BBRRC - May 2021

When cooler evenings and warmer days begin to fill in the barren patches where winter grass would not grow, our walking group lapped up the light that cast a lime-greenness over our morning trek/sojourn this month. It is Spring, and the radiance from all the vigorous crisp growth is like no other we see any other time of the year.

Mother Nature unpacks newness, or maybe the other way around. She is no longer boxed, bottled or wrapped in cellophane by Earth but is triggered upward towards us like birthday candles from a God who wants to shower us with fireworks. How do you say thank you for the Sun we have waited for all winter, or for three-foot weeds that make us sneeze five times in a row, and the last few with embarrassed laughter? This is also a time when tide of winter litter becomes fodder for birds’ nests and the last leaves of last Fall are mulched up by an army of zero-turn mowers. One of those oversized commercial mowers flew by us at record speed and easily passed a sleek black BMW on Lincoln Avenue. At that speed the operator could barely hold onto the wheel (#Evansville), but he plowed ahead anyway with reckless abandon.

Perhaps no other time of the year but Spring does our conversation become so peppered with remarks about nature. We might grumble about health, jobs, and family struggles other times, but in the Spring, we talk of the newness, freshness and the blessings the earth is now presenting. The most well-known annual flowers trickled out of our discussions as well, but things got more complicated when we reached a Master Gardener’s path laden with hybrids and exotics. Nothing in that space stays dwarf for very long, and even the low growing sedums, awaiting more heat, were singing an opera at fever pitch.

Our this-and-that prattle was interrupted by the sounds our brains love more (according to research): that of wind, water, and birds. That sensory trifecta spoke to us as if a conductor had raised his baton and signaled an orchestra to prepare to play, and we, the audience, to be still. This Spring orchestra announced:

"Excuse me. Ahem. Pardon me. I’m sorry to interrupt, but it’s me over here. It’s me, Spring. I’m here, ready to start. I have something for you I think you are going to love to see. Can you smell it? Do you hear me?"

We did hear you, Spring, on our walk today. We saw you when a stark white head appeared high overhead in a bald eagle catching a draft. We smelled the fragrance of your long draping arms in an eighty-foot weeping Hemlock. We heard you squawking about your territory when an over-aggressive gander stretched out its nearby neck. Mother Nature was on. She left her mask behind and breathed on us anyway, and she scratched our senses with no restrictions or health warnings. We tried to catch up on our oh-so-important life details, but Spring is the strong quiet type, and had the last word on our BBRR pilgrimage.

Off in the distance there was a field of soccer preschoolers running helter-skelter, all playing the same position with uniforms that were grossly oversized. Their strategy seemed more like that at a piñata party rather than an organized sport, but the soccer kids didn’t care. And neither did we. Spring is nature’s party with no winners and no losers, just participants, and us few walkers.

At War with Jack's Rats

On their last morning of vacation, my daughter’s family met us to absorb the last savory breaths of the ocean. Perhaps nowhere else in nature are all of our senses so alive, feeding on the sensibilities that landscape whips up. Our grandsons especially seem transported on the millions of footprints underneath their own tiny feet, only surpassed by an endless indigo morning sky and ticklish seafoam.

This universe is the mystery that covers us when unseen smells mitigate stress levels on a wind that tosses our hair until it is the same mop everyone else has on the beach. Can someone explain to me again why we are getting our hair styled, and spending a fortune on “product?”

Our family spent the next hour bent down peering for sharks’ teeth on the line where high tide had reached its apex. Shiny black, sharp triangles occasionally popped up and even the four-year-old, several feet closer to the sand than us, found a few of them. In all, our collection amounted to perhaps a dozen before time drew a window shade on their trip and they raced away to catch their flight home. We all should be reminded of the days when what we were doing was so much fun that time stood still and we became so immersed in the moment that no greater purpose or ambition could improve our existence.

When we hugged goodbye, tiny salty-filled tears began to form as my grandson Cash tried to fathom any other life than that of time spent finding sharks teeth surrounded by everyone who loves him most. It was as if his emotions had been dipped into a smorgasbord, and I pried him loose to place him in his car seat. He had freely roamed the beach complete of threats, scolding, correction, or advice. Nature and encouragement alone were his boundaries. We would all do well to use those same boundaries as we forage in our high and low tides. Is it no wonder we often come up empty handed, feeling confused and fearful?

