Stop tipping your chair. You’re going to fall. If you fall, you will disrupt class. If you’re going to tip your chair, could you at least keep it on two legs? One leg looks really dangerous. How do you keep it balanced like that? I’ve really never seen a kid keep a chair balanced on […]
Author: Evelyn J. Willburn
You big bully!
There is, apparently, a large portion or our brains that thinks we still live in caves and chase gazelles with sharpened sticks. Such a paradox we are. I’ve heard it said that even depression serves, or rather did serve, a critical function in the run-and-hide period of our history. The rationale goes like this: the […]
The fourth state of matter
Weren’t we all taught in elementary school that there are three states of matter, solid, liquid and gas? It’s a nice neat concept for an elementary science lesson. You can demonstrate with a block of wood, a bottle of water, and a balloon. But along comes “plasma” to muck up the equation. First of all, […]
Fancy footwear
For a kid who spent at least 40% of the year barefoot, I sure set a store by my shoes. Scene: I’d been trying to be cool with some other kids, and we went to a shoe store in the mall to try on the platform sandals, some of which increased our height by at […]
Sunday morning
There is nothing in my life that has caused me greater ambivalence than religion. I was raised in a religious family, although we didn’t attend traditional church. Sometime before I was old enough to remember, my parents had a parting of the ways with the local Episcopal church and decided to instead join the Anglican […]
Golf, Southeast Alaska style
These two pictures represent Craig, Alaska’s answer to a driving range. We are crammed onto two tiny islands joined by man-made causeways (see the picture in my right-hand widget column), and there is no flat ground anywhere to be had. There was a time when I laughed at golf, declaring smugly that it couldn’t possibly […]
A-gardening we will go
Recently I started growing lettuce in window boxes. Now, of course I could put together a garden box or a greenhouse, or both, and grow my lettuce that way. But here’s the thing. I am too lazy to go outside to pick my lettuce. Actually, I am trying to set things up so that I […]
Here’s to you, Eddie Robinson
While we’re on the subject of things my father used to like to say, here’s another: he was, to his estimation, “the littlest human” to graduate with his high school class. Five-foot-nothing and 93 pounds wringing wet. I will point out that he was sixteen at the time, and that later he grew to be […]
Point it straight
As my sister Laura mentioned, “Point it straight” was another thing our dad liked to say. He would pull out this old saw when one of us was heading out behind the wheel of a car (to my mind, that car was usually the Warthog (see an earlier post), in which case he had reason […]