Essay Inspirations
Some mornings I'm just lucky. The other morning I awoke to news out of Oregon that teachers need training that encourages “ethnomathematics.”---it seems that White supremacy manifests itself in the focus on finding the right answer when doing arithmetic. You can't make this stuff up. It takes a liberal. What a subject for an essay. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. It is so easy, I think I'll put it on the back burner…just waiting for me to pick it up any time and run with it.
A lot of essays are prompted simply by memories. The animal essays like “My Dog, My Hero” go way back. Sometimes my essay subjects are old friends who have passed away: “My Friend Jim.” My town sometimes causes me to write about it: “Our Town.” My interest in art has caused me to write about the subject: “Art: It's My Nature.” Being that we have and have had cats for years, that's another subject which comes up occasionally: “Counting Cats.”
After my first hundred essays, I began to wonder if I would run out of subjects about which I could write. Then I realized that subjects of my essays are practically endless…be patient, John.
I think most of my subjects come from interaction with folks. Folks say something that makes me think of a subject. “What's All This Israel Stuff” was prompted by a coach friend asking me this astonishingly naïve question, “What's all this Israel stuff?” “LSU and Other Things I Don't Lose Sleep Over” was prompted by the agony over the fate of their college football teams some of the folks I know suffer. “You're Not the Boss of Me” was a reaction to folks trying to tell me what to believe. “The One-Eyed Man” resulted from a dream. Although I may have written it anyway, “Holy-Moly! We Went to the Moon!” was probably brought to mind because I have a friend whom I correspond with regularly who made a career at NASA. I don't write about political issues much, but just to keep me from busting a seam, I occasionally write one like “The Ol' Double-L, a Sovereign Nation” which was a reaction to the Obama administration. Sometimes I write about historical figures I admire: “The Most Interesting Man in the World” is my thoughts on Thomas Jefferson. Probably the oddest way I came to write an essay was “Javelina Yawns”: I was watching TV one evening, when the close up image of a javelina caused me to yawn in response to its yawn.
Although the pandemic has put a bit of a crimp in my personal interface with folks, which is a marvelous source of subjects for my essays, I've survived it so far, but I'm looking forward to the time when a friend's comment will lead to new subjects for my essays.
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