I hadn’t planned on returning this August to the home town I couldn’t wait to leave. It seemed I had more urgent things to do than schlep by plane and bus to Durham, New Hampshire, where a gaggle of far-flung alumni from my high school—many of them strangers to each other and just about all them strangers to me—were convening to honour Eleanor and Frank Milliken, two wise and generous-hearted teachers who gave the best part of their careers to our collective intellectual development.

Have you lived a story you’re longing to write? Do you wonder what it takes to strike a universal chord with your own hard-won experience? Join me on Saturday, September 18, at Verity Women’s Club for an intimate, hands-on story fest in which we’ll work together as a group to refine your own writing.

Once upon a time, in the grip of a fever, I dreamed God spoke to me. Man, what a way with words! Imagine Shakespeare, Donne and all the other great poets from a bygone age, piped through an organ the size of Mount Everest. I awoke in a rapture, gropin…

Among the kids in my high school it was generally agreed that a certain English teacher made a fitting target for the casual cruelty that so often passes for teenage humour. We made fun of her hair, a frizzy cloud of indeterminate colour. We rolled our eyes at her makeup, a clownish blob of rouge on each thickly powdered cheek and a slash of too-bright lipstick that she seemed to have applied in the dark. We wondered where on earth she got those tubular knit dresses she favoured—and was known to put on backwards, as if she’d been distracted mid-toilette by an insight into Hamlet that she couldn’t wait to share with her equally distractible students, dreaming of love, sex and beer. What defied mockery was our teacher’s love for her subject and for us.

Once upon a time, many haircuts and compacts ago, I wanted nothing more than beauty. These days what I’m after is wisdom. I don’t know of any blow dry for the mind, any light-reflecting product to cover blemishes of the soul. But illuminating thoughts are out there for the taking—as you’ll see from these gems I found while reading. While I can’t claim they’ve made me any wiser, they’ve affirmed my faith in the existence of wisdom. And that’s a pretty good start.

My Mother’s Earrings

Decided to wear my mother?s earrings while visiting… Posted by Cup of Tea.

I expected to remember Helen Thomas, the legendary White House correspondent who retired this week at 89 after holding presidents to account for close to half a century, as a model for my own old age—scrappy, tenacious and relentlessly committed to her craft. “I think I’ll work all my life,” she once said. “When you’re having fun, why stop having fun?” Why, indeed.

When I first ventured onto Twitter at the urging of more cyber-savvy friends, I thought I’d died and gone to that accursed nether region of hell that is politely known as high school. Then I found some good reasons to stick around.