At My Mother’s Knee

Daddy’s Dort

I Smiled at Her

Like all humans with access to a certain degree of privilege, an education and a willingness to look inside, I’ve been in the ‘Who am I?’ quandary. Specifically, mine’s been about what to call myself as I wholeheartedly play as my life-long contribution to making our world a little better.

My last year of high school… actually my last half year because I graduated a semester early as did 300 or so of my class of 1200. Where I live now in the Berkshires, there’s less people in my rural little town than there was on my block growing up.

One winter afternoon, I climbed up into the preschool’s bookloft with Eli, a red-headed three-year-old.  He picked a fact book on dinosaurs.  As I read to him, his eyes remained glued to the pictures - of tyrannosaurus, stegasaurus and all the other sauruses.  When we got to the end, I casually asked, “Hey, Eli, what happened to the dinosaurs anyway?”