In Praise of Great Teachers

   “And if I were a good teacher, who would know?”  
                Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons

    It’s often easier to complain than praise. Even so, this essay is about the great profs I’ve known, the rare ones who have challenged me to become a better student and a better professor, those who have inspired me personally and professionally. It is offered as thanks to those in academe who keep it alive and thriving.

    Perhaps the best professor I have ever known is Dr. Charles Nelson from my days at Sacramento State University where I completed my MA in English.  SSU was my launching pad.  I did well in my MA work, well enough to voice aloud my desire to earn a PhD and teach at the college level. The MA gave me the ability to teach in the California two-year system with its good pay and multitude of opportunities since the state boasts of so many campuses from the Sierras to the Pacific.  
            
     But Charles stirred me on to the next level. I am forever indebted to him. (As an aside, one of my worst profs at the time urged me to stay at Lucky’s, a supermarket chain where I used to work.  “You’ll make more as a store manager than a high school teacher or a professor,” he explained.  Not exactly a Christa McAuliffe comment.)  
             
     Originally from Oklahoma, in his office Charles spoke with a relaxed twang of the Sooner State. He’d
drop a few Twain-like words, including that colloquial A-word ain’t when we spoke about my next project with him. For instance:  “I ain’t too sure Hamlet’s crazy.” Besides that ain’t, his crazy seemed stretched out by the addition of several letters: crraazzzy. But, get Professor Nelson in the classroom lecturing and he held his own intellectually, bar none, with never an ain’t or other grammatical slip.
              
     Any yet, he did something that few adults do when seriously talking about any subject.  He broke into laughter about the whole situation—genuine, often self-effacing, always playful, never cynical, pure fun-loving laughter at the absurdity of the situation.  (“What?  Killing your brother and marrying his widow for the crown of Denmark? You crraasssy?”)  More than once he pulled my academic career out of the recycle bin.  
             
     I was a bit of a lost puppy at the time.  I did a start-and-stop MA.  I started at Hayward State near Oakland, ran out of money, didn’t finish, and transferred to Sac State in my hometown.  I needed to regroup, then my father got very sick, and here I was stacking groceries all night at Lucky’s, trying to
finish my MA, searching for something professionally. Dr. Nelson helped me when I applied to the Catholic Diocesan system where I taught (sometimes full-, sometimes part-time) for the next four years.  Over the course of one grueling year,
he guided me through my final MA project while I was teaching and while my Father was growing sicker.
              
     To finally graduate, I wrote a series of essays in lieu of a single thesis.  It was probably more
challenging than a thesis since it had to be passed in pieces, and Charles was no slouch about scholarship.  I remember he wrote things like, “Why are you quoting all this outside material if you don’t use it in your essay?” I learned to temper my enthusiasm for long quotes that seemed more like
padding than serious research. It’s a story I still tell my students every time I teach composition. I want my writing students to have the same skills Dr. Nelson taught me.
             
     Two men pointed me toward Notre Dame, my Father (who was a “Subway Alum” always wanting one of his sons to attend ND) and Charles.  When I was accepted, I was also accepted at several other schools, but only ND offered me four years of teaching so I could teach part-time to pay my way through the program.  Dr. Nelson assured me that ND wasn’t just a football school. The rest is history.
             
     Years later at Notre Dame, in order to finish my dissertation, I worked closely with another gem of a professor, Dr. Donald Sniegowski. He made sure that my work was edited well, and he scrupulously went over every detail with me even under adverse circumstances. (This was actually the job of my thesis director, but Don did it instead; that tells you something right there.) One Saturday, we were to meet, but he called to cancel since he was going to
the hospital with phlebitis.  He had limped into the English office that morning to put his completed evaluation in my mailbox so that even though we weren’t meeting, I would have his notes about my next chapter.  
       
     Twenty-some years later, when our daughter asked her own professor to work on a paper dealing with African literature, her prof told her that she
needed to work with Professor Sniegowski, a noted specialist on that topic.  She called, made an appointment, and met with him.  When she entered his office, Don had a copy of my dissertation open and asked her if she was related to its author.  He hadn’t forgotten although the phlebitis had long since cleared up. 
           
