Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Three Beautiful Things 07/18/17: Breakfast with Rita, Coffee with Kathryn, Dinner at the Pendletons'

1.  This morning I roared in Mom's Malibu south on I-5 to Creswell where Rita and I each ate a hearty breakfast sandwich at the Creswell Bakery. We talked about all kinds of things and looked at passages from Aldous Huxley's Perennial Philosophy and returned to Rita's house and sat on the porch and talked some more. Rita and I first started team teaching together in 1993. It's remarkable to ponder that that was almost twenty-five years ago and looking at Huxley's book brought back memories of many of the ideas we explored while teaching ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics, along with composition, together, opening, yes, our students' minds to many different worlds of new ideas, but each of ours, too.

Coincidentally, when I got back to our Eugene rental later in the day, a former student of ours from 1993-94 posted, on Facebook, a request for material assistance as she hosts her granddaughter. I thought back to all the writing this student did for Rita and me and all she's experienced over the years and how fortunate her teenage granddaughter is to have such a generous advocate helping her out this summer.

2.  Upon returning to Eugene, I met Kathryn for coffee downtown at Full City and we talked about all kinds of things, including the challenges of helping care for an ailing mother, cooking, mutual friends involved with the Saturday breakfast at St. Mary's, writing, and a host of other topics.

3.  The Deke and I spent the evening at the Pendletons' with Herb and Francoise and Miles and Bryce. Miles and Bryce were both the Deke's students at Charlemagne -- in fact, Miles was in the first class the Deke taught at that school and now he has graduated from high school and is off to the University of Miami in Florida. Another of the Deke's students, Joey, was also at the Pendleton's and so was Martha, the Deke's first principal at Charlemagne. It was a lively evening of cocktails, great food, and many, many stories and lots of laughter.

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