I wonder too if my art is able to call up whose same emotions in my viewers. Have I been successful making pieces that are really washed up in some ego centered tide of my own selfish making? Is my art riding on the restless surface or below the waterline where the richer still moments rest? Is the viewer able to lean into the marks and found objects in my work and take a brief vacation if only for a second, before being called to catch another flight?

In At War with Jack’s Rats, I am on a quest, looking out from the crow’s nest with my spy-scope, keeping watch over the ocean for unwanted flotsam and jetsam that might jam my rudder, my path forward, my metaphorical journey for wisdom. The weather seems tempestuous where I scratched the zinc plate in this hand-colored etching. Fog (spit-biting for those of you familiar with the technique) fills the atmosphere around the ship with scratchings of words and commands being yelled by hidden sailors on board. I am maintaining my course, but I am besieged by an imaginary sea of waring, short tempered pirates. They are nothing but the dull-witted rats we all face. They merely need to be kicked aside. They are not to be feared for their tempestuousness. Batten down those hatches. We are loved.

aeiou

A-E-I-O-U. And sometimes what? No one who learned their vowels in grade school can say them without adding, “and sometimes Y.” And everyone who ever learned their vowels learned very quickly that for every way that a vowel sounds there are a bunch of other ways that changes. To confuse things, letters like W can bring up the tail end of a vowel and complete its sound, like the word “cow.” In short, there are no end to the crazy combinations of diphthongs, and language eccentricities in our esoteric English Language, or as one author puts it, the Anguish Language.

I find the use of words, the shapes of letters, their combination and usage fascinating. I have allowed letters and odd words to float around my pieces, to drift in and hover there as if they are trying to speak up or trying to keep up with the other parts of the drawing.

In my piece aeiou, lower case, I celebrate the airiness of vowels, how in and by themselves they seem to float in and out of words with grace and or elegance, and sometimes awkwardness. The drawing in this example began by an accidental coffee stain in the middle of a brand-new sheet of Arches. A frustrating way to begin a drawing, but ok, let’s go with it. I really wanted that subtle brown stain to stand out in spite of its lack of solidity. It is but of wisp of air, smoke out of a chimney slowly dissipating into the atmosphere, like a vowel. The viewer cannot lean into it, but the viewer cannot get around it, just like a vowel.

Around it floats the consonants of the piece. These are the hard notions that try to grab their slice of the action… a broken pencil, a penciled in sheep, blots of purple watercolor, a long thin man. These are the flashes of reality we get through our day that float around our consciousness, never taking full shape, but always shaping our reality. It would be nice to think they all mean something, but they are only connected by the line that our life takes through them. They are only held together, those bits and pieces, because of the vowels that hold them together, those ephemeral translucent, changeable wisps of air.

We have a fish in our pond we named Lynyrd Skynyrd Jones, after the country song. To hear our four-year-old grandson talk of it, one would hear a long-convoluted story of the life of Lynyrd Skynyrd Jones, that in the end, makes no sense whatsoever. While it may be perplexing to hear his story, his random addition of details and confusing sequence of events are the very things that give his story their charm. By the end of hearing him we cannot help but be fascinated by all of it whether any of it makes any sense of not. It is his mispronunciations, his needless repetitions of words, the fragmented, dreamlike quality of his speaking that captivated us as we listened to him tell his story the other day. These are the things outside the story, the bowels and vowels that hold a story together. And sometimes, they are the very things that are holding our lives together.

While they may not be as hard and as attractive as magnets, they still have the power to draw us in.

Harv Questions Mr. Klee

Most of your artsy types are familiar with the name Paul Klee, Swiss born artist whose investigations into color theory, and the power of line were pivotal in the infancy of modern art. If you get a sec, take a second look at The Twittering Machine, a precursor to Rube Goldberg’s Mouse Trap game in two dimensions that calls us to visually turn the crank on a machine that makes birds chirp. The same is true in Klee’s Fish Magic, where the viewer must address up and down, under and over, night and day. These pieces and many others of his often leave us wondering where the light is coming from, which in turn leaves us wondering how we are supposed to get our footing. You have to love art that keeps you a little off center, and challenges you to figure out where you are standing.

As you may have discovered, I have several archetypical alter egos that, while never the focal point in a work of my art, allow me to go down the proverbial rabbit hole to my playful side. Harv is one of those guys. Harv, for the record, is never without his H-mobile, the H spinning incessantly as the propellor for his spaceship/car/boat. Harv is kind of the James Bond of pajama parties, the Jason Bourne of out-of-control smash cakes. When I draw him into one of my pieces, he has to negotiate his way through any sort of visual cataclysm. Several of those have included storms of mathematical equations, which sweep through the canvas like a comet, or a big bad balloon bearing down on him out of the clouds.

