ALTE: What You Need to Know
More suddenly than we feared given covid generated printing delays, ALTE issue # 10, Suddenly, has been mailed. We are grateful we have heard from so many of you. If you have not received your copy, or if you would like to be added to the mailing list, please let us know. Our email is altetogether@gmail.com. Note “subscription” or “mail” or something like that in the subject line to help us respond promptly. For snail mail write to ALTE, POB 111, Accord, NY,12404. The next issue of ALTE will be an open topic issue. Email your submissions, no snail mail submissions, please. Note “submission” in your subject mail. We really love to read your work.
Other news in the ALTE world, another Passover Zoom get together is in the works. Mark your calendars for Monday, April 18, 2022, at 7 p.m. My compatriots here at ALTE did not know that April 18 is Patriot’s Day, the traditional running of the Boston Marathon and a day off work in Maine and Massachusetts. It commemorates the beginning of the Revolutionary War, the date memorialized in Longfellow’s poem to Paul Revere. Longfellow, famous in his day, has been underrated, in my opinion, for the last century. The 20th century moved away from poetry that landed hard on rhyme and meter. Ironically, with the explosion of rap and hip hop, I hear echoes of Longfellow, but I digress.
April 18, 7 p.m., Zoom party. You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know anyone else on the call. I don’t know many of you. How am I supposed to meet you, and I really do want to meet you, if I cannot see your face in one of those tiny squares? For the Zoom link, which will go out a few days before the event, again email altetogether@gmail.com. Note “Zoom link” or “party” or something like that in the subject line to help us stay organized.
Yes, we are all tired of Zoom. We never even heard of Zoom before the pandemic, and now we are so tired of Zoom, so tired. Fear
not, in addition to our Zoom April event (Please, please, please come) we are also planning in-person events. No specifics yet, but stay tuned to this space for more info. Our hope is something later in the spring or early summer. We shall see.
Have you visited our website lately? You can find all the issues of ALTE there along with writings too long for print, etc. You can find books and items for sale in the “Pushcart.” Please check it out.
https://www.altegettingoldtogether.com
If you’re on Facebook, join us in the lively ALTE Facebook group. As I’m writing, I am uncharacteristically watching a basketball game. It’s on in the background in any case. Retirement, for me, involves a lot of different little, or not so little, projects. ALTE (Please come to the Zoom party and send us submissions) is one of those projects, another is teaching a class in the graduate public administration program at St. Peter’s in Jersey City. Teaching there really seems to suit me. So, I am watching the St. Peter’s basketball team, the underdogs, and hoping they win.
Retirement is a misnomer for many of us who no longer work full-time at something at which we formally worked. I’m interested in hearing about the kinds of things all of you are doing.
In the meantime, I hope for peace and wish there were more I could do.
Longfellow is wonderful, forgotten and pleasure to - at this age- reread. Thanks for the pitch.