I owe God nothing but thanks – thanks for everything I ever had.  Yes, I owe Him for great parents, for great schooling, wonderful interests, amazing women (whom I never really knew or understood), the high school captaincy of the basketball varsity, the presidency of my class, fantastic teachers, clean air, clean water, and the list goes on.  I lack only the knowledge of how to return the favor.

I worked thirty-one years in the public schools of this nation of idealistic men and women, and an additional ten for good measure in a private school, but that is far from enough.  In attempting a thank you, I got a novel on the Amazon best seller list (only for a day or two) – how do you thank a God who keeps giving?

In my declining years I owe him for a few sincere friends and a wife more stellar than the stars; what more dare I ask?  Must I go to my grave an ingrate?

He was called a momma’s boy, but the name hardly stuck, because outstanding virtue obliterates shortcomings.  His mother was lame and arthritic, lived in a town-subsidized apartment, and was a widow.  But he was there regularly with groceries and to run a million errands for her.

What were his shortcomings?  He never mustered the energy to court a girl, to be polite to strangers, to advance beyond assistant to the president of a security firm, or to go on a vacation where he could meet a girl.  He was just run-of-the-mill.  But some people loved him.  They saw the great service he performed, and that blanked out any shortcomings, right?

Wrong.  It took the turn we’ve seen with our President.  He’s done great things for this nation, but people mock him for his tweets, for his impetuous statements, for his lack of courtesy.  What he has to endure is almost Biblical.

Paul did not want to go to Fairfield, though in the end I am happy he did.  I don’t ask much of a university.  All I ask it for a boy is that they keep the flame of his self-educative instinct alive, and Fairfield did.  He went there despite his protest because they offered me a financial package, for a teacher I guess, and so Paul was on his way.

He did indeed have that self-educative instinct.  He crossed the USA hitchhiking, got into trouble in California (I bailed him out), and came home to earn a Master’s degree with money he earned as a librarian at New York Tech.

And then!  He became an adjunct English professor at New Jersey’s Paterson University in northern New Jersey, surpassing his father, and rounding out a life that left only a few achievements to be conquered.  God bless that son!

In the course of my education I took a course on the history of the English language.  Naturally I was interested in how the   suffix –burg, as in Fredericksburg, got into English from the German Burg, or castle.  Of course, the Angles and the Saxons were German tribes who invaded England.  Well, Burg became a burg, or fortified town, as languages change, and now I have my own American town, alias Barbara Fritchie.

I found out that the good monks who copied documents often mistook a g for a y, and so we have Westbury instead of Westburg.  We also have Queensboro from Queensborough from Queensburg, and Salisbury from Salisburg.

Let me correct you: we don’t have raspberry from raspburg.

I have been called a racist by a relative who took offense at my criticism of Pres. Obama, he little knowing that I started my work among the blacks in my college days when I gave up one summer to go to Kingstree, in one of the Carolinas, to teach young black children their catechism.  I sat with them in the garden, and we tried a stint at memorization.  I also indulged in explanation and possibly reasoning—after all, I was a college student.

My work continued teaching high school, with one year of unknown effects, and in Montessori School, where my efforts produced excellent results for years.   I regret that George Floyd died, and that civility died as a result.  A black police chief was killed by looters, and added to the chaos was criticism of a President’s efforts to stop the mayhem with Federal troops.  Were people blind to the presence of chance in the whole affair?  They invoke it when talking about the need for the moral law.  Because a white man broke it, should hundreds of blacks follow suit?