Last year 4,007,908 teachers toiled in our nation’s public schools, 3,197,000 of them in California. The last few years have been rough on students nationwide, what with pandemic lockdowns, distant learning, social-media saturation, and general…
Posts published by “Marilyn Davin”
King Lear laments that “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.” He’s referring to his daughter Goneril in the first act of King Lear, one of Shakespeare’s best known…
I remember standing over the hospital bed in my father’s bedroom, an hour before he died. He couldn’t talk anymore and thrashed from side to side in great agitation, his eyes rolling wildly in his…
Openly gay, black, 32-year-old basketball player American Brittney Griner walked away free as a bird from a Russian gulag seven hours east of Moscow in a prison swap with Russian Viktor Bout (pronounced “boot”) who,…
After reading his messages in the AVA for lo these many years, I finally met Craig Louis Stehr in downtown Ukiah. Having no idea of what he looked like (he emailed me an AVA profile…
When I was in high school my father would get home from his San Francisco law office at around 7 and, much to my mother’s chagrin as she shushed two hungry, complaining teenagers, walked over…
An Englishman I met on a kibbutz in Israel during the many international travel years of my youth asked me a question I’ve pondered ever since. Genuinely curious, he asked me in his measured, lilting…