The wise, wizened old Teacher sat in the shade of the towering jacaranda tree. His attentive, eager students sat on the fresh green grass and wanted to hear answers to questions over which they, and generations of questioners before them, had puzzled. The Teacher, instead of reciting lectures from his notes, turned the tables and asked his young acolytes to think through the issues with dialogue, argument, and debate. “What is the purpose of learning?” he asked. An hour of thoughtful, sometimes heated discussion followed. He carefully summed up their ideas by way of conclusion, added some of his own insights, and then left the students to continue their dialogue…

We were walking in thick Vancouver fog with our little daughter, age two-and-a-half. She was testing her wings in the park where we had gone for some family time. She ran ahead of us into the dense white cloud only to find that we had disappeared from her sight. There was an exuberant shriek, and she ran back into our view and our welcoming arms. It quickly became a game. Off she would run, again and again, each time with greater confidence, testing her ability to be out of sight, shout, and excitedly come running back to safety. It would be several years, in adolescence, where she would be ready…

I am filled with gratitude for my Mennonite roots. At age ninety I have spent more than half of my life away from that community, but the anchor of my life has always been the deep, unfathomable, and permanently sticky, connection to that community and its special people. A sociology professor once explained “marginal man” as people born to the immigrant parents who had decided to live in a new and unfamiliar country. Their children have learned to live partly in the country of their parents’ origin and its beliefs, language, and culture, partly in the new country. Theirs is a dual identity, he said, so very many years ago,…

Peter and Ernie don’t know each other; they belong, however, to the family of creative story tellers. Peter tells stories of his contemporaries as though on a mission. He sees it as his duty to describe the foibles of people in his cultural group in order to maintain the ethical standards of the community and to warn his acquaintances of the danger of stepping off the familiar and acceptable path. He is the community’s moral watchdog. Many of his stories, he recognizes, are colored by a highly active imagination and this makes the telling an entertaining event. He can talk about someone’s indiscretions with an enthusiasm that grips the full…

An old friend from college days was now professor of English at a small college in the States. It was the early seventies, and he was teaching a class of sophomores when, suddenly, two local police officers walked briskly into the classroom. One officer stayed at the door, hand on his side arm, the sergeant marched to the front of the room, and announced in clear tones to the surprized professor that he was now under arrest. The big, muscled cop turned Jack against the wall, had him spread-eagled, frisked him, then roughly and quickly he was hand-cuffed. Without further words, the cops briskly led Jack out of the room,…

The wise, wizened old Teacher sat in the shade of the towering jacaranda tree. His attentive, eager students sat on the fresh green grass and wanted to hear answers to questions over which they, and generations of questioners before them, had puzzled. The Teacher, instead of reciting lectures from his notes, turned the tables and asked his young acolytes to think through the issues with dialogue, argument, and debate. “What is the purpose of learning?” he asked. An hour of thoughtful, sometimes heated discussion followed. He carefully summed up their ideas by way of conclusion, added some of his own insights, and then left the students to continue their dialogue…

We were walking in thick Vancouver fog with our little daughter, age two-and-a-half. She was testing her wings in the park where we had gone for some family time. She ran ahead of us into the dense white cloud only to find that we had disappeared from her sight. There was an exuberant shriek, and she ran back into our view and our welcoming arms. It quickly became a game. Off she would run, again and again, each time with greater confidence, testing her ability to be out of sight, shout, and excitedly come running back to safety. It would be several years, in adolescence, where she would be ready…

I am filled with gratitude for my Mennonite roots. At age ninety I have spent more than half of my life away from that community, but the anchor of my life has always been the deep, unfathomable, and permanently sticky, connection to that community and its special people. A sociology professor once explained “marginal man” as people born to the immigrant parents who had decided to live in a new and unfamiliar country. Their children have learned to live partly in the country of their parents’ origin and its beliefs, language, and culture, partly in the new country. Theirs is a dual identity, he said, so very many years ago,…