Harv, primitively drawn, is at the controls, revving up his propeller, not to escape, but to weather the adventure. He is not sad or afraid of his circumstances, because those just make for a better story later.

In Harv Questions Mr. Klee, Harv’s, I drew the little submarine-like H-mobile from a cereal box sticker. It appears as if some aqua-hand has gone wild with spots of color which now float about the picture like bubbles in an aquarium. And as if the hand did not adequately identify those fingerprinted bubbles of color, part of the word “MINE” appears at the bottom. It is me playing with color with “my hand” standing in as my alter ego. As a nod to Klee, I have a small car driving upside-down across the top edge of the drawing, defying gravity. One could turn the drawing around like an hourglass and start the whole adventure over. With Harv at the controls, the bubbles would eventually make their way to the surface again anyway.

One of my favorite parts of this drawing, and the reason I included it in my website, are the diaphonous watercolor-like brown washes which are done with paper pulp. They are very delicate and reticulated, and care had to be taken to let them stand on their own and not to crowd them out. Beautiful things need their space to work out their beauty, and I’m glad I have learned enough about art to recognize when something beautiful needs to be left alone. That is something I learned from Mr. Klee and his art.

If I had a chance to ask my favorite artists what they were thinking when they did a work of art, I know Paul Klee would be on my short list. And I know Harv would make another seat for him on the H-mobile. I like to think the two of them would have a great conversation.

BBRRC - April 2021

With our route at the State Horse Pistol (hospital) temporarily off limits due to renovations, aka, a battalion of trucks the size of Utah, our small but determined band of roving walkers met down at Mickey’s playground. For a moment we pretended we were at the warmer version of Disney, but the snap of the Ohio River wind brought us back to reality. Evansville is not known for its consistent weather in the spring. Gray and cloudy is our consistency in the dead of winter, but this walk was going to bear up to a clear blue bone chilling April cold snap.

As you might recall, we are a newly formed walking club that meets on the first of every month. That seems like an easy date to remember, but alas, our club’s membership has already fallen by half, and it was only at five members to begin with. Let’s just blame it on the cold and gargantuan construction equipment. This time.

We were brave enough to walk along the levee path, checking out the curves of the river, and looking for a calmer path. Aren’t we all? For a brief moment I worried that I would become air born in my parka and have an aerial view of Evansville as I parasailed across the Midwest. Two of my companions actually had bunny ears on their head, hints of an upcoming Easter party, and like real bunny ears, they twitched in the wind, listening for clues of summertime, (or perhaps errant radio stations).

We blathered nonstop, according to the rules of the club, as we picked up two little ones in a stroller, mom in tow. Twisting our way through the restoration area, we marveled at homeowners ambitious enough to scrap and paint their way along tall porticos, cornices and wonderfully carved entablatures. I don’t know what any of those words really mean, but if you get the idea that we were surrounded by century old river houses, you’d be correct. I felt like I had stepped out from Mr. Peabody’s Way Back Machine, and for a moment I longed to be an 1850’s steamboat boat captain coming home to my wife, waving to her one hundred feet up in her widow’s perch.

While we meandered aimlessly, narrowly missing piles of gravel and concrete, upturned hazard cones, and delivery trucks in the wrong lane, and I envied the two toddlers warmly buckled into their stroller with only their sniffy red noses showing. Being from Kenosha, Wisconsin, they took in the cold like bosses, and I know in their stocking capped heads they were giggling at all of us for being such wimps. Made me want to put on my big-guy-pants, find a bubbler at the nearest stop and go light, er no? (apologies to Wisconsin vernacular).

I did learn a couple of interesting facts about Kenosha on our BBRR journey. People there are working together, very hard I might add, to heal tensions after a very rough year. All along our walk, as we talked about our life’s challenges, I thought it telling that no one made any hint of April Fool’s Day. There were more important things to cover, among them the gratefulness that we were all healthy, and that we were looking into the sun and seeing some light at the end of Covid.

That is no joke. The Bunny bunnies keep marching towards better, and so does our nation, and our next generation, the kids from Kenosha.

