My Rejection letters

Well I did get the job with both the Summit Academies, and with Hope High School. I ended up taking the job with Hope High because they offered me $31,000 which was less than I had wanted but not as low as the joke of an offer from Summit Academies which was $27,000 with no acknowledgement of my teaching experience.

For prosperity I will attach in this post all the rejection e-mails that I received from my Spring and Summer of applying for teaching jobs.

I'm posting my rejection e-mails in reverse chronological order.

This was the rejection letter from Lakewood Schools for a High School Science Teacher position.

July 5, 2005


Dear Candidate:

Thank you for your interest in the Science Teacher position at Lakewood High School. We were fortunate to have a number of outstanding candidates interview for this position.

After careful consideration, the position have been offered to and accepted by another applicant.

Once again, thank you for your interest.

Sincerely,

JoAnn M. Berkowitz
Director of Personnel

JMB/kr

Here is rejection letter from Lakewood for a Middle School Science teaching position.

July 5, 2005



Dear Candidate:

Thank you for your interest in the Middle School Science Teacher position at Emerson Middle School. We were fortunate to have a number of outstanding candidates interview for this position.

After careful consideration, the position have been offered to and accepted by another applicant.

Once again, thank you for your interest.

Sincerely,

JoAnn M. Berkowitz
Director of Personnel

JMB/kr

This is a letter of rejection from the Lorain County Joint Vocational School for a Science Instructor position, this was dated July 20th.

Thank you for taking the time to apply for the position of Science Instructor. We were impressed with your qualifications and experiences. I must tell you, we have concluded our search for this position and have offered the job to another applicant.

Please keep us in mind when considering employment opportunities in the future. Thanks again for your interest in the Lorain County Joint Vocational School.

Sincerely,
Michael S. Larson
Assistant Superintendent

This is a letter of rejection from Cleveland Heights-University Heights Public Schools for a Substitute Teaching Position, this was dated Aug 11th.

Job Posting: Substitute Positions - Daily - for Teachers / Educational Aides / Other Professional Positions
Posting ID: POS20040805000001
Location: Board of Education

This position has been filled. Thank you for applying and please feel free to apply for other positions in the District for which you are properly qualified.

This is another letter of rejection from Lorain County Joint Vocational School for an Alternative Learning Monitor (In-house Suspension Teacher), this was dated Aug 23rd.

Thank you for taking the time to apply for the position of Alternative Learning Monitor. We were impressed with your qualifications and experiences. I must tell you, we have concluded our search for this position and have offered the job to another applicant.

Please keep us in mind when considering employment opportunities in the future. Thanks again for your interest in the Lorain County Joint Vocational School.

Granted I applied for way more than five positions over this past spring and summer. However I believe that the school systems should a least give the meager courtesy of notifying potential applicants about their rejection instead of not communicating at all. I applied for many positions over the Ohio State Department of Education's Online Job database. Basically the schools just log on to the database and pull the applicants that they saw had applied. I cannot imagine that it would be very difficult to pull the names an e-mails of applicants an make a mail merge to send out a mass email of rejection.

Even though the letters of rejection above were generic and canned. I applaud them for having the common courtesy of replying back to me with a rejection letter.

Been holding my breath

Well its been a while since my last post, about eight months I think. Not to say that there has not been very eventful things happening in my life. Much has happened; Liam spoke his first words, walked his first steps, had his first birthday, and endured his first Harry Potter Book release party in these short months.


Don't you love Google Maps? 

To talk about where I live. Now I live in Lakewood Ohio in a nice and quiet neighborhood. We have lived here since May of 2005. We had to move out of the "Murder House" in February because our new neighbors were very abhorrent people who I don't feel like describing right now. They were so bad that we had to move ASAP when they moved in at the end of January. Let just say the fact that they moved in at 1am was the least bad thing we had an issue with. We then moved with the help of our friends Katie, Carol, Heidi, KC, Tim, Andy, and again with a lot of muscle from my brother Marvin. We moved our stuff to a self store, Ahmie's uncle's basement, her mom's storage area, and the bulk of stuff we moved to our friend Jenny and her baby's daddy's house in Cleveland Heights Ohio. This was not too bad we thought but it was tough to live without our own kitchen and on the third floor. It was just plain tough to cramp ourselves into the attic of her house. During our stay March to May my parents visited we were hoping to buy a house but the deal fell through and we decided to look for a place to live in Lakewood, we spent several weekends looking for an duplex before settling for a duplex on the same street as our friends Carol and Heidi. As you may have guessed we are still trying to "settle" into our apartment.