Peter and Ernie don’t know each other; they belong, however, to the family of creative story tellers. Peter tells stories of his contemporaries as though on a mission. He sees it as his duty to describe the foibles of people in his cultural group in order to maintain the ethical standards of the community and to warn his acquaintances of the danger of stepping off the familiar and acceptable path. He is the community’s moral watchdog. Many of his stories, he recognizes, are colored by a highly active imagination and this makes the telling an entertaining event. He can talk about someone’s indiscretions with an enthusiasm that grips the full…

An old friend from college days was now professor of English at a small college in the States. It was the early seventies, and he was teaching a class of sophomores when, suddenly, two local police officers walked briskly into the classroom. One officer stayed at the door, hand on his side arm, the sergeant marched to the front of the room, and announced in clear tones to the surprized professor that he was now under arrest. The big, muscled cop turned Jack against the wall, had him spread-eagled, frisked him, then roughly and quickly he was hand-cuffed. Without further words, the cops briskly led Jack out of the room,…

The wise, wizened old Teacher sat in the shade of the towering jacaranda tree. His attentive, eager students sat on the fresh green grass and wanted to hear answers to questions over which they, and generations of questioners before them, had puzzled. The Teacher, instead of reciting lectures from his notes, turned the tables and asked his young acolytes to think through the issues with dialogue, argument, and debate. “What is the purpose of learning?” he asked. An hour of thoughtful, sometimes heated discussion followed. He carefully summed up their ideas by way of conclusion, added some of his own insights, and then left the students to continue their dialogue…

We were walking in thick Vancouver fog with our little daughter, age two-and-a-half. She was testing her wings in the park where we had gone for some family time. She ran ahead of us into the dense white cloud only to find that we had disappeared from her sight. There was an exuberant shriek, and she ran back into our view and our welcoming arms. It quickly became a game. Off she would run, again and again, each time with greater confidence, testing her ability to be out of sight, shout, and excitedly come running back to safety. It would be several years, in adolescence, where she would be ready…

I am filled with gratitude for my Mennonite roots. At age ninety I have spent more than half of my life away from that community, but the anchor of my life has always been the deep, unfathomable, and permanently sticky, connection to that community and its special people. A sociology professor once explained “marginal man” as people born to the immigrant parents who had decided to live in a new and unfamiliar country. Their children have learned to live partly in the country of their parents’ origin and its beliefs, language, and culture, partly in the new country. Theirs is a dual identity, he said, so very many years ago,…

Peter and Ernie don’t know each other; they belong, however, to the family of creative story tellers. Peter tells stories of his contemporaries as though on a mission. He sees it as his duty to describe the foibles of people in his cultural group in order to maintain the ethical standards of the community and to warn his acquaintances of the danger of stepping off the familiar and acceptable path. He is the community’s moral watchdog. Many of his stories, he recognizes, are colored by a highly active imagination and this makes the telling an entertaining event. He can talk about someone’s indiscretions with an enthusiasm that grips the full…

An old friend from college days was now professor of English at a small college in the States. It was the early seventies, and he was teaching a class of sophomores when, suddenly, two local police officers walked briskly into the classroom. One officer stayed at the door, hand on his side arm, the sergeant marched to the front of the room, and announced in clear tones to the surprized professor that he was now under arrest. The big, muscled cop turned Jack against the wall, had him spread-eagled, frisked him, then roughly and quickly he was hand-cuffed. Without further words, the cops briskly led Jack out of the room,…

The wise, wizened old Teacher sat in the shade of the towering jacaranda tree. His attentive, eager students sat on the fresh green grass and wanted to hear answers to questions over which they, and generations of questioners before them, had puzzled. The Teacher, instead of reciting lectures from his notes, turned the tables and asked his young acolytes to think through the issues with dialogue, argument, and debate. “What is the purpose of learning?” he asked. An hour of thoughtful, sometimes heated discussion followed. He carefully summed up their ideas by way of conclusion, added some of his own insights, and then left the students to continue their dialogue…

We were walking in thick Vancouver fog with our little daughter, age two-and-a-half. She was testing her wings in the park where we had gone for some family time. She ran ahead of us into the dense white cloud only to find that we had disappeared from her sight. There was an exuberant shriek, and she ran back into our view and our welcoming arms. It quickly became a game. Off she would run, again and again, each time with greater confidence, testing her ability to be out of sight, shout, and excitedly come running back to safety. It would be several years, in adolescence, where she would be ready…