     The first department chair I worked with was Dr. Ed Uehling at Valpo U near Chicago but located in Valparaiso, Indiana.  Good school. I faced a rocky year, but Ed helped me so much. He was a genuine man and a stabilizing influence on me. I had high school classroom know-how, a PhD in hand, administrative and university-level teaching experience, yet I was not getting any traction on the
job search.  Ed kept up the encouragement.  When I contemplated other academic careers or different professional tracks altogether (like being a tech-writer for an engineering firm in Michigan), Ed counseled me to stay with our profession.  I did, he worked with me, and I moved along to another campus in a tenure-track situation.

     As a department chair myself now, I often think about how Dr. Uehling would do things.  His calm and thoughtful demeanor managed many a situation (a mess I created or other issues). Well-respected, Ed helped on many levels at Valpo campus-wide.  I wouldn’t be here if not for him.  Even now, I wish at times that my hot Italian temper could be as cool and controlled under fire as Ed’s.
              
     The saddest story to relate in this blog is about Dr. Bob Alexander.  He was nearing the end of his exemplary career at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania where I taught for two years after Valpo. This campus and I were not a fit.  We should have been: small, Catholic liberal arts college so like my alma mater from California, my own PhD from ND where the priests of King’s were trained, and the list goes on. But, it never worked out between us. It went from bad to worse.
               
     Bob was an inspiration, however.  He was the professor who used to enter the classroom each day a few minutes late on purpose.  His explanation:  if on time, you looked cowed by the administration; if too late, you seemed to disrespect the students.  His trick was to come in consistently a few minutes late to show his students he was his own boss.  Having taught high school, I never broke with that routine of being “ahead of the bell,” but I loved Bob for his
wise, idiosyncratic attitude.
           
     His heart gave out while he was fighting severe influenza our last winter in Pennsylvania.  He was within a year or so of retirement.  It was the saddest blow since he had been such an advocate of mine at a time when my life at King’s had grown so deplorable. His wife, Gracie, told me later that Bob’s one regret was that he had never written while teaching.  I remember that every time I write now; Bob didn’t write and it haunted his widow and cast a shadow over his fine career.  

    Every career is filled with mentors and colleagues who rise up at precisely the needed moment. We all
could fill pages with anecdotes of colleagues or teachers who inspired us, helped us, kicked us out of our complacency, encouraged us at just the right
moment.
           
     It’s not about their published books or their impressive resumes, although many of these scholars are widely published.  It’s about their humanity in the face of so many obstacles in academe today, their humanity and their love of teaching which they shared with me and so many others. They cared about their students, embraced our profession as a vocation not an occupation, and did their best.
          
     At this time of Thanksgiving past and Christmas ahead, holidays steeped in gratefulness, it’s important to remember all those inspiring men and women from our past.  Colleagues and mentors like these point our way to the future.  


                 
 


  

  Science Fiction:  Plans, Sidetracks, and Endpoints 
   
     For over a year, I’ve been telling students and colleagues that I was willing to venture into the realm of teaching creative writing.  I am the Chair of an English Department quite famous for its writers. 
I’m not putting myself into that august group, but I wanted to pull my own weight in terms of taking on a
workshop.  The Department has recently begun a new class format that is the perfect venue.  
    
    Instead of a 4-hour weekly workshop, we have these new flexible mini-workshops for only 2 hours per week.  I didn’t need to go off the high dive; I was going to stand on the edge of the pool and dive (or belly-flop) with a short offering.  
 
    It was to be my first-ever sortie into teaching any type of sci-fi and/or creative writing workshop.  
 
    Although eager, I was nonetheless intimidated.  
 
    I shouldn’t be because, after all, I know  something of writing and something of sci-fi.  I have put together 4 such novels since the late 90s, working in a lonely and silent workshop (my home office) and pouring myself into a horrific world not so
farfetched from what we have now.  
 
    In these four linked novels, The Marsco Saga, I have space travel, love, political catastrophe, plus colonies on the Moon, Mars, the asteroids.  A war is about to break out; a ragtag band of optimistic (and literate) heroic dissidents are not willing to knuckle under; and a religious lunatic (living in a cave) is willing to destroy everyone else to prove his messianic beliefs are correct.  (I slapped
him into an Amazon rainforest cave long before
9/11.)
          
     The creative writing class was a great idea. 
Science fiction and fantasy are extremely popular. 
Since I’m on the verge of publishing my own books, I readily agreed to do a mini-workshop and let the dragons, war-bots, green-goo-attacker-globs, dark
and shadowy killer thingies fall where they may.

