ABOUT

I started this blog back in 2006.  Both my parents were dying and working on this blog was a way of negotiating that troubling time.  The death of parents is a big deal.  Freud says, the most important event in a man’s life is the death of his father.  

I wrote about whatever came to mind.  The events surrounding the death of my parents, the sale of their house, throwing away all the stuff in their house, where we–my brothers, and parents, and I–had lived over the years: In Ora, South Carolina.  Then in Spring Valley, CA, where we moved in 1955.  So there’s a strong autobiographical element running throughout these posts.  I can break that element down into parts: 1945-55 in the South, 1955-64 in California, 1964 till about 1980.

I haven’t written a whole lot about my “private” life as an adult.  Though I have written about adulthood.  I was for many years a teacher of writing at a university.  So, inevitably, I wrote about that: my daily struggles, as a teacher, my work situation, work I did with a union.  Also I wrote, as part of my professional “career,” a good deal about education more generally.  What it means to be educated, how to get educated, the trails and tribulations of doing that.  All of this, the education stuff, was new to me.  I was the first in my family line to get a BA and a PhD; so I came to higher education as an outsider, and left it, pretty much, still an outsider.

L

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