Miscellaneous

I suppose it wasn’t really her fault. Well, I can say that now, but at the time I could barely look her in the eye.    I had just turned 12 and started the seventh grade, my first year of what was then known as Junior High. There were lots of terrifying firsts for a…

This story begins on February 9, 1917, in the one room schoolhouse in Elkhart, Kansas. The Cunningham family lived closer to the school than the other students, so they were given the task of arriving early and getting the old pot-belly coal stove that kept the school warm ready for the day.    Four Cunningham…

  That’s my grandpa on the phone, the red power phone. We were in a beautiful hotel in Tokyo, summer 1972. It was a wonderful trip, but at that particular moment, no one was having fun yet.    You see, Grandpa didn’t speak Japanese, and whoever he was talking to clearly didn’t speak English, so…

Peter, our youngest son, is a man of many talents. It’s hard to say which is his greatest, but perhaps it is his people skills. He has a personality that people enjoy and charms them at the same time.    Peter was famous for using this talent when it came to his mother, my first…

I wish my family was different. I wish we didn’t fit right in with the global norms. But we do.   We have five school age grandchildren. I wish I could somehow magically protect them from the impact kids around the world are feeling as the pandemic continues to dramatically disrupt their lives.    You…

We lived across the street from a beautiful home, and one day, while Anne was walking home from work, she thought, “If that house ever comes up for sale, maybe we should buy it.” Later that evening, as we were sitting at the kitchen table eating dinner, she noticed a For Sale sign on that…

“Any color but red!” responded the seasoned public school teacher when I asked what colors I should use to show progress through the stages of Conquering Homework in Middle School, our new membership program for parents.   That got me thinking about the association of red with failure in school. I still cringe at the…