Welcome!

I’m Chris the voice behind the writing and the eye behind the camera for Roamrambleread.com.

 

 

The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown asks children to deeply think about the importance of the ordinary things around them using repetition, rhythm, structure–the simple devices of literature. The book has been around since 1949 just a little longer than I’ve been around.  Children approach the book with glee and delight and remember it long after it has been read to them.

 

 

In a sense this is what I’m hoping to do–take the ordinary, but often the extraordinary, and think deeply about it through research, writing, quotes and photography.  I have no agenda while I’m roaming, rambling, and reading–just find things that interest me–photograph them and write about them.  I hope you approach my blog with glee and delight and remember it at least a little while.

 

 

 

Let’s get philosophical.  The Important Book raises the question of whether everything that exists has an essential property.  The distinction between essential and accidental properties dates back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle who thought that there were certain features of a thing that it could not lose and still be the thing it was–the essential properties.  The accidental properties could be transformed without  changing the essence of the thing.  Another way to put it is that the accidental property of a thing is one that it happens to have but that it could lack.

Think about the color of your hair.  You will remain yourself even if you dye your hair. But what are the significant features of yourself?  Your personality?  Your interests?  Could you still be you even if you no longer enjoyed your passions in life?

The Important Book says that the most important thing about you is that you are you.  But what exactly does this mean?  Is there something that makes each of us the individuals that we are?  The optimistic German philosopher Gottfried W. Leibniz (1646-1716) thought that everything that is true of us is equally important to making us the individuals that we are.  What do you think is the most important thing about you–that thing that makes you you?

 

About Me

The Essential Properties

Imitating Margaret Wise Brown’s structure

The important thing about me is that I have always been a teacher. 

It is true that when you are a teacher you have to “teach something” but you have to always learn as you’d live forever.

You always have to have a sense of awe, a sense of curiosity, a sense of inventiveness, a sense of individuality, a sense of originality.

You have to know more today than you knew yesterday.

But the important thing about me is that I have always been a teacher and if I lose these things I won’t be me.  

Accidental Properties

I was born in Germany.  My father was stationed in the Army in Germany when I was born. It’s been one of the things I love to say rather haughtily:  I was born in Germany.  Big mistake to say to Europeans because they expect you to know something–like how to speak German.  I’ve been put in my place.   

I am an only child.  I was never lonely.  I had plenty of playmates as my mother can attest to.  She was always listening to me playing teacher with all my pupils–alone in my room.

I picked up my first camera in high school in Japan.  I tried other things that I failed miserably at:  playing the guitar, writing poetry, writing short stories in the style of Guther Grass, painting cubist art.  I had plenty of time back in the 60’s without a television and a car.  

I went to college in Illinois.  Culture shock and shock to my ego.  Four years in Japan with long blonde hair down to my waist.  Girls on trains in Tokyo touching my hair and giggling.  College in the middle of a corn field with one out of three girls with blonde hair down to their waists.  

I’ve been married for 45 years.  I met my husband my second day in college and we’ve been together ever since.  I still nag, he still resists.  We complement each other.  Although he does seem to be picking up my bad habits.    

 

I have two children and four grandchildren. My children are successful, happy (I hope), have spouses we love, and don’t live close enough now that there are grandchildren.   

I’ve always had dogs. I enjoy training dogs and my two Labs are therapy dogs.  Both Labs were welcomed into our home when they were thirteen months old–around the age when people decide, maybe, they didn’t want a Marley after all. 

 

 

I’ve taught elementary school, middle school, high school, and college–about 10 years at each level.  I never could decide what to do as a teacher–too much to learn.  I’ve found kids are kids no matter what age.  I’ve actually had a handful of kids as kindergartners and then had them in class their first year in college.  Guess what–they hadn’t changed!  Just bigger and hairier.  

 I love food and drink.  But I don’t like to cook. I don’t buy frozen or prepared food.  I do like to chop and slice so we eat salads full of fresh or roasted vegetables and often with grilled meat (via husband).  Twice a year I host one of my book clubs and pour over recipes and fix four courses.  Then I rest on my laurels for six months.  

About Roamrambleread.com

My husband was asked to work in Poland for three months.  We arrived in Krakow, Poland February 2018 and he went to work and I stayed home.  It was bitter cold outside but what fun taking pictures, but I, especially, loved being holed up in our sleek modern apartment with free time.  That lasted about two days.  Then I discovered I had time to edit my photos and get to know my new Surface Pro laptop.

I’ve always embraced technology even though I was slow to “text” and have my phone on all the time.  My daughter would ask when she was in high school:  What good does it do to have a phone and you don’t turn it on so we can get hold of you?  Point taken, but around me I saw mothers darting off to “rescue” their children–mine became self sufficient even to this day–taught them well.  They’d actually probably credit this to their father whose very presence commanded:  You know the right thing to do; I’d expect nothing less.

I knew I could start a blog on a free website, but I wanted something a little more “sophisticated.” Sophisticated became synonymous with complicated but my stints as yearbook adviser and a failed attempt to finish a Photoshop class at our local community college paid off and I signed up for web hosting and WordPress.

In 2017 Time magazine commissioned Brazil-based photographer Luisa Dörr to create portraits of 46 women who are changing the world.  Luisa uses an iPhone for the portraits.  In the Time article she talked about the freedom of being able to carry her camera around in her pocket everyday, everywhere instead of the stress of carrying around a bagful of lenses and batteries.

 

 

Ninety-five percent of the photographs on my website are taken with my iPhone–thank you Luisa for the inspiration.  Ninety-nine percent of the photographs are taken by me except for a few and they are footnoted as to the photographer (usually my husband).   I do miss the anonymity of a zoom lenses when I want to get up close and personal with people.

I text all the time now and actually get mildly perturbed by friends that don’t text.  Everyday “The Family” text messaging is flowing back and forth across the ocean.  It still “blows my mind” that I can message, send pictures, or call in real time.  My father spend 18 months in Korea on what the Army called a hardship tour when I was in fourth and fifth grades.  The only communication:  hand-written letters.  The saying:  Absence makes the heart go fonder–has become obsolete.

More information on Leibniz–the most interesting philosopher you’ve probably never heard of.

The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is chiefly remembered today, when he is remembered at all, for two reasons. First, he invented the calculus — independently, most scholars now agree, of its other inventor Newton. And second, he authored the provocative statement that this world is “the best of all possible worlds.”

The diversity of Leibniz’s interests and undertakings is dizzying. How are we to make sense of a man who contributed prominently to so many fields, including both religion and science? In our day, it is common to think especially of religion and science as either pulling in opposing directions in their respective understandings of the world, or as parallel but different domains. How did they hang together for Leibniz?

One of the hallmarks of Leibniz’s vast undertakings is that he strove to unify his kaleidoscopic interests into a single whole that deeply integrated faith and science, philosophy and politics, and shaped both his public and private life. This complex effort is difficult to summarize, but Maria Rosa Antognazza, author of an indispensable 2009 intellectual biography of Leibniz, captures its essence about as succinctly as possible when she describes Leibniz’s project as an “all-encompassing, systematic plan of development of the whole encyclopaedia of the sciences, to be pursued as a collaborative enterprise publicly supported by an enlightened ruler,” the final goal of which was “the improvement of the human condition and thereby the celebration of the glory of God in His creation.” The motivating force of Leibniz’s life’s work was his optimism, which grew out of his philosophical and theological convictions. It is perhaps best understood as the optimism of a scientist who believed not only that science was going to get the truth but also that the truth was something worth getting for its practical and moral benefits.