Pick On Someone Your Own Size

Over the years, many kind folks have asked me why I have not turned my art into children’s books. After all, they say, you seem to have a story to go along with all of your pieces. Some have even said they like the stories better than the pieces. I’m thinking of the one client who was interviewing me for a purchase for a retirement home and asked me if I would be willing to frame the paper without anything on it.

“So, these would be conceptual pieces, right?” I humbly asked and briefly excusing myself to return to my car with no engine and drive down a one lane superhighway to a restaurant, where I ordered an egg omelet and ice cream ala’ mode. Ahem deleted.

Actually, there’s really no good excuse for my lack of children’s book, but I’ve got plenty of stories, so let’s just call ourselves children and pretend my art blogs are each a little book, whaddaya say? And starting with one of my earliest pieces, a piece that has many versions in print and drawing form, Pick on Someone Your Own Size. This piece was originally drawn on a piece of parchment paper using whatever was handy and free, which was print ink and a pencil. I used whatever was handy because at the time I was so angry I didn’t feel like wasting any time looking for materials. I just started drawing anger.

And looking up tenderly from a cozy tucked-in space on your bed you ask, “Why were you so angry?”

In one word, betrayal. It’s not a bedtime word, but it is the truth. I was angry for being asked to leave a faculty meeting at an art school where I was part of the faculty. No explanation, no apologies, and a lot of cold stares. Now ain’t that a fine how-do-you-do?

Artists, and humans in particular, do striking things when boxed in a corner. Me, I’m somewhere in between those two, so I went to wrestle with my better angels by drawing Pick on Someone Your Own Size. Now that is an artist’s response! You go channel that anger, Rip! Yea!

In the image we see a huge scorpion-like bug with a long pterodactyl beak bullying a frightened kid on a swing. If you look closely at the drawing, you’ll also discover that the threatening beak of the bug is barely penetrating the plane of the swing set, enough to scare the kid on the swing but not really enough to threaten his ultimate security. That kid on the swing is me, and the huge bug is the bully called Rudeness. And when Rudeness came my way, I ran into the flat plane of a swing set box and hunkered down, kind of like Harold with his Purple Crayon (who could draw himself right out of a corner).

I always liked those fables of long ago that summed everything up with a wisdom. They always made me feel like there was a point to all those beastly frogs and snarly gnomes lurking about under bridges. I’ll take a little closure with my story, please and thank you, with a dash of Sweet n’ Low. Here then, is the wisdom from the boy on the swing set:

Who do we think is in charge?
Is it small or is it large?
Creeping up on our fears
We check all our mirrors,
secretly staying on guard.

Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit Club

When you are thinking of a name for a new club, it is probably not such a good idea to use bunny and club in the same title, let alone in the same sentence. It tends to bring out the naysayers and activists. My four-year-old grandson likes to call these groups “binger-bongers” and the rest of the family has yet to understand exactly what that means.

I like joining activities, organizations, and coupon applications that have a bare minimum of requirements, so I was happy to recently join a group of people who loosely call themselves a club. We are keeping our club simple, and it’ll have very few stipulations.

When I was a kid and joined a club, I received a sticker and a hat in the mail and sometimes a jingle that made me feel like I was an animal of some kind, or perhaps an alien. To get even those few things, I had to fill out a long questionnaire that asked questions like “Do you eat Captain Terrific Cereal every day?” or “Have you learned all the words to The Ballad of Davy Crockett?” In all honesty, I was often afraid of the overwhelming responsibilities I would be obligated to uphold by joining such a club and would seek my older brother’s counsel which included a short retreat to the backyard to play two hours of basketball or to poke sticks down ant holes for that same amount of time. This was my way of talking myself off the ledge of commitment.

In addition to the application, joining a club also meant I had to sign a special pledge of loyalty that read something like this:

“I, ____, promise to have good manners and uphold the rules and regulations of the Buzzing ‘Round Jupiter with George Club. I will, to the best of my ability, promise to be active in taking care of Mother Earth, and to only use my Jupiter Jetpac in emergency situations.”

There were several difficult parts about learning this new pledge. Part of the difficulty rested in the accompanying secret handshake, which was impossible unless you were a contortionist. One problem was that after I memorized the new pledge and repeated it into a taped recorded 800 number when I was ready to join, I mistakenly said the same pledge at school in place of the Pledge of Allegiance at school every day. Heard and seen as slightly rebellious, my club pledge, mixed with the national pledge, did not fare very well with my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Heart, who embodied kindness and magnanimity with her every living breath.

