About Me After completing a BA at NYU in dramatic literature and journalism, I gathered my ideals and doggedly pursued a career as a playwright. That year of writing, meetings, and rewriting was an occupation but hardly a career. To offset the mounting pile of unpaid bills, I got a job copyediting at a financial newswire. It’s difficult to conceive the notion that the years melt away, but it’s true. I got married, we made plans, we moved, and I awakened one morning to find that eighteen years as an editor had passed. In the interim we had left the Upper West Side, where I had lived for a decade and a half. We chose a quiet community in central New Jersey. While I missed New York culture—the downtown variety of experimental theater and classics, the museums, the galleries, the art houses, and Strand Bookstore—once in Monmouth, I discovered other things to savor: the horses wandering the fields, the goldfinches at the feeders, the egrets on the reservoir, the deer that emerge at dusk to watch the cars pass. On the way to the train station one morning I spotted a red fox on the edge of a hayfield. It was one of those miraculous moments in which he turned and our eyes met, neither of us startled, as though we often passed each other on the way to work. There was something elegant and defiant in the way he ambled along the road. In fact, he seemed to begin his day with a lot more conviction than I, for the news business was changing, and I had begun to consider careers that were more meaningful to me. Teaching was not a new idea. In observing our modern, complex society I have been struck by the idea that the social groups that have traditionally offered guidance have faded away. The extended families that explained life’s challenges, that taught principle and integrity, for the most part no longer exist. Instead, we’re left with the more fragmented structure of townships and neighborhoods in which people rarely see each other. In simple terms, traditional support groups have largely been replaced by popular culture and our schools. American popular culture, however, has its own agenda, fomenting what Christopher Lasch has called a “culture of narcissism,” a self-absorbed, frivolous society centered on consumerism. Why teach English and why is it a required subject? Great literature often addresses the idea of finding meaning in the hubbub of living. Some writers ask how that meaning relates to the quest for the American dream, or what might be described as Thomas Jefferson’s call for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But what makes us happy? Possessions? Fitzgerald, Miller, Steinbeck, Huxley, and, indeed, much of the literature in the high school language arts curriculum (Thoreau!) tangle with the notion that materialism—the possessions that popular culture connects with happiness—might well be antithetical to true happiness and fulfillment. I often think back to the fox in the hayfield. Choose well and walk with conviction.