Working has been tough in the past eight months, I lost my QMRP (assistant manager) twice. The first one quit on me, and I said don't let the door slam on your ass on your way out; good riddance. The second QMRP I have her name is Maria Hisey, and I loved working with her she was my brain twin and was a really good QMRP. I believe she started working with me in February. We worked through some tough times but in May she was promoted to being the Manager in charge of the Supported Living division of my company NCC. I could not have been happier that she was promoted to this demanding position because she is very talented and this will suit her personality. But, I was sad and upset that I was finally ready to really work well with her and Susan our nurse as a management team and then she was tapped for this important position in our company. She is thoroughly challenged in her new position and I don't think she has ever met a challenge that she cannot conquer. Every now and then I talk to her and ask how she is doing she does have very much in her hands. She seems tired I hope that she is doing okay with work and her family, granted her children are all older, but it is tough to juggle work and home.

But, I digress.

Since the end of May I have been running Royalton House by myself and have been working very many long and hard hours to make sure things are done. Staffing has been okay but I had certain responsibilities that I could not delegate to others and thus ended up working many weeks for 50-60 hours. Since I did not have a second person at the house I ended up being on-call for over 2 and a half months. I have gotten to the point where I cringe upon hearing the work cell phone ring. All of this has caused much strain in my relationship with Ahmie. I know that I should be better with her. I feel that I am running all the time from home to work, running circles at work, and run back home where I try to take care of Liam and cook and other stuff. But by the end of the day I don't feel like anything. When I wake up in the morning I don't feel like doing anything, I don't want to go to work. Some days I spend at work plunged in deep despair, feeling trapped in this job. Some times I just stare at the walls or mindlessly surfing the web because I don't seem to be motivated to do much more than that. But I manage to do what keeps the house afloat but I did not have energy to expand my presence at work. I now have a third QMRP and his name is Charles Hester and of the 3 QMRPs that I have had Charles by far is more experienced then my other two QMRPs. I hope that he and I will have a good collaborative relationship. Although I hope Charles can tolerate a good surprise.

What about teaching?

Good Question. Cleveland has been a very difficult market for finding work as a teacher. Especially with companies leaving and school levies failing and the state of Ohio not able to properly fund its school districts, makes the Cleveland area a tough teacher market. I have tried since April to apply for various positions for local school districts, they take my applications but don't call back. This is tough for me. I found that being a teacher is my calling and really ingrained into the definition of who I am. It is hard for me to check websites for teaching jobs, applying for them and not get any response, or follow up and find that the position was already filled, but I get the "Check back with us there might be more positions opening up later". I was pretty ready to give up when Ahmie found several ads for teaching positions at local area Charter Schools, and a school for a Juvenile Correctional facility.

The first place I interviewed at was for the teaching position at the Juvenile Correctional Facility. It was an interesting experience walking into jail and having to walk through a metal detector but the job was interesting, but the job was a all year gig for 35,000 which was not so great when you factor the fact that you will teach or be at "school" all year. It required 3 weeks of training in Columbus which would be too much time away from Ahmie and Liam.
The second interview was for a position with Summit Academy for a position in Parma Ohio, which would not be too far of a drive. The school was interesting because Boy Scouting is used as a character development part to its curriculum, but the pay was really bad 27,000 and they did not count my teaching experience outside of their school so forget them.
The third interview was for a position with Hope High which is part of White Hat Management group of EMO's (think HMO for education). This job is in downtown Cleveland they gave me a range of pay between 28-32,000 and I will be teaching in a newly renovated building with new equipment, all of which excites me, and includes some off site training for some of the science teaching equipment which really excites me. The Principle Mr. Longino was very interested in hiring me, but he needed to process my file with his HR department. Unfortunately he did not submit the paperwork until Monday morning and has to wait for HR to finish their background check stuff before a job offer can be made. So I have been waiting for almost a week and I guess I don't have the patience at this time to be cool and calculating about this. I hope I will get the contract on Friday, because school starts on next Thursday.

