CharlesPaolino's Blog

Now that I’m back to teaching, I’m used to being the one giving assignments. But I have been given an assignment which can be summarized as follows: “Blog!” I don’t know when I’m going to find the time – to say nothing of where I’m going to find the original thoughts – to sustain this journal, but I know an assignment when I hear it. If there were any chance that I wouldn’t recognize it as an assignment, it came with the word “assignment” explicitly stated. So within the hour I had opened an account on WordPress and posted this first message. This process reminds me of my days in college radio, when I often wondered while I was talking into the microphone whether anyone but the engineer and I were listening. In a way, that was part of the romance – especially on a night shift, when there was nothing but darkness outside the studio window and the engineer in his den seemed oblivious to anything but his own thoughts. My own mind wandered while the records were turning, but the call I dreamed of never came, that throaty whisper both exciting and thrilling: “Play ‘Misty’ for me.”