    Sadly, these “best laid plans” have fallen by the wayside. I fell behind over the summer so I never got a handle on a clear conception for the class; I had to beg off offering this class in Spring ’12.  To my surprise, my office door on campus was not surrounded by ranks of zombies, creatures from black lagoons, diaphanous and silken-clad alien women lusting for my soul but really desperately needing my blood and marrow to live.  

    Had these ET hordes assailed me, I would have cautioned them, don’t mess with me, you alluring creatures from a galaxy far, far away.  Marianne is
like the honey badger protecting me and will rip out your pulsing innards, you green-blooded beauties who talk in stilted English.  You know the kind, spandex accentuating them just right, threatening with chilling remarks like, “All your orbit bases and hunk-men are belong to us. . . .”
             
     It would have been a good class. 
              
     I had looked for a textbook and found the How
to Write Science Fiction and Fantasyby Orson Scott Card came with the highest recommendations.  I crossed paths with him once in graduate school before he hit it big as a fulltime sci-fi writer, but he wouldn’t know me from Obi Wan Kenobi.  

     His enormously successful Ender’s Game didn’t capture my attention when I started it many years ago.  Since I was then in my 40s, the appeal of youthful anxiety so central to the novel didn’t grab me, invite me into that world.  My nephews read him while in high school and loved him.  Card’s
protagonist has that dour, loner, teenage angst, which I had long since lost by the time I opened the novel.  It’s not that other works primarily written for young adults can’t hold my attention; I love all seven Harry Potter works and have devoured them twice.  The same is true of The Lord of the Rings.

    However, Card’s How to Write is helpful and honest about the struggles of trying to craft fiction professionally on a sustained basis.  “Don’t quit your day job” is just one of his many admonitions; “this gig is harder than it looks.”  And I love his understanding of the sci-fi genre and why some of us embrace it willingly: 
  
    “One surprising result of the ghettoizing of 
speculative fiction, however, is that writers have enormous freedom within its walls. It’s as if, having once confined us [sci-fi, speculative, and fantasy
writers] within our cage, the keepers of the zoo of literature don’t much care what we do so long as we stay behind bars.”  

     I hadn’t thought much about it, but when I created my world of Marsco (disease-ridden, dysfunctional politically and socially, rewarding and sustaining only an elite clique), I thought I was
simply exaggerating the world around us.  I explained to someone recently that the mainthe-reader-has-to-buy-this-exaggeration of the Marsco world is simply that the Third World is no longer out of sight on the other side of the world, but it’s on the next city block.  
 
    Marsco has the power to control who crosses the street and when.  Today, in our real world, Israel is
walling itself away from Palestinians.  In the Marsco world, this is happening but on a total planetary level, not in the far corner of the Mediterranean.

    But, back to class!  We were to read Walter M.
Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, a novel I want my students to know.  In this Cold War-era story, the world has been destroyed by a nuclear war, typical sci-fi fare from that paranoid and wary age.  The novel is set at a remote monastery in the southwest desert of the old USA. There, the monks are hand- copying books because after the atomic conflagration, the survivors blamed
knowledge and the literate for ending their 21st Century world.  So, intellectuals, scientists, educators alike are doomed, hunted and
attacked with merciless savagery after the atomic fires died down. Any books that survived the war went up in smoke afterwards, scapegoats for the catastrophe that brought the world to the edge of
extinction.  

     As the novel begins, it is 600 years after the war, but the world is still in ruins.  Miller’s world is roughly analogous to the 5th or 6th Century of our real history after the Fall of Rome.  The monks at the abbey are painstakingly laboring away on vellum like real monks did in our distant past.  

     The next section is roughly another 600 years later, in what would be our own historical world on
the verge of the Renaissance. When secular scholars visit the monastery seeking any text that deals with
theoretical physics and engineering, the monks have already made a treadmill-run generator that allows their visitors to read by a primitive electric light.  The visitors are devastated when they realize their incipient theories are not in fact new ones, but rediscoveries from an old world long past; they’re doubly upset because these desert hermits are a century ahead of their fledgling scientific hypotheses.  
 
     The last section is set 2400 years after the first conflagration and the world is on the verge of a second nuclear holocaust.  Having forgotten their own history, arrogant and tech-mastering humans are condemned to relive it.

     Even though steeped in Roman Catholic monasticism (the monks are authentic Dominicans who still speak in Latin), and even though our own Cold War fears have eased, Canticle is a tremendous book.  Well-crafted.  Keenly paced.  Generously
described.  Readers feel like they have entered Miller’s Medieval, Renaissance, and Modern redux. 
He captures the political machinations of those trying to harness science for their own means, not for the good of the whole.  He creates believable characters caught in the political webs and intrigues of their world.  The science fiction creeps in; it does not saturate.  Radiation-mutilated humans with extra
heads or arms roam about, reminders of the nuclear war long past, of science run amuck, of hubris fouling the world. 
 
