1 Toward the end of eighth grade, when kids turn fourteen, a girl I’ll call Delia volunteered to visit my home one afternoon a week to read class assignments to me. I was new to America and to blindness. During our reading sessions, work gave way to
Memoir
Bullying: What’s a Parent To Do?
1 My most painful experience of bullying occurred in a taxi. Each day for two years, from the age of eleven to thirteen, I shared a taxi with three or four other children to and from school. Why the taxi? We were in the first group of partially
Moral Compass
1 The subject that afternoon, our teacher, Mr. Slater, told us, would be how to play chess. "Chess is about checkmate, about trapping your opponent’s king,” he said from the front of the classroom. “It isn't about taking pieces. Only mediocre
Gratitude for My Violent Act
1 From the age of four until around my tenth birthday, my commute from the suburbs to my London school was at least an hour and a half each way. The coach, meaning a single-deck bus, ground through stop-and-start traffic along the non-postcard
Monkey Business
Here’s something I wrote when I was seven in one of my class exercise books that have miraculously survived the years: I have been to the seaside, Shanklin, in the Isle of Wight. We stayed there for a week. We saw the only traffic lights on the
A Lexicon of Character Formation
Mimicry is one of many skills I don’t possess. Even so, the people I’ve known over the course of my life have made their mark on me, and I hear it in the expressions I’ve co-opted from them. I’ll always recall from my childhood with affection and