It has been tough this summer for me, between work stress and the stress of trying to find a teaching job. I feel like a double agent, sneaking away time to work on my portfolio, filling out applications, sneaking time out to talk to schools and interviewing. But this last week I feel like I am barely breathing, holding my breath wishing for some change.

Winter Holiday Review

Well my parents and my brother Marvin are on their way home to New York right now. For the past week and a half my parents have been visiting with us in Cleveland. It has been an eventful week and a half with lots of snow and lots of my parents enjoying time getting to know Liam. But let me digress, the Winter Holiday really started almost 2 weeks ago.

Two weeks ago we visited New York for my Uncle Peter's 70th birthday celebration, which was really nice since last month we saw the passing of my uncle Joseph who was the older brother to both my uncle Peter and my Father. We also visited my aunt Pat and my cousins Gene and Wendy. On Monday the 20th Ahmie and I drove back to Cleveland with my parents for a visit. (We have been preparing for several weeks for this visit house wise at least.) My brother had finals that week and did not come to Cleveland until Thursday of that week. Of course Cleveland had a huge snow storm that week and we were buried under a foot and a half of wet snow. I did not spend as much time as I would have liked with my parents because I had to work. I spent half of Christmas day sleeping because I had to work a 3rd shift at work, which was not great.

Fast forward to today I took the day off so that I could spend time with my parents and get some family pictures taken.

As I'm closing the post now my parents are just boarding the bus back to New York from Cleveland leaving from gate 7 and will arrive in New York at 9 am.

Liam's first taste of Christmas

MMM... Santa tastes different. 

This picture was taken at my company's children's Christmas party where they had a Santa to pose with the children. The santa was good, his beard was real. Bogged with work, hopefully more to come soon

Heres to you Uncle Joe

In diapers -- report cards
In spoke wheels -- in speeding tickets
In contracts -- dollars
In funerals -- in births
In -- five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you figure
A last year on earth?
-"Seasons Of Love B" by Jonathan Larson

My uncle Joseph died last Wednesday. He had turned eighty years old this past July, we had just moved to Ohio and Liam was just too young to go to New York to see him. I learned about his passing last Friday.

Other than my uncle Peter, uncle Joseph was one of the few uncles that I can actually say I had regularly talked with and got to know a little. My father was 9th of 10 children so my father's side of the family is huge. He lived around Toronto Canada with my aunt.

Sadly we never brought Liam to see Uncle Joseph when he was in New York for his eightieth birthday. When I heard from my mom that he had passed. The news hit me like a stack of bricks. This really reminded me of the mortality of my parents. I know that my grandmother lived to her eighties so I know that most of my family is fairly long lived but I hope my father will live long enough to see Liam and his siblings grow up and maybe marry and have children, so my dad who is now 65 will have to live to at least his 90's. I hope that he will be around that long.

To mourn my uncle's passing I have for every night until when he will be buried (November 29) I pour wine, burn inscents, and leave food as an offering for my uncle. I say a prayer for his passing. I do all this for my own peace of mind, mourning rituals to me is for the living, it gives people a time and a way to deal with the death that wait for us all. It gives us a way to transform the pain and loss into something else something less scary. Since I can't be there for his funeral I can at least do this to mourn him.

"To everything
(Turn, turn, turn)
There is a season
(Turn, turn, turn)
And a time to every purpose
Under Heaven

A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep..."
"Turn Turn Turn (There is a season)" by Pete Seeger

We are all part of a cycle as some are born some must die. As I was overjoyed by the birth of Liam, I am sad for the passing of my uncle Joseph and I guess that is the way it has always been.

The Week that never ends!

Monday: November 1st

Day started pretty much ok not much done at work, caught up on paper work from my Friday off. Had a nice weekend with Sabrina and Eric when they visited this past weekend for Ahmie and My 5 year wedding anniversary.

Tuesday: November 2nd

Woke up at 8am and got dressed and ready to go vote. Got a phone call saying that the Medicaid Surveyor was at the house to do the annual inspection and asked me to come ASAP. So Ahmie and I went to our polling place and voted, unlike many other polling places around Cleveland our polling location had a short wait, 10 minutes or so when we were there voting. Got back home from voting and went to work.

