Notes from Dallas, 24 June 2017: Observations on the Educational Advantages of Having a Genuine Interest in People

My nearly 96 year-old mom continues to astonish with me with her resilience.

 

After enduring various challenges during February to May of this very year 2017, she is now highly mobile, reasonably agile, and as dexterous as can be expected within the limitations of her rheumatoid arthritis and remnant impact of the small left-brain venous blockage that occurred 14 months ago.  On Thursday, 22 June, Mom walked all the way to the dining room without stopping.  She negotiates her way around the apartment quite well, and moves in and out of the Toyota Matrix with considerable skill.  I treasure her mobility and recovery from the challenges of February to May, never taking for granted the manifestation of physical and physiological skill, nor Mom’s tenacity in exercising those skills as long as her body gives her a chance.

 

Mom’s appetite is very strong---  as strong as I’ve observed in her for many moons.  She packed the food away at a Father’s Day repast that included generous amounts of fresh shrimp and smoked salmon, also eating up her watermelon chunks, a chicken wing, and a sizable piece of coconut pie.  And in like manner has she continued during these days at mid-June, including a lunch of my preparation on Friday, 23 June, eating with gusto my avocado and cream cheese sandwiches and my fruit (apples, oranges, bananas) salad.  

 

I arrived in Dallas on Saturday, 17 June, eager to spend time with Mom in an earthly sojourn that best evidences suggests eventual mortality for us all.                 

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Having an interest in people makes for never-ending leisure-time opportunities.

 

I continue to learn so much in talking to Mom about her life as a child and adolescent in McKinney, Texas, when this now burgeoning exurban area was a town of 16,000 residents.  With each conversation, I learn in great detail everything from positive matters such as the propensity of Mom and her tight group of friends to create their own scenarios for healthy fun, to the darker side of life of McKinney, with regard to manifold prejudices and petty socio-cultural stances.

 

And I’ve learned a ton from talking to a friend that I’ve made in Dallas, a very classy social service worker.  This new friend of mine has a family history that is a fascinating subset of the racially and classist circumstances of American society, but not the stereotypically downtrodden tale of African American woe:  Rather, hers is a story that would make Booker T. Washington proud, of folks migrating to California to forge black middle class communities of physicians, lawyers, landowning large-scale farmers, teachers, shop-owners of many sorts;  and schools with erudite teachers, segregated and much better academically than many of those artificially desegregated institutions spawned by Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

 

I continue to marvel that most people are so insecure as to be more interested in their own navels that they are in expressing some interest in other fellow sojourners on the planet. 

 

Openness to information from other people and to objective anecdotal accounts creates understanding that goes far beyond either the closed environment in which the typical time occupier on the globe dwells and the level of understanding that results from most sociological studies of the conventionally academic sort.

               

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I’ll be in Dallas until the first of July, departing sometime between Saturday, 1 July, and Monday, 3 July.

 

I’ll arrive back in Minnesota in time to spend the 4^th of July with Beloved Barbara, read my extended-length compressed version of Comedy of Errors (as always, maintaining all Shakespearean, Elizabethan language) with six students, take those students to the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona on Sunday, 9 July, and give Superintendent Ed Graff and the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education my wisdom on 11 July.

 

Sometime soon thereafter, Barbara and I will head back southward on I-35 for the series of days that will include the arrival of Beloved Son Ryan Davison-Reed on 16 July, in the midst of the multi-day celebration of Mom’s Number Ninety-Six.

 

Be attentive, Dear Readers, to continued pungent messages for Ed Graff, Rebecca Gagnon, and other pretenders or ephemeral occupants of the throne at the Minneapolis Public Schools;  to numerous observations on the Human Drama;  and to forecasts for the storm of The K-12 Revolution that is looming with ever-darkening clouds over Davis Center Palace of the Minneapolis Public Schools.