Dennis Sparks : All posts

Dennis Sparks' Things Observed

Two birds, one stone

Dennis Sparks | Contributor

Dennis Sparks' Things Observed

Better together than alone

Dennis Sparks | Contributor

An elderly couple navigated uneven terrain as they walked by the Huron River. Both were recipients of the accumulated infirmities that often accompany advanced years of life, one bent by the gravitational pull he was no longer able to resist as his partner hobbled next to him with a cane. They leaned into one another as they enjoyed the beauty of a summer day, sharing an outing that neither would have been able to experience alone.

Things Observed

The end of life: when an important conversation is often a difficult one

Gallup Park 2010

Dennis Sparks | Contributor

The most difficult and perhaps the most important conversations we can have with loved ones and doctors concern our preferences regarding the care we wish to receive at the end of our lives. Our culture makes it easier to talk about our sexual predispositions and personal finances than the quality of life we would like in our final weeks, days and hours. As a result, many of us avoid those conversations until it is too late, and, as a result, we are subjected to treatments that not only diminish the quality of our lives but also shorten them.

Things Observed

Substantive conversations are key to happiness

"Hanoi Conversation"/2007

Dennis Sparks | Contributor

[S]ubstantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people. —Rachael Rettner

While “small talk” can be a social lubricant and a way for strangers to find common interests, it cannot replace conversations of substance that offer deeper communication and value.

Things Observed

When less is more: Most of us would be happier by taking some things more slowly

Kristen Rizzo, daughter of Canadian artist Dave Rizzo, enjoys a slow start to the 2010 Ann Arbor State Street Art Fair.

Dennis Sparks | Contributor

I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier. —Thomas Jefferson

Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly. —Mae West

Things Observed

Choosing to pay attention

Nichols Arboretum at University of Michigan

Dennis Sparks | Contributor

Things Observed

Give the gift of listening

Dennis Sparks/Contributor

Things Observed

The tyranny of fear

2009 Ann Arbor 4th of July Parade

Dennis Sparks/Contributor

I’d rather be singing in the face of my fear. —Libby Roderick

The 4th of July reminds us as a nation to celebrate the independence and freedom granted us by our Founding Fathers and by the wise and courageous men and women who have preserved and extended those freedoms for more than two hundred years. I am fortunate and deeply grateful that I was born at this time and in this place rather than in the many countries on this planet that have during my lifetime denied basic human rights to their citizens and whose cruelties have taken the lives tens of millions of people.

Things Observed

Finding our “sweet spot” in life

Dennis Sparks | Contributor

I recently watched proud high school graduates cross the stage to receive their diplomas, with many of them breaking into spontaneous (or perhaps well-rehearsed) dances of joy at their accomplishment. Later I found myself thinking about my own high school years—which an objective observer would not have described as joy filled—and about the many ways in which middle school and high school experiences can have a profound and lasting effect for good or ill on the lives of young people, experiences that shape their views of themselves and their life plans.

Things Observed

Resilience in times of sorrow

Dennis Sparks | Contributor

Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.
—Helen Keller

Sleep evaded me as emergency sirens twice warned of approaching tornadoes, although I was exhausted after a long and satisfying Saturday in early June spent as a volunteer at Camp Heart2Heart, a program for grieving youngsters and the adults in their lives co-sponsored by Ele’s Place and Arbor Hospice’s Grief Support Services.

Television news reports showed the storms moving through the Napoleon area where just a few hours before 26 youngsters from age 5 to 15, 12 parents and other family members, and 27 staff members and volunteers had spent the day at the Storer YMCA Camp.

Things Observed

Lamenting the loss of veteran teachers

Dennis Sparks | Contributor

And what happens to the soul of a profession like teaching if experience becomes a dirty word? What message do we send to people who want to commit their lives to teaching and to children?
—Claus von Zastrow

This month thousands of veteran Michigan teachers and administrators will leave their classrooms and offices for the last time. At least for some of them, retirement was not on their minds when they entered their schools last fall, but recent cost-cutting legislation that offered a significant incentive for retirement served its purpose, and they will be ending their careers earlier than they had anticipated.

Things Observed

What it means to be an educated person

Dennis Sparks | Contributor

[I]n the past quarter-century, one narrow version of a good education—now thoroughly identified with a good schooling—has become the orthodox view among policymakers, civic and business leaders, parents, and students themselves. That version says a good education is one where a school . . . meets state curriculum standards, has satisfactory test scores, and moves all students successfully to the next level of schooling.
—Larry Cuban

Earlier this spring I stayed in a hotel in Mt. Pleasant not far from where I attended classes at Central Michigan University in the 1960s. That evening I used Wi-Fi to read the New York Times and AnnArbor.com, to review several blogs, and to connect with friends through email.

When I was a student at CMU, using information technology meant walking to the library to find a book or article that more often than not was checked out, misplaced or stolen. If out-of-town newspapers were to be found, they arrived several days or weeks late via the U.S. Postal Service. Professors and libraries controlled information, and being an educated person meant having a highly developed short-term memory for recall of information on exams.

Things Observed

Bullying requires a community solution

Dennis Sparks | Contributor

While bullying may be a perennial feature of childhood, its consequences can be profound and long lasting for both its victims and the bullies themselves, as recent local, state, and national news reports attest.

Things