Anxiously driving to work because the Surveyor comes once a year to inspect the operation of the house that I manage. If we don't do things "right" according to the standards set in the Medicaid standards I run the risk of being cited for deficiencies. Which requires action on my part to correct the deficiencies and so on. Plus my boss does not like the managers to have too many deficiencies from surveyors. The Medicaid surveyors have the right to pull funding from a place that they visit if there are too many problems seen. But this is only reserved for major problems, or not correcting problems identified.

I was anxious because we have not started preparing for the survey, I was hoping that we would start this week to prepare for this. I was about half way to work when I noticed that my car was running very hot as in line beyond the red in the temperature gauge. So I stopped the car at the first parking lot I could and looked under the hood. Some steam came out and I did not see anything out of place. So I let the car cool for 10-15 minutes and started the car again. This time the car heated up very quickly again. I was thinking "great', exactly what I need on the day of my first Medicaid survey. So I stopped at the first strip mall I found and called Ahmie about the problem. Then I called my boss Jessie and he said that he would pick me up. When I got there at about 11am, everything was pretty settled, the surveyor was going through the books. Ahmie and her mom were helping me with the car. Cindy was driving the car to Polaris Career Center to get it looked at.

Through the afternoon it went pretty well, another surveyor came and did an inspection of the facility. I got cited on a facility issue which is beyond my control, so I am not so worried. The other surveyor stayed and observed dinner and had some suggestions for the staff. Ahmie picked me up at 7.

But before that I was "initated" by Floyd who was an employee of mine. The staff have been talking about giving me an "imitation" for a week or two, so I knew it was coming. I got shaving creamed. Yes it was a little embarrassing, but I think the staff will have something interesting to talk about. I think little things like that strengthen work morale. (picture to post soon).

Coming home I took our old car (92 Saturn) home. We had given the car to our friend Libby and her daughter Katie. However neither Libby nor Katie took care of the car and in the end they did not want it. So Cindy and I took the car back Monday night.
When we got home we were glued to the election coverage. I stayed up past midnight knowing that we had little chance of having a Shrub free presidency for the next four years.

Wednesday: November 3rd
Woke up at 4 am to go to work. Rolled into work at 5 to be there for the Surveyor for her observations. For the most part the rest of the day was uneventful from the Survey. We had the exit interview at about 3 pm and I did not get any citations! Yes! After the exit interview I went home.

Ahmie had the bush blues after hearing Kerry's concession speech and was enraged that her mom voted for the Shrub. She was enraged because the whole reason that swayed Cindy's vote was a political cartoon of Kerry.

Ok enough for this post!

Halloween Fun

Halloween Costumes 

Here is a picture of us at church today. We were asked to dress up for the service although I spent most of it preparing food in the kitchen for the pot luck after the service. Liam was dressed up as a monkey, Ahmie was dressed up as a tree, and I was dressed up as the scariest thing I can think of ... (gasp) ... a ... Republican. It was so scary I could not bear to wear the home made button saying (Bush,Cheney 04) although if you read carefully it also said www.factcheck.com underneath.

The explanation is this, Liam is a monkey. Ahmie is a tree that nourishes the monkey, in fact the costume has a flap that allows Liam access to breastfeed. I am a republican who is interested in having the tree chopped down because Ahmie is an old growth tree, and am willing to allow it to be chopped down for pennies with no thought about the consequences. Scary huh.

This evening Ahmie, Liam and I went trick or treating unfortunately the pictures did not come out right. We walked around our street and trick or treated with Liam in my arms. Afterwards I manned the porch and gave candy to the neighborhood trick or treaters.

Liam is 5 months old today

Liam turned 5 months old today. After work this afternoon Ahmie, Liam and I went walking around Big Creek Park to enjoy a fleeting fall afternoon. Ahmie wanted to take some pictures of the park trails with the flaming foilage.


Father, Son and Mother Nature 

While walking around to find the paved walking path Ahmie took the picture above. He has grown so much in these five short months.

Been too lazy to blog lately.

