Of turtles and tutors

It's a Sunday evening. I happen to be sitting by myself in the living room as Gven Golly finished painting the kitchen cupboards - she's the handy one, you know - and I'm enjoying a rum and OJ with some crackers and a pretty good Muenster while watching the Steelers lose a tough one to New England. Suddenly the TV loses channel 10, nothing but fuzz and static, so I click to PBS, where there's a Nature special on turtles - sea turtles, desert turtles, you name it - with the fantastic footage we have grown to expect from Nature specials in the age of electronic citizenship. Why go outside when the photography is so much better on Nature. Those ancient-looking faces with their patient eyes and amazing long necks, the look like they could live through just about anything.

Unlike yours truly. I was tired all day, except during the free class I taught at the Factory with a roomful of would-be taiji and qigong students. Very energizing it is, to get up on Sunday morning, gulp some coffee, and mosey up the street to find a roomful of aspiring mystical bodymind workers eagerly awaiting my words and other signs of wisdom. And how exhausting to spend the rest of the day trying to find things to do after that tough act to follow. So I read the paper, drink more coffee, eat lunch, reach another paper, watch a little football on the tube, pull weeds while names like Lavernues Coles and Orpheus Roye echoed through my brain, and make the north bank of the yard facing Plum Street a little less ragged. Small victories.

On that note, I am compelled to share a couple of priceless pictures of Jessi Golly and his pal Gavi, "the kid I tutor," that I got over the wire today.





Caption: We do his homework together. Mostly, it consists of learning to write the letters of the english and hebrew alphabets and learning spatial concepts like above/below, before/after, back/middle/front. And when we finish his homework we go outside and run around in the lawn outside his apartment complex, and sometimes we work on writing numbers.