It was in the late 1980s when I was indentured at the University of Florida and saw an ad in our campus newspaper looking for marketing managers for some unspecified “family focused” entertainment business. The ad promised the trifecta: travel, independence and big bucks. Even though I was in my senior year, close to the college finish line and anticipated...
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Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit. Helen Keller Mad respect to Helen Keller and her starchy endorsement of optimism, but I don’t subscribe to the notion that pessimists have never swashbuckled or furthered the...
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Each morning I ARISE, brush my TEETH, heat some WATER, make some TOAST and THINK about my day. But first I open Wordle, the tasty online word game less than a year old and more addictive than potato chips. In an interview with the BBC earlier this year, game inventor Josh Wardle said his aim was to make Wordle something akin to “a delightful snack.” And so...
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It was about a week ago, a late Thursday afternoon. Outside the classroom windows, golden hour saturated the light with amber. My advanced writing class had just concluded. Seven students Zooming in through laptops vanished from the checkerboard of faces on the projector screen in front of the room. At my university, we are hybrid teaching, a...
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On a muggy August day before my fifth grade school year was to begin, Mom circled my three brothers, my sister and me. She told us that we were moving to Indiantown, a scratchy, green patch of inland South Florida that we’d visited a few times. Indiantown was all I knew of “the country.” Mom said we’d be moving in a week and living in Indiantown in a...
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