I am filled with gratitude for my Mennonite roots. At age ninety I have spent more than half of my life away from that community, but the anchor of my life has always been the deep, unfathomable, and permanently sticky, connection to that community and its special people. A sociology professor once explained “marginal man” as people born to the immigrant parents who had decided to live in a new and unfamiliar country. Their children have learned to live partly in the country of their parents’ origin and its beliefs, language, and culture, partly in the new country. Theirs is a dual identity, he said, so very many years ago,…

Peter and Ernie don’t know each other; they belong, however, to the family of creative story tellers. Peter tells stories of his contemporaries as though on a mission. He sees it as his duty to describe the foibles of people in his cultural group in order to maintain the ethical standards of the community and to warn his acquaintances of the danger of stepping off the familiar and acceptable path. He is the community’s moral watchdog. Many of his stories, he recognizes, are colored by a highly active imagination and this makes the telling an entertaining event. He can talk about someone’s indiscretions with an enthusiasm that grips the full…

An old friend from college days was now professor of English at a small college in the States. It was the early seventies, and he was teaching a class of sophomores when, suddenly, two local police officers walked briskly into the classroom. One officer stayed at the door, hand on his side arm, the sergeant marched to the front of the room, and announced in clear tones to the surprized professor that he was now under arrest. The big, muscled cop turned Jack against the wall, had him spread-eagled, frisked him, then roughly and quickly he was hand-cuffed. Without further words, the cops briskly led Jack out of the room,…

The wise, wizened old Teacher sat in the shade of the towering jacaranda tree. His attentive, eager students sat on the fresh green grass and wanted to hear answers to questions over which they, and generations of questioners before them, had puzzled. The Teacher, instead of reciting lectures from his notes, turned the tables and asked his young acolytes to think through the issues with dialogue, argument, and debate. “What is the purpose of learning?” he asked. An hour of thoughtful, sometimes heated discussion followed. He carefully summed up their ideas by way of conclusion, added some of his own insights, and then left the students to continue their dialogue…

We were walking in thick Vancouver fog with our little daughter, age two-and-a-half. She was testing her wings in the park where we had gone for some family time. She ran ahead of us into the dense white cloud only to find that we had disappeared from her sight. There was an exuberant shriek, and she ran back into our view and our welcoming arms. It quickly became a game. Off she would run, again and again, each time with greater confidence, testing her ability to be out of sight, shout, and excitedly come running back to safety. It would be several years, in adolescence, where she would be ready…

I am filled with gratitude for my Mennonite roots. At age ninety I have spent more than half of my life away from that community, but the anchor of my life has always been the deep, unfathomable, and permanently sticky, connection to that community and its special people. A sociology professor once explained “marginal man” as people born to the immigrant parents who had decided to live in a new and unfamiliar country. Their children have learned to live partly in the country of their parents’ origin and its beliefs, language, and culture, partly in the new country. Theirs is a dual identity, he said, so very many years ago,…

Peter and Ernie don’t know each other; they belong, however, to the family of creative story tellers. Peter tells stories of his contemporaries as though on a mission. He sees it as his duty to describe the foibles of people in his cultural group in order to maintain the ethical standards of the community and to warn his acquaintances of the danger of stepping off the familiar and acceptable path. He is the community’s moral watchdog. Many of his stories, he recognizes, are colored by a highly active imagination and this makes the telling an entertaining event. He can talk about someone’s indiscretions with an enthusiasm that grips the full…

An old friend from college days was now professor of English at a small college in the States. It was the early seventies, and he was teaching a class of sophomores when, suddenly, two local police officers walked briskly into the classroom. One officer stayed at the door, hand on his side arm, the sergeant marched to the front of the room, and announced in clear tones to the surprized professor that he was now under arrest. The big, muscled cop turned Jack against the wall, had him spread-eagled, frisked him, then roughly and quickly he was hand-cuffed. Without further words, the cops briskly led Jack out of the room,…