     The novel opens with the unwitting discovery of a fallout shelter and its long-buried mysteries totally
misunderstood by monks in their nearly-destroyed, post-bellum world; these discoveries are understood by the reader:  Air lock? “Can of kraut and pound of pastrami”? Fallout itself—a mysterious ogre?

     And, Miller asks, how do you make ethical choices in such a world?  Indeed, how do we, today, in our real, wrap-knuckles-on-the-solid-desk-world right before us, how do we make ethical choices?  How do we live amid the injustices of our world?

     I ask these questions in The Marsco Saga.  My characters tend to be of Marsco, of the top 1% of the world in terms of political power and the necessities of life.  They have safety and comfort, freedom
from disease, crime, and the grime of a nearly-destroyed world. Most of the world’s population is held down to languish on the “nasty, brutish, and short” lowest stratum of society.  How do my characters’ consciences allow them to live while aware of this?  How do they live at all?  Or love?  Move about with any degree of freedom while knowing that their world is built on the backs of the
oppressed?

     It’s an exaggerated world, but also one much like our own.  In Card’s words, I write behind these bars.  And I chose to locate there so I can control the canvas backdrop and ask questions about that oppressive environment.  How do we make ethical choices in our own world?  How do we live and love
without becoming calloused and cynical?  
 
    Good speculative science fiction isn’t about the science, it’s about the speculation.  The British war poet Wilfred Owen wrote:  “All a poet can do is
warn.”  
 
    So, too, with the sci-fi writer:  we write to warn.

[So sorry I am late with this!  I plan to write on a more regular basis.  I'll keep you posted.  Also, check for updates on my Facebook wall.]

 
  
          

    I received an unexpected email the other day.  It was a brief notice from Saint Mary’s College of California where I earned my bachelor’s degree announcing that a classmate of mine had died.  Mike was 60 or 61. 
I dug out my old yearbook to make sure I was remembering correctly,
hoping that I had two classmates with the same name.  His is a common Irish name, but no such luck.  It was a small school, about 1,200 students, and I was right; it was him.  
            
     This shouldn’t surprise me.  As an educator, I’ve had students die tragically in accidents or illness.  Family members have passed on; both my parents are dead. This past winter, one of my colleagues at Southwest Minnesota State University died unexpectedly over Christmas Break.  He was only 54 and in perfect health, but a stroke took him after a long flight to visit his mother.  
 
    So, hearing of Mike’s untimely passing wasn’t out of the realm of my
experience.

    I opened my yearbook and glanced at the senior portraits.  This was 1972, the height of the counter-cultural movement in California; thus, these portraits were informal.  Turns out I took two of them, a fact I had forgotten.  Both were casual snaps of two friends after a play performance. Saint Mary’s had an amphitheatre then; the play, The Birds by Aristophanes, was performed wearing masks the way it would have been in 414 BC when first produced. (If the times were counter-cultural, I hung with the counter-counter-cultural crowd.  I believe the term today would be “nerds,” but that’s another blog post.) 
 
    I glanced at old friends with whom I have not spoken in years.  Partly, this is because I moved away from California in 1978 and have not been back for any length of time since then.  And once my Mother died in 2004, even my trips to family out there have been less frequent.  In fact, since her passing, my family has met here in Marshall or in South Bend more regularly than out West. 

    But, excuses aside, I should have kept in better touch with old friends.

    This past week, we drove to Chicago and Indianapolis to visit Marianne’s
family.  Her uncle, Uncle Tom, a retired priest, suffers from advanced Parkinson’s.  (He is affectionately, “Father Uncle Tom” or “UT”to his nieces and nephews.)  Even with his tremors, his mind is sharp as ever. What
struck me during out visit was his knowledge of classmates from high school,
Notre Dame, and Indiana Law School that he remembers and keeps in touch
with.  It’s a talent I lack.

    Uncle Tom is able to do this in part because he was born and raised in
Indianapolis and except for four years at Notre Dame, two years stationed in
Japan with the US Army in the 50s, and his time in Rome at seminary, he has
lived his whole life there. On the other hand, I have packed up and re-rooted myself several times since I was 28, twice in Indiana, then Pennsylvania, and twenty-plus years ago, Minnesota.  I move, time moves along, old friends are forgotten.

