Composer, Educator, Conductor, Blue Jack Music, Making Music Work
I am surrounded by refugees of one kind or another every day.
Most of those I know are under 4 feet tall.
They have hopes and dreams.
The adults in their lives have hopes and dreams.
Some of those dreams are nightmares.
I’m around kids all the time. So are you.
My feel for them may differ from yours because Mondays through Thursdays, my job is to teach them, to guide behavior, to help keep their ever-spinning wheels mostly on the ground and between the lines.
Through our days together, I occasionally deal with depression. Both mine and theirs.
September 11 is my wedding anniversary. My wife will never forgive Al Qaeda.
I say this with no smile.
Instead of having dinner with her that night in 2001, I was making plans with the Washington headquarters to head to NYC as part of a special Red Cross Disaster Response team.
I was a Response Specialist at the time. I got to New York September 14. Times Square was empty. Lower Manhattan looked like a set for a sci-fi movie – all dust and floating paper. Then there was the smell.
This past week, I attended and participated in a prayer service at a Mosque.
At Imago Dei Middle School, I co-teach a 7th grade religion class with the Reverend Susan Anderson Smith. Each year we visit different sacred spaces – Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish – so students get first hand knowledge of what each is like.
We have Christian services at the school twice a day and a Eucharist every Wednesday, so it’s not like they aren’t exposed to Christianity as well.
