I am addicted. . .

to Panera coffee.  The dark roast blend.  Two percent milk.  Heaven!  Sugar, you ask?  I would no more put sugar in my coffee than I would heat up a bottle of Coke before drinking it.

       I often meet friends and acquaintances at Panera's, too.  Two days ago it was Kathy Vogel. Today I met two former students.  Terry Perrone, who I often see at the Fayetteville Panera's, was there this morning.  I taught Terry way back somewhere in the distant 70's.  Terry is a great guy who runs his own dance studio and drives one of the hottest cars you'd ever want to see.  He and his dance partner Carrie Lazarus of Channel 9 just won the Syracuse version of "Dancing With the Stars." Terry showed me an amazing photo on his computer of the two of them tangoing or something equally exotic.

I also saw Jill Tirabassi.  Jill was in my sophomore honors class in 2001-2002, the year I retired.  She's now a first year med student at University Hospital, and she comes to Panera's on weeks when she has tests.   Other med students come there on test weeks, too, and they study together.  Jill was a great high school English student and a really terrific person, but my most vivid memory of Jill is from September 11, 2001.  It was between 2nd and 3rd period, and the kids began coming in, buzzing about a terrorist attack that had supposedly just happened, and that they were hearing about in the halls.  I guess I was probably a little skeptical; it sounded like one of those wild, baseless rumors.  Then, Jill came into class.  "It's true," she said.  "A plane crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center."  Jill had been out of school for an appointment and had heard it on the radio.  So it was official, and that moment and Jill's words are burned into my consciousness forever.  For people of 55 or older, the news of the terroristic attack is like the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  Unforgettable.  Ironically, I was in English class then, too.  I was a junior in Mrs. Hassett's room when the announcement of that world-bending tragedy was made.

     I think that Chittenango Central School is a terrific school system with a history of fine administrators, but I remain, 7 and 1/2 years after the fact, terribly bothered by the lack ofreaction by the administration that day.  To begin with, it was criminal that the high school wasn't equipped with televisions.  Every U.S. teenager should have been a witness to the events of that morning, if only because a lot of them have served or are serving in the middle eastern wars, in part because of those actions.  Also, throughout the morning, the loud speaker in each classroom remained silent.  If ever there was a time for a calming comment from a person in authority, it was then. Enough on my soapbox.

  In writing it seems to be the era of the "memoir."  People are pronouncing it affectedly as "mem-wah," now.  Give me a break!  It's like how "homage," properly anglicized for decades, has become "oh-modge."  Using mem-wahs or memories is great in writing, though.  I got an e-mail from Highlights Foundation announcing that they are offering a workshop on using memories in writing.   Another of my vivid memories is the 13 days in 1962 called the Cuban Missile Crisis.  I was in 10th grade and for almost 2 weeks, my friends and I thought we were about to get nuked.  I have a partially written, partially fictional mem-wah about those days which I titled THE SOCKHOP AT THE END OF THE WORLD.  Interestingly enough, it was Rich Wallace, who does workshops for Highlights, who told me I should write about that memory.