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Gallery: "Uncategorized" - Travel Blog

Gallery: "Uncategorized"

pedagogy

03/25/24 08:07

Yesterday’s lesson, from Isaiah 50:4-9a, began: “The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.”

And I thought: Those were the days.

I’m off on a little Easter week jaunt, coming back here sometime next week.

 

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university days

02/29/24 08:52

Monday evening, at the Villanova Alumni gathering in Coral Gables, the president spoke mostly about developments on campus, including the construction of a new library. Afterwards, I spoke to a tall, older man who said that he had gone to Harvard. (Not sure what he was doing there.) “This is the first thing I’ve been to in a long time,” he said, “where nobody talked about AI. Perhaps it has to do with the Augustinian values,” he continued, trying to explain it to himself. “Which is a good thing.”

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the loved one

02/26/24 08:48

Yesterday we attended a funeral at the South Florida Jewish Cemetery in Lake Worth and were struck by the beautiful simplicity of the ceremony, particularly the plain wooden coffin and then, at the conclusion, the way the mourners stood in two lines facing each other and the bereaved family members walked between them as a symbol that they are surrounded by friends.

 

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It was a long day at Bascom Palmer yesterday, the majority of the time spent sitting and waiting in crowded corridors. For the most part nobody talks, except to the person they came with, though yesterday a woman spoke to us in Spanish. I told her, in Spanish, they I don’t speak Spanish, and she switched to English.

By 5:30, she and everyone else except one middle-aged woman had disappeared, either home or into one of the examination rooms. We were finally called into one and when we emerged it was 6 pm. We had arrived at 2. This would have been less annoying if I could have spent the time reading but I refrained before my eye exam so I could see the chart better and after that it was difficult with dilated pupils. One elderly woman, obviously new to the procedure, moaned in panic to a passing doctor that since seeing the technician her vision had become blurry.  

At checkout, we ran into the woman who had talked to us earlier. She was with her husband. I asked if they lived in Miami. No, she said, Guatemala. They fly up once a year to see her husband’s ophthalmologist. She pulled out her phone and showed us pictures of her garden in Guatemala City; large modernist sculptures stood on the grass. Then a picture of her daughter, standing with their granddaughter in Antigua. Another daughter, she said, is in Berlin, studying to be an ophthalmologist. Hania of course asked about the political situation in Guatemala, and the woman mentioned last year’s elections, saying, tentatively, “we hope for the better.” Then we exchanged business cards. I have never been to Guatemala.

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comic faux pas

01/10/24 09:06

Whether you found Golden Globes host Jo Koy funny or not, he did something that students at my comedy school would learn not to do on the first day of class: He laughed at his own jokes. It is the standup’s equivalent of a writer telling instead of showing.

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It began last month when our local Whole Foods returned their delicious gingersnaps to their bakery. Then, a few days before Christmas, our neighbor knocked at our door, presenting me (Hania’s a celiac) with a plate of oatmeal raisin cookies. At Christmas Eve with our French neighbors, I received from the daughter a box of Girl Scout Tagalongs. Then Tuesday, our Alsatian friends handed us a gift bag containing a bottle of Gewurztraminer – made with grapes from the family vines – a box of French pralines, and a tin of homemade cookies.

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