Rocco Maiolo's Ramblings and Musings

Rocco Maiolo ‏ @ roccomaiolo "Immature religion creates people who know what they are against, but have a very poor sense of what they are for." Richard Rohr Richard Rohr Meditation: Sharing in God's One Spirit http:// createsend.com/t/d-EF94B8FF0D 1D05B9   … 0 retweets 0 likes "What you see is what you are." Richard Rohr 8:57 AM - 7 Aug 2016   St. Catharines, Ontario "Human beings never behave more badly toward one another then when they believe they are protecting God." - Barbara Brown Taylor "True religion is not trying to make human beings spiritual.... Great religion is trying to make human beings human." Richard Rohr 0 retweets 1 like "...most problems are psychological and most solutions are spiritual." Richard Rohr

It’s 2:16 PM on a Tuesday, September 6 after Labour Day Monday and I’m not teaching. Second time in 30 years. The first time was three Septembers ago when I was doing chemo. I was told by someone that I should do something “special”, something out of the ordinary on the Tuesday after Labour Day. I had some thoughts: do a 9 AM driveby at the last school I taught and honk the horn... Do breakfast with some other retired teacher friends… Pull a lawn chair up in front of my former school and smoke a stogie… I have a friend whose mother was a teacher. For years she and her friends took a boat out on the harbour -- their school was close to water -- and rang the bell at 9 AM. I settled for going to café to read -- Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road -- and blog. Nobody believes me, but I’ve been thinking about all my teacher friends leading up to today. I wish them well. My daughter asked me if I was sad. A tiny bit, yes. But mostly I’m excited to do some things that, for ye...

All year, I’ve been looking forward to this: my last day of teaching. Now that it’s here, I’m pretty sure I’m not ready for it. How do you prepare emotionally for a 30-year career to end? The day started with a Facebook friend request from one of my grade 12s. My normal rule is to not Facebook friend students until after they’re graduated, but, hey, I’m retiring and, besides, this young man is 18-yrs-old. I went out for breakfast with 2 colleagues/friends. I asked, How do I commemorate my last day of teaching? One of these fellow teachers said, blog about it. Hence, this post. Went to my mailbox as usual. Got my attendance -- there are maybe 12 names on the list. Only one of them reads “send to office” next to the name which means we don’t know why she was away… likely truant (I love that word :) ). I compare this to my previous school where, on some days -- especially a day like this -- there would have been two pages of absence reports. Made my way to my first period ...

I've just finished reading Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman which I'd put off reading it until just recently. Even before all the bad reviews, it seemed to me like the book was a cash/publicity/marketing grab by the publishers. You've always got to wonder why something wasn't published way back when. Why did the author and/or publisher sit on it for decades? The answer is usually simple: it wasn't that good. But mainly, I didn't want to read Go Set a Watchman because I didn't want to ruin the special place To Kill a Mockingbird has in my heart. My main takeaway after having read it -- and after reading a few reviews -- is that it's sad that Harper Lee didn't write more/publish more. She obviously had a gift.  If nothing else, Watchman confirmed for me, at least, that Mockingbird wasn't a fluke. Lee had a rich, deep, measured voice in a dark time of American history that would have been a welcome inclusion to the canon of 1960s civil...

Richard Rohr's devotional, Love is One Body, is quite likely the most beautiful defence of church -- the expression of faith in Christ in a community of albeit flawed believers --  I've ever read.

This is my last Fall semester of teaching.  Barring a miracle change of heart or an unforeseen event, I will retire on June 30, 2016 after 30 years of service. So after making this monumental decision, this has become a year of lasts: the last Remembrance Day Assembly; the last time I’m in a room full of grade 10’s; the last time I teach The Merchant of Venice ; the last time I mark a set of Media Studies exams; the last time I have a semester turnaround day (because the next time I have a turnaround day -- in June -- I won’t be turning around.  I’ll be retiring). I had a thought this morning: I’ve taught grade 12 University English every year except in my first year and in this, my last year.  I’ve come full circle.  In my first year, I was rookie guy.  I was given the dog’s breakfast, as it’s called in the business: 2 Maths, 1 Science, 2 English and 1 Accounting. Café/Bookstore in Gorey, Ireland (not a book room:) ) The Science was lots of fun. Try/de...

The super short version: I'm still in near total remission :)   I had a scare about a month and a half ago when my blood test -- one day prior to a scheduled maintenance treatment -- came back with a dangerously low neutrophil count.         In normal people, the count should be between 2.0 and 7.5.  In cancer patients, they like it be between 1.0 and 2.0, especially in order to give you treatment.  Mine came back 0.1.  The long and short of it was that a) it was too low for treatment and b) I was in danger of picking up an infection (which I did and which landed me for a three day stay in the lovely Kindcardine, Ontario hospital while on vacation). My neutrophil count has been fairly low since originally being diagnosed a year and a half ago.  After my 0.1 count, my oncologist suggested that it might be time for another bone marrow biopsy.  That happened several weeks ago.  It came back negative -- which ...