…so I’m doing the Post of the Day again:

What are the three most memorable moments — good or bad, happy or sad — in your life? Go!

I actually don’t have a terribly entertaining answer for this, unless it’s possible that it entertains you that it took ten minutes of thinking about it before the birth of my son entered my mind as a possibility.  Maybe the fact that I’m the worst dad in all of human history is funny to people; I dunno.

Other possibilities (screw “three”) in no particular order.  Well, except the first one:

• Proposing to, and actually marrying, my wife.  Also in the category of “wife” memories: our first kiss, which is a story I ain’t tellin’ here.
• Finding out, over the phone with my landlord, who I’d given written permission to go through my mail, from three hundred miles away, that I’d gotten into Harvard.
• Giving the eulogy at my grandfather’s funeral.
• My first meeting with students as a classroom teacher, which… didn’t go terribly well.
• My first look at my students on the first day at Hell School in Chicago.
• Being lifted off the ground and tossed into a blackboard by one of those same students a few months later.
• Various “first girlfriend” stories that are probably perfectly predictable and I don’t plan to share.
• Weirdly missing: memories of graduations.  I remember very little of any of the four.
• Going into Jerusalem by myself while on a post-college dig in Israel, a story that I actually have told here.  Also: spending an evening lying on a beach in Tiberias during that same trip.

I am trying to come up with some that don’t feel like cheating or stereotypes.  May add more to this later.

More answers to this question after the jump.

Continue reading “In which I have no original ideas” →