daily prompt

My Duck Companion

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

If you are reading this page on a Windows browser, there should be a logo on left side of the tab at top, a little green-brown-yellow blob. I first placed it there as an inside joke with myself, but the story is worth sharing. The full-size photo is at the top. (Most of this first appeared in a post from December 2013, “A Duck About Town.”)

It is a photo of a duck. The photo was taken in 2013, and it was added at the last second on the very first post written later that year. If you have looked at this web site once or a thousand times (thanks, mom!), the duck has been there, on whatever device you use, each time. It is this site’s mascot, a companion to each piece I write.
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School’s out for Summer

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I taught freshman composition at two upstate New York colleges in the early 1990s for five years. My last class met for its final session at the conclusion of the fall 1995 semester, just over two decades ago now.

From the start of my last-ever school term, 20 autumns ago, I knew that this was going to be my final semester teaching or attempting to teach or even putting the word “teacher” on the line marked “profession”; thus, of course, two of the three sections that I worked with that semester were two of the best, brightest, most entertaining groups of students I had yet worked with, and they almost made me regret my decision to retire at age 27. Almost.
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A Father’s Day Memory

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Some memories are of the photograph of an event and no longer of the incident itself, but some feel to the rememberer like they are a photo, with the details so clear and so accessible. This is one memory … it feels like I could count the rocks in the creek bed if I would just take the time.

Today is Father’s Day. It is a difficult day for my girlfriend, as her father died in February 2016, a sad fact that brought us together in our house-that-is-becoming-a-home.

My father will be 82 in August 2017. That sentence, while I know it to be factually accurate, has the effect of making me feel like a child lost in the mall. Where am I? Where have I been? If August 15, 1935, is known for anything, it is not known for the birth of my dad but for it being the date that the comedian Will Rogers and famous aviator Wiley Post died when Post crashed their airplane north of the Arctic Circle near Point Barrow, Alaska. (The plane was not de-iced because no one yet knew that that would be necessary. Barrow and Post may have been the first celebrities to have perished in a plane crash.)
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