstances favor this desire, and the results are invariably stunning.

One operative word in the preceding paragraph is occasionally. Not every dawn offers the rich palette of the scenes I have captured at Monument Valley, Lake Mattamuskeet, and Pine Knoll Shores. Most often, the sun rises with a gradual change from gray to white over concrete and asphalt, without the added interest of clouds or cypress trees or early fishermen silhouetted on a an ocean pier.

The other operative word is awake. Continue reading →

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The Armistice: A Remembrance

Posted on November 25, 2017 by Boz

The 99th anniversary of the Armistice that ended World War I took center stage in my English 112 class on Friday, November 10. For more than a year, I have been preparing to guide my students on this journey through the trenches. I have read the novels, watched the films, bought the first editions, combed through the trench magazines, and immersed myself in the literature so that I could not only teach them how to research and write papers in three scholarly disciplines, but also engage them with the events that happened a century ago and cast deep shadows over the hundred years that followed. Continue reading →

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The Classroom, the Headlines, and a Lesson in Perspective

Posted on November 23, 2017 by Boz

By  the time I was in the third grade, in thrall to the eccentric Mrs. Nina Williamson, who taught us our multiplication tables, read aloud to us from Thornton W. Burgess or The Jungle Book after lunch each day, and helped me turn my poems into a book bound with flowered wallpaper samples, I had decided that I wanted to be just like her–a teacher. When I was a freshman in college–even though I was a pre-med student at the time–I finally understood why. My English class read an essay by a Columbia professor who had refused to cancel his classes during the student strikes of 1968; despite his support of the students’ causes, he explained, he could not allow his political beliefs to imperil the ability to use his “longing to impart,” which he called “the soul of the teacher.” I recognized that longing and adopted it as my raison d’être during the long years during which I waited for my place behind the lectern and my office in the halls of academe. Continue reading →

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The Land of the Free

Posted on October 28, 2017 by Boz

 

 

 

 

Despite the turbulent events in the world outside the mountains that sheltered our childhood, we in the Globe High School class of 1971 were little concerned with politics. In her Social Problems class, Mrs. Allison Roenigk provided about as much turbulence as we ever experienced when she told us, “You can’t have the war in Viet Nam and the Great Society at home.” The extent of our engagement with her pronouncement was to write it in our notebooks and regurgitate it on the test. One group in our English class used the Byrds’ antiwar song “Turn! Turn! Turn!” as the narration for their slide-tape project, but the photos illustrating the lyrics neither represented nor awakened any sense of adolescent rebellion. We had, after all, stood in the schoolyard as fifth-graders and cried as the flag was lowered to half-staff on the day President Kennedy was shot. So seven years later, we still said the Pledge of Allegiance and stood for the National Anthem played every morning on the PA system. Continue reading →

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Let Me Count the Ways

Posted on October 14, 2017 by Boz

I am not certain I ever heard the name Harvey Weinstein before October 5, when The New York Times published its initial exposé of sexual-misconduct allegations and hush-money payoffs. Nor have I followed the increasing media firestorm with any interest though the story is impossible to avoid, even on my medium of choice, National Public Radio. I simply don’t care about  Harvey Weinstein or the women crawling out of the Hollywood woodwork with their stories in some cases over thirty years old, often detailing advances they rejected.

However, this tawdry story contains many elements that I do care about–and care about deeply. Let me count the ways. Continue reading →

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Naming Evil

Posted on October 8, 2017 by Boz

Fleeing the violence in Las Vegas, October 1, 2017/David Becker/Getty Images

I write today in the bloody wake of the most recent in an increasingly frequent series of mass killings–this time, the deaths of 58 country music fans at the hands of a gunman poised 32 floors above the concert venue with an arsenal of 23 weapons and a meticulous plan to wreak the most carnage in the least amount of time. As is their custom, the news media first headlined the numbers of deaths. When I awoke on Monday, the number killed was reported to be 20; by the time I left for work, it was over 50. As soon as that number rose above 49, with the ardor and precision of baseball statisticians, the sensation-mongers scurried to name this massacre the “deadliest shooting in modern US history”–with “since 1949” cleverly hidden in the fine print. And they printed top-ten lists and maps with clever computer graphics to illustrate the horror. Continue reading →

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Something Old

Posted on September 13, 2017 by Boz

I still have the tattered Golden Book of Nursery Tales (1948) and Mother Goose Book of Nursery Rhymes (1953) presented to me at birth. At a time in my life when preserving the past evidently mattered less to me, I removed the covers and added my own crayon and pen illustrations to those of Tibor Gergely, whose images are for me the definitive Mama Bear and Papa Bear, City Mouse and Country Mouse, Three Little Pigs and Big Bad Wolf. Continue reading →

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Viewing the Eclipse with the Sororal Twins

Posted on August 26, 2017 by Boz

I was ten years old when I made a pinhole projector from a shoebox for my first solar eclipse on July 20, 1963. It reached a mere 30% totality over Globe, Arizona, but I was a curious child, and seeing that moon shadow as it bit even a small piece out of the sun’s globe was exciting enough for me to remember more than five decades later. Sadly, I must have become too jaded to watch the handful of solar eclipses in the 54-year interval. Or maybe it was cloudy; I was living in North Carolina for most of them, after all. But when I learned well over a year ago about the August 21 total eclipse practically in my own back yard, I got the fever. I determined that I would get reservations for South Carolina far in advance and be able to witness this once-in-a-lifetime event in comfort and firsthand. Continue reading →

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Charlottesville, Boston, Berkeley and the Desecration of the First Amendment

Posted on August 20, 2017 by Boz

August 19, 2017
Speaking my mind today may be impolitic. However, because what I fear most is the silence following the premature death of the First Amendment, speak I must.

I am reminded of Paul’s recital of his unblemished pedigree: “circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Philippians 3: 5-6). I cannot claim so perfect a lineage. Mine is cobbled together, a denial of my birthright, a patchwork of personal choices in the quest to believe and do the right things. Continue reading →

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