    Glancing through the yearbook of 1972 the other night, I remembered every one of my classmates, even ones I did not know well at the time. 
Several had a band, a retro group that in the early 1970s played 50s
music, their act complete with leather jackets and slicked-back hair.  Instead of individual snaps of these guys, they did a band photo in their stage attire. 
They were pretty good as a mock-rock band and actually ended up performing long after graduation.  They made quite a name for themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area until a few years back.  One or two years
ago they were up for a reprise gig when one of the members (another classmate) died unexpectedly.

    I knew all these guys, but was never close to them, so the passing of one
of them didn’t hit me like Mike’s.

But it was the announcement of Mike’s death that led me to my long-unopened yearbook with grainy black and white photos.  When I came upon the photos of close friends, I had to ask questions for which I don’t know the answers.  One photo showed a recently-married couple.  In this day and age, you have to ask at least mentally, are they still together? A few classmates had become lawyers. Still at it?  I know from recent class notes on the
Saint Mary’s alumni homepage, that classmates who went into high school teaching right after graduation have been able to take early retirement through buy-out programs designed to retire higher-paid teachers.  What are their second careers?  Another classmate once lived in Canada.  Still there? 
 
    It seems like I should know a few of these things, but I don’t.

    The twists and turns of keeping in touch. And the odd ways that old
friends and acquaintances return to your life.

    Soon after we were married, Marianne took a Notre Dame summer class. 
The first day, she came home talking about her new classmates and
mentioned one by name, a Christian Brother out from California for a summer degree.

    “Not Brother Edmund?”  Could he be my Saint Mary’s classmate?

    The next class meeting, Marianne put the Saint Mary’s Alumni Directory at Brother Edmund’s seat.  When he came in, he glanced around the room.  Zarzana is not a common name but when first introduced to Marianne he had not put the two together.  He should have asked about a connection; it’s not a name like Murphy or Smith or Kelly. 
 
    Small worlds do exist.

    On Saint Mary’s alumni webpage this past week, I found out Brother Edmund is now principal of a Christian Brothers high school in Berkeley, California.  I’m a department chair; he’s a principal; a classmate is gone. 
Time moves on.

    This all made me realize yet again how important it is to cherish each day and each friend.  I think this is one of life’s main messages, but daily routine can smother us so we forget it.  We need to relearn it.  And it takes a jolt to shove this message back into the forefront of our lives. 

    Take the sentence, “Life’s too short for. . .” and fill in the blank.  Life’s too short for bad coffee or cheap wine.  Life’s too short for putting up with this or that nonsense.  Life’s too short for wasting on an unfulfilling career. 
 
     For some, life is just all too short, period.

    When an obituary arrives out of the blue, making you realize how short life really can be, it’s time to remember and reconnect.

    I hope you make time this summer for just that: connecting and
reconnecting with family, with friends, and with your own past.

         Riding home from campus on my bike the other day, I passed by a house that is a residence for adults with developmental disabilities.  In social work parlance, it is a group home.  Two residents were each pushing lawn mowers down the street while a third talked to a neighbor.  These residents had a caretaker with them who was kindly walking along keeping the three on task.  This across-the-street neighbor was kidding the men, all in their late 40s or older, because he had seen them out at a local restaurant the other night.  He was needling them for all the BBQ ribs they ate. The good-natured chiding, the laughter, the warm feelings:  it may have been a work crew finishing a long week together or a bowling team after a tournament.  Guys having fun.  Guys sharing a laugh with one of the guys.
             
     I found the sight heartwarming.  
           
     I know one of the residents by name, Tom.  He is quite the Notre Dame Football fan, as I am.  I owned a few ND shirts I didn’t want anymore and made it a point of dropping them by his residence several years back.  He
still lights up when he sees me.  This was during the darker years of ND Football when the Faithful (Subway Alums or graduates alike) needed to rally to the cause.  Tom was right there.
           
     This particular residence has 4 or 5 adults.  It’s a stable group.  I think Tom’s lived there for about 15 years, a few of his housemates about the same. Every workday, a bus gathers them up, drives three blocks to a second group home and gathers another 4 or 5 adults, and off they all go, lunch boxes in hand, to productive work in a sheltered workshop or another business here in Marshall.
            