The other problem with memorizing my new club pledge was that I had both pledges fighting for space in my brain, which caused me to randomly substitute words here and there as I stood there looking loyal to our American Flag. As other kids heard me, they in turn began to stumble over their words, particularly the difficult ones like “indivisible” and “republic.” After a few days of this, a whole row of kids, hand on heart, were fearlessly taking an oath to Jupiter instead of the United States of America.

My new club, the Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit Club has, at least so far, nothing to do with bunnies or rabbits. In fact, as near as I can tell it does not have any parameters, boundaries, or obligations of any kind. However, it does have a couple of rules, which are very loose, and have already been broken without any penalty or even a mild scolding. What I like even more, is that our Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit Club cannot be found on the back of a cereal or cookie box, and I’m not going to get anything in the mail that tries to sell me something. Ever.

At the risk of losing potential members, here are the two rules you need to follow to join our club. First, this club meets the first of every month, which by definition, is the very essence of Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit. (As a sidebar here, let me state for the record that I am already tired of typing the title of our club, as it seems intuitively and grammatically incorrect to repeat a word just typed. However, it drives spell check crazy, so I guess, being that I don’t having a loving relationship with computers anyway, makes that complaint a wash).

For some people, myself included, meeting the first of every month in a club becomes immediately fraught with problems. First, I generally have little clue what day of the week it is, and even less information about the day of the month. I have found it nerve wracking to expect myself to be a human calendar, and equally annoying to try to understand the Chinese directions that allow me to set the date on my $19 watch, so I just stumble along through the week hoping my wife tells me where I am supposed to be at any given moment. Time can be a fickle thing, always changing, and given that I am retired now, and don’t like to be reminded that three fourths of my life is in the past, I let time do its thing, and I do mine. This does not mean I do not have goals, or a bucket list. I do believe in having a bucket list but belonging to the Bucket Bucket List List Club doesn’t even sound right.

Still, if you want to be in our club, you have to be there.

If this bothers some of you, you may find some solace in an experience I had several years ago regarding the issue of being on time. I actually circumvented any responsibility for my schedule several years ago when I was teaching, being blessed with a student genius in one of my classes who had a beautiful gift associated with his autistic spectrum. And I sincerely do mean I was blessed to have him in my class. If you’ll excuse me going down this rabbit hole, my student, Richard I will call him, could tell you the license plate numbers of every faculty car in the parking lot. He could also give all of the students their passwords in his class, which took an enormous amount of pressure off all of us. With hormones circulating in their middle school bloodstream at a furious rate, secret passwords to log on to a computer should be outlawed if not taken off kid’s plates completely.

I cannot fully express the gratitude I have for my former student Richard. While he did not tacitly carry any of my teaching duties per se, he was an enormous help in my personal life. Because of his incredible ability to remember numbers of any kind, all I had to do is give him my weekly appointment and meeting schedule and he would come into class and remind me that day where I was supposed to be and when. He would in a few words also say things like, “Bring your iPad,” or “They are going to rotate your tires,” which was just enough to make me look prepared when I arrived at said appointment. Needless to say, the beauty of Richard was that for two years, I never missed a dentist appointment, a haircut, a doubles match, or a date night with my wife. That last one had some big pay offs, and things around our house were never better than when Richard was in charge of my time. (full disclosure to naysayers and activists: I had many a conference with Richard’s parents who were glad to see his skills being utilized).

So, knowing that our Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit Club was meeting on the first of every month did pose some challenges for me. Particularly without Richard. I began to think I would do some searching on the internet before I would commit to being somewhere every first of every month. I did not want to build up any undesirable resentments at having joined a club that might have some sinister or clandestine background or start receiving any teleprompts at dinnertime telling me I needed to call back or my IRA would be confiscated.

As it turned out, I found some really good news. Most of the references to repeating the word “rabbit” on Wikipedia turn out to be positive, and in general lead to some kind of luck if you say the word this way or that at the beginning of the month. It’s like a blessing, only without the religion, or any twelve-step program. I’m not generally in favor of relying on luck, so I began to wonder whether joining the club might cause me to pick up habits like throwing salt (or rabbits) over my shoulder or rubbing a Buddha statue’s tummy. I’ve tried both of those things for luck and got thrown out of restaurant for the first one, and out of a temple for the other.

What I learned was “NO” to luck, “YES” to blessings.