I have been very busy with my new position as House Manager at Royalton House and have been pulling average 50 hour weeks the past three weeks. So between all that work and the kingdom of loathing, I have been a little too lazy to write enteries.

But here are some pictures of Liam from the past 4 months, enjoy.

I like trees.

I like trees. 

Here is a picture of Liam behind a tree at church two weeks ago. Ahmie did not want to take a generic picure of Liam laying on the grass so we leaned Liam against the tree here and he stood pretty well.

Daddy, name badges are yummy.

Daddy, name badges are yummy. 

This is a picture of Liam and I at Case Western Reserve University, for our reunion weekend 2 weekends ago. If you look carefully you can see that Liam is wearing a name badge with his name on it but it said class of '74 on it.

Hello Tree Again

Hello Tree. Again! 

This is a picture of Liam at church on a tree. The Sunday that this picture was taken the church was doing an animal blessing and we took our cat Artemis in for the blessing. Liam dressed up as a tiger (tigger) to show support for Artemis. Well we thought that Liam was a Monkey dressed in a Tiger costume. We thought people would get a kick out of the irony.

Hello Tree 

Fortune Cookie Analysis

I have a dirty little secret. I love eating Chinese food (duh, I'm Chinese). What I really enjoy when I go eat Chinese food is getting a fortune cookie at the end of the meal (by the way, fortune cookies are for Americans. Real Chinese restaurants don't serve fortune cookies at the end of a meal). I love the little messages enclosed, it is just fun to read and share at the end of the meal. Some people like to add the sophomoric epithet

... in bed.

However, I have always found fortune cookie messages to be good pondering points. Saturday night Ahmie, Liam and I went to a Chinese buffet restaurant to celebrate my Promotion. The buffet was cheap but not too good. Their fortune cookies were unpalatable. I actually spat the cookie out (which is rare for me, since I am usually not picky about what I eat) because it was really nasty tasting.

So my fortune cookie read:

You are interested in public service and would make an outstanding statesman.

Well I thought this really fit with my promotion since I will be working in a service which serves community needs. I am going to need to be a good statesman in order to win the confidence and respect of the people who will work under me.

Ahmie's fortune cookie read:

You will find an outlet for your creative genius and accomplish a great deal.

Well I think this is sort of obvious. Ahmie is a very creative person but her current outlet for her energy has been Liam and she is using her imagination to nourish, encourage and entertain Liam.

I hope for good fortune ahead.

Liam will be 4 months old on Sunday

It's hard to believe that Liam will be four months old tomorrow. Amazing how the time flies and is slow at the same time. As of two weeks ago Liam weighs 17 lbs and several ounces (which was a surprise to me). He is now 26 inches tall. According to the doctor she said that he is near the top of the growth curve. (I beam with joy at those words. God I must be a dad).
He now regularly turns over from his belly to his back and will scoot around on his back. His new favorite play things are linking plastic rings. Ahmie is still exclusively brestfeeding Liam and it is so cute when he falls asleep while feeding. He hugs Ahmie's breast. It's very sweet. I also enjoy watching him fall asleep when he is tired and all I have to do is talk softly to him and gently rub his head from the back of his head to his forehead. This triggers a reflex that babies have, which encourages the eyelids to shut.
Ahmie took Liam to Picture people for his 4 month pictures on Friday and she said some of them came out right and I will post those pictures as soon as I get them back. Some of you readers may say hey I thought Ahmie IS a photographer. Well we have a coupon and also they have props that we don't have so that is why.

Liam is 4 months old today, oh how time slowly flies.

Promotion

Tuesday I interviewed for a House manager for royalton house which is a small group home with 8 residents. Since starting with Northeast Care Center in the start of July I worked hard in the past two and a half months learning about how to run a group home as a Manager in training. So I was pretty much training for this position. I had only one other competitor for this position. That applicant is the current QMRP (Qualified Mental Retardation Professional) who has worked at the house for the past year of so. I thought the interview went really well although I did not feel very prepared for the interview. I dressed well, (I always do) for the interview and I think the old saying is true, as shallow as it may sound.

The Suit makes the man.

