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Recently I was on a volunteer literacy Zoom meeting, a group founded by a famous writer who is now, like me, in his sixties. One of the insults aimed at wrong headed guidance to teenagers was “adulting.” This caused me to speak up and suggest they stop using a word that is, in reality, a phase of life that almost every child I have taught wants to reach. Not to be dull or boring or weirded out by awful things like balloon mortgages, income tax, and the need to floss but so they can be independent and make choices based on lawful behavior and their own dreams. Peter Pan is a cautionary story, not one that paints paradise as a place where children remain children forever. Tinkerbell protects Peter from reality and Peter causes great harm by thoughtless, irresponsible, and selfish behavior. He is a child and in a grown man that is a terrible thing.

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I don’t actually know the future of teaching. I left the classroom for good after 2009 and started my own company. I left because the huge high school where I taught was where ideas went to die. Every grant I applied for and received; a poet in the classroom, a digital storytelling week in Washington DC using the National Museum for our visuals, organizing Poetry Out Loud events resulting in a student going to Springfield to recite her poem, a special class to study the short story at the University of Chicago, a weekend seminar on Mark Twain and the final insult, the theft of my proposal for a writing center supported by Northwestern writing tutors and the head of the Northwestern Writing Center was greeted with indifference and in the case of the Writing Center, betrayal.

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Recently, I became interested in the idea of grief as an inheritance. I am a second generation Irish American, whose father, because of the Great Depression, was left in an orphanage for a year at age six, whose grandfather, whom I never met was described to me, or at least as I can remember through the mysterious prism of childhood, as dying in an alley. He was an alcoholic, his charm reported to be boundless but whose thirst killed him alone and penniless. My father was a brilliant, funny, loving man whose personality was transformed when he drank to excess into a violent, angry, and cruel man. He suffered deep guilt but did not stop drinking and that was our family’s shadow.

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