However, there are a couple of specific negative references to rabbits than concerned me on the Internet, as I continued my research. One has to do with an archaic 19th superstition fisherman had about saying it when they went out to sea. That one did not concern me, as lately I am spending little or no time fishing at sea. Even if I was, I’m sure my conversation would be centered around fish and not rabbits.

The other reference has to do with actually seeing a white rabbit near a dying person. I’m not even going to go there given the kind of year we have all had. Finally, there was one reference that suggested yelling the word “Rabbit!” up a chimney would alter your day in a good way. I opened the flume on our chimney and tried it once or twice for good luck, got an eyeful of soot and scared a roosting bat out of its wits, and almost into our living room. I decided then and there that I won’t be incorporating that in my repertoire of “Have a nice day!” routines.

Well, so much for over thinking things through research. I may make further references to the history of the title of our club, but I will try to keep it short. Most people only can stand so much folklore and historical minutia, given their time constraints, personal “lucky” habits, and relationships with bunnies.

So, back to the rules and regulations, our first club rule is that you must show up to the meeting on the first of the month. The second rule is that you must be willing to walk. Show up and walk. That is the club, the Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit Club. It’s a walking club, and just to be clear, you do not have to hop because that would be just plain exhausting. I have seen Olympic athletes astound and thrill audiences all over the world with their feats of strength, agility, cunning and finesse, but there are few of them who take more than a few hops anywhere in any of these events, which should tell you how difficult it is. Even bunnies that do it only hop for a few hops, (known in the bunny biz as “hop-a-doodles”), before they tire of it, stop to stare you down while they gnaw on your newly sprouted, unspoiled daffodils. Some of you may take argument with the Olympic event, the hop/skip/jump, but again it is only one hop and then competitors immediately revert to something no bunny has ever been seen doing, and no one in our club better be seen doing, either. At our age, skipping sounds and looks a lot like its cousin, tripping, which would immediately get you tossed out of the group for obvious reasons.

There is a third requisite to the Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit Club, but it is not mandatory. Members may need to talk as well as walk. Walk and talk. But talking is only voluntary. Since all of the members so far are retired teachers, we have no problems talking. In fact, at our first meeting, there was continuous chatter from the moment we arrived, with no one really listening to anyone else. Thankfully, listening is not one of the rules. No one said anything about listening. If talking isn’t required, then listening certainly isn’t necessary, and I suspect they’ll be darn little of it if our first meeting is any indication.

During our first meeting, since I provided most of the leadership in the not-listening department, I can tell you very little about specific things that were said as we walked continuously and interrupted each other on a regular basis. Teachers will be the first to tell you that they are great at interrupting. Just sit in on any faculty meeting and watch an administrator or principal try to get a word in edgewise. Even when a principal gets the conversations down to a dull roar, the teachers aren’t really listening. Upon close inspection, most of them are deftly texting each other without even looking down at their phones hidden under the table, while continuing to smile and nod at policies being reviewed for the thousandth time ad nauseum ad infinitum.

A few more key bullet points stood out to me in the cacophony of chatter as we walked, not hopped, over hill and dale. I might add here that none of these topics inspired me to be a better person in any way, and most of them were not informative, true or helpful or even necessary. However, all of it was kind and respectful, which is a quality in short supply in this world, and sorely needed in surplus quantities. While the subjects of insurance rates, taking care of elderly parents, raising grandkids, and orthotics did pop up, the “kindness” thread that was woven in our bunny squared rabbit squared (Rats! Spell check still after me!) group was a reminder that in spite of the disrespect we were sometimes subjected to while we were teaching, there were many shining moments that deserved a higher space than we had to time to give them during our teaching careers, or on one walk.

(Hmmmmmm…Next month we walk on April Fool’s day, and we’ll have both luck and the foolishness in the mix. Luck and Fools. Sounds like an old-fashioned baking soda).

So, while we may be just a walking club now, we teachers did not always just walk. In fact, we never walked at school. We hit the ground at a dead run before most people get out of bed, ready if not eager to see if the plan we made the night before, or in the middle of the night, or over the summer, or while on vacation, was going to work with our students at school. We used to say that the days were long, but the years were short. Many of the days were very, very long… and complicated. And DIFFICULT. Full of more than just a few hurdles and a couple of really big hops. It was more like a leap of faith that got us through, Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit, and if we are lucky it’ll keep us new clubbers talking and walking.

(Next entry for the Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit Club will be April something-or-other, 2021).