Blog

My wife grew up in a very rural part of southern Poland. Very rural. This is an image from our 2017 visit.

When my wife and I were dating, I would often spend the afternoon with her Sundays in her home village of Jablonka (which means "little apple tree" in Polish). We'd have lunch with her family (often...

When we lived in Asheville, I worked for one year at a day treatment facility for kids who'd been expelled from alternative school. It was a tough bunch of mainly fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. At...

I was looking at the photographs of British/Polish photographer Chris Niedenthal when I saw an image of PKO Rotunda in Warsaw. Suddenly, I was back in Poland in 1996, experiencing the country for...

February. There's ice everywhere from snow packed on the road, snow compressed on the sidewalks, early melts in the fields that have refrozen. I am walking to the post office that's in the serve-all...

Borders are strange things -- they can turn our perceptions on our heads. Take Poland and Slovakia, for example. We generally think of Slovakia as south of Poland because, well, it is. But there are...

This evening, I got to meet many of you for the first time. It’s always a thrilling experience: I’ll get to know you over the next several months better, in some limited ways, than your parents and...

All my students agreed to a collaborative version of "Happy Birthday" for my son. He was thrilled. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGe3-aQE4w4

Now that spring is here, I thought I'd remind everyone what a real winter looks like. This is in Zakopane, sort of like a Polish Gatlitburg. My wife and I went there relatively often because her...

We're making progress with our Beta Club canned food drive...

The older I get, the more madeleines I discover I have.

I read “In the Family” four more times this week -- it was the fifth through the eighth time that I read it in two days. I’ve noticed a few more things about it after reading it four more times....