     As a homeowner, I appreciate these group homes because their lawns are
cut, their siding, windows, and roofs are in good shape.  I don’t want to cast aspersions at any other neighbors in these tough economic times, but the two nearby group homes look far better than several houses around here.  And at first glance you would never suspect these homes are in fact used for institutional purposes.   
         
     I know at SMSU every few weeks, yet a third group of adults with
disabilities comes up to collect recycling.  This particular group is not as high
functioning.  But their caretaker moves them along and they complete their task in a satisfactory manner.

    When we were first married, Marianne worked for an agency with the long-outdated name of “Council for the Retarded.”  In charge of this agency’s PR, Marianne’s first task was changing the name to Logan, because their buildings were on Logan Street in South Bend, Indiana, and their campus had become known as“Logan Center.”  
       
     Of course, “retarded” was the term of choice when this agency first started about thirty years before Marianne joined Logan.  Retarded was a polite euphemism that became the vogue in the 1950s.  At that time, the parents of the children this agency initially served were proud of the name, Council for the Retarded, because few agencies or groups were doing much for their special-needs children.  Back in the early 50s, the correct medical terms and psychological titles for children and adults with these disabilities were idiot, moron, and imbecile.  If I had a child which the state and the medical community labeled as “moron” or “imbecile,” I’d feel that “retarded”was a much softer, friendlier label. “Oh, my son’s not an idiot;
he’s just slow or retarded.”  
      
     How times have changed.  

     About the time Marianne worked at Logan, the last of the Indiana state
hospitals for such adults were being closed.  These institutions had shunted children and adults with disabilities out of plain view, often out of parents’
homes.  In the 80s, group homes like the two in our neighborhood were becoming more and more common.  Two social forces met and agreed on this:  the cost-cutters who never loved any state agency and the social activists who saw warehousing high-functioning adults as cruel.  Warehousing is also self-fulfilling.  It suggests that “these morons can’t do anything else,” so well-meaning bureaucrats set up a system where the developmentally disabled could not do anything else.  But when given the chance, oh, how
these young men and women shine.  We see it every day. 
          
     Logan ran about six group homes when Marianne worked there.  I remember filling in for the caretaker staff one night to make sure the six residents were fed dinner.  I hadn’t barbequed on their grill before, but I gave it my best shot.  Well, the men loved my burnt chicken.  Loved?  They devoured it.  

     A few of them were workers at a South Bend steel finishing works.  They did all the labor of the regular crew.  In fact, a study of their work productivity showed they actually out performed some of the longtime workers there.  These guys were on time each day.  They were scrupulous about their break time and lunch time.  They punched in and out accurately.  They didn’t sneak off to smoke on the company’s time.

    When Logan bought its seventh group home, however, the neighbors raised a stink.  All of Logan’s group homes had to meet stringent State of Indiana regulations. So many bedrooms so there was no overcrowding; so many bathrooms; and an adequate suite for the live-in caretaker. Logan did not want to saturate any one neighborhood, so for the seventh home, it went into a higher-end location. This upper-middle class neighborhood had families with good sized broods of children, thus the houses were larger, well suited for Logan’s needs.

    It was only here that Logan ruffled some feathers. However, at a public meeting, the confrontational neighbors were embarrassed to hear themselves essentially saying they didn’t want “those kind of people” as their neighbors, saying that “those kind of people” weren’t welcomed.  As these complaining
future neighbors heard themselves speaking out, they grew humiliated and humbled by their own heartlessness and mean-spirited attitudes.  
  
     But what good neighbors the group home residents turned out to be.  The group home residents cut their own lawn.  When the guys realized there were two widows on either side, those lawns were cut also.  And what guy can
resist a powerful snow blower?  Plus, South Bend is in the Great Lakes’ Snow Belt.  So, three driveways got cleaned up early every morning it snowed. Baked cookies soon replaced complaints as reluctant neighbors realized what great new neighbors they had.

    Marianne’s second task at Logan was getting the PR ready for the International Summer Special Olympics which were being held at the Notre Dame campus.  By the time the Games were held, my new teaching position across state had moved us away from South Bend and her job at Logan, but the experience has stuck with us.

    Special Olympics.  Group homes in residential neighborhoods.  The
clerk at a local supermarket here in Marshall helping me load my bags of
groceries in my car.  The visible and normal lives of our fellow citizens with special needs.  No longer labeled as morons, no longer warehoused out-of-sight, no longer shunned.  
 
     They’re carrying their lunchboxes, going to work, and every once in a while packing away the BBQ ribs like one of the guys.