It's like a little ritual for me, preparing my physical appearance helps quiet my mind and focus on the interview ahead. The interview was fairly routine, questions about strengths and weaknesses, what I will bring to the position, how will I deal with staff. I addressed all the questions but my essential message was that I would be a good and effective communicator, I tried pretty much to address the question and tied it back to my central selling point. I think I showed a fair amount of ambition during the interview.

To be honest I will follow through with everything I said in the interview and communicate with the staff and residents to see what can be done together to maximize the benefit of staff and residents of Royalton House.

So Thursday morning, we had our monthly Admin meeting, which ran pretty routinely. At the end of the meeting Jessie the Executive Director asked me to talk with him for a second. He shook my hand and congratulated me on for being chosen for this position. I was shocked and really it almost felt a little unreal in retrospect. I have got to keep this information to myself because the other applicant has not been notified about their decision (the person should have been at the meeting but was not).

I am concerned about how the working relationship between the QMRP and I will be since we both applied for the position. I hope we can work well together.

Maybe communication will bridge this awkward divide.

Detachable License

License! Yay! 

I finally got my Ohio Teaching License. After a weekend at Sabrina and Eric's for their Handfasting, I got to check my mail at about 11ish Sunday night and found my License in a very unassuming mailer with Credentials Enclosed printed on it. I was expecting something larger and more official looking but hey I got my License.

I feel complete again. Even though I have learned about the fact that I had obtained my license last Friday. I did not want to proclaim this fact to everyone until I got the paper in my hand.

I feel like the narrator in this famous King Missile song if you replace the p-word with the word license, that would adequately explain my sense of loss and frustration of the past 2 months. However I don't think "Detachable License" would carry the same panache as the original.

I saw my License lying on a blanket next to a broken toaster oven. Some guy was selling it. I had to buy it off him. He wanted 22 bucks, but I talked him down to 17. I took it home, washed it off, and put it back on. I was happy again. Complete.

I am happy again. Complete.

3 years ago today

It started out like any other Tuesday morning, woke up at 6:30 am, showered, shaved, and ate breakfast, dressed while catching the morning news out the door by 7:30 am. Dropped my wife at work at about 8 am. Got to work at 8:30 printed my work for my Earth Science class. 8:45 I was prepping for my first period class. 8:55 am the bell rang, students herded in to my class. We start lessons, I think class went on for about 5- 10 minutes and I heard from one of my students coming late into class. A plane crashed into the World Trade Center. My students suddenly roared into talk and panic. I tried to reassure the class that there was probably some pilot error and that we should get back to our lessons. A few minutes later another student came into the room and said another plane crashed, and told us that Mrs. Clark had the TV on the news in the Computer Room.

Like my students, I had a mix of dread and curiosity, while I followed some students to the Computer room and I was shocked by what I saw. The picture of the Twin towers with smoke and papers blotting the blue out of the sky. I told my students to return to the class room, a few did but I did not force the students who did not want to go back to class. I tried to focus my students back to my planned lessons but we did not progress very much. None of us knew what was going on except that 2 buildings got crashed into and they are now burning. I spent the rest of the period trying to allay my students' fears. But during the middle of the period another student came in and said the Pentagon got hit by an airplane. Pretty much after that I tried even harder to keep my students on an even keel and told them to wait and not to be afraid.

10:30 rolled around and all the students crammed into the computer room and saw the footage of the collapse of the Twin towers, and the scene of chaos at the pentagon. My heart stopped and I felt sick. The rest of the day students trickled out of class as parents called their children to come home early. Nothing much got done that day. We spent much time talking about what was happening.

After work that day I went straight to my wife's school and talked to her and asked how her day was. She told me that she was teaching a student the Pledge of Allegiance to a student in ASL during the time the plane crashed into the Pentagon and expressed the same grief difficulty in teaching anything except consoling the grief and fears of students.

I remembered that the sky was the most brilliant hue of orange that evening, with no contrails in sight.

For about a year after that dark day I lit a candle for those who died every night.

I think I feel as many Americans did that day. We were united in our loss. Like many New Yorkers still to this day, I walk around with 2 tower shaped holes in my heart.

I took a minute and closed my eyes and reflect back on that day.

I guess you can't go home again.

Friday morning Ahmie, Liam and I helped transferred our title over to our friend Libby. We gave her our old ailing Saturn SL2; it still runs, but, just not like a dream. We recently bought a 96 Dodge Grand Caravan (yes a mini van. tho there is nothing mini about that car). Since we had to go to the title bureau which was located in downtown Cleveland and Ahmie also had to drive Libby to her doctor's appointment at the Free Clinic. Since we were half way to the Free Clinic already I wanted to see the Clinic since I had volunteered there during college.

I can remember the moment that I saw the poster advertising the Free Clinic's need for volunteers. It was the start of my sophomore fall semester, and Ahmie, Bryce and I were walking up the stairs of Sherman House, the dorm in which Bryce and I lived in. The poster was posted to the left of the door to our floor (2nd). I read the poster and picked up a card which was tucked into a pocket on the poster.

It was at that moment which leads to me achieving one of my life goals. I had since my turbulent teen years, always wanted to work on a crisis hotline. I guess I had always wanted to help other people. Hey you can't become an Eagle Scout if you don't want to help other people. I guess I always wanted to help in a meaningful way but stay anonymous.

During college (sophomore to senior years), I had volunteered at the Cleveland Free Clinic's Together Hotline. For 2 1/2 years I volunteered 4 hours of my Thursday night from 6 to 10 pm every week. The Together Hotline was a crisis counseling hotline we helped people from simple sex, drug questions to situations where callers were on the brink of suicide. From my fuzzy memories, I remember some chilling calls that I had helped callers through some rough moments of their lives.

The hotline room where the volunteers worked was a dim, narrow brick room in the basement of the free clinic. Tho' it may seem grim, the room was like a womb, the light was soft, and my heart was in the room when ever I was there. The yellowed white walls were covered with graffiti and sayings left behind by volunteers. There was a feeling of permanence, because during my time working there, the together hotline had been in existence for over 20 years. Part of my heart and soul was left behind when I moved to Virginia after I graduated from CWRU, I left with fuzzy memories of chilling calls where I tried to help others in need in very desperate situations, and times of change.

I was forewarned of the drastic changes that the free clinic had gone through in the past 5 years. In fact the old clinic is no longer there, it was torn down after a new clinic building was built adjacent to it. When I drove up Euclid Ave and under the RTA tracks. I saw the new building, and where the old building was, it is now a parking lot. It is a very nice looking building, Brick and concrete blocks and with large glass windows in the modern style. When I walked into the foyer/ admit area. The building was very clean and looks very much like a hospital admit area.

In the back of my mind I was comparing the old building with the new building. I remember that the old clinic was an old dingy brick building, with a very unassuming sign proclaiming that it is the free clinic, now there is a very artistic sign in front of the building stating that this is the Free Clinic. The inside of the Clinic in my mind was aging, dim and was well worn with plants everywhere. The floor was covered in old tile flooring that had a pattern of streaks of green with some other white streaks. The new admit area looks like any hospital admit area, bright, light colored walls, with light colored wood railings. I did not look at the floors.

I walked up the admin secretaries, and asked for the two people who I knew were the people in charge of the Together Hotline, Jane Loisdaughter and Deby Auberbach-Brown. The admin secretary calmly told me that they no longer worked there. In the back of my mind I knew that was possible. Then I asked the heart breaking question "Is the Together Hotline here anymore?" She answered no, again calmly. I thanked the secretaries for their time and I told my wife that I will go to work.

I don't know who the philosopher who said this. You can never cross the same river twice. That is true, the shape of the river changes, the speed of the flow changes, the water it self changes all the time and flows away. Perhaps it is silly of me to think I come back to the Free Clinic and think nothing has changed in the past 5 years, and that I would come back and walk in and see that nothing has changed. But, I was sad to find that the Together Hotline no longer exists. My heart ached, it felt like a long needle had been poked into my heart piercing my soul. I had hoped to come back and return to help other people anonymously when they need it most.

I now feel some need for some consoling but there is no one to call.

Liam's first purchase

Last night we went to Petsmart to buy a parakeet for Cindy. Cindy's old parakeet died a few weeks ago and Ahmie wanted to (let Liam) buy a new parakeet for her mom Cindy.

So as you can see


Do you take card? 

Liam made his first purchase.


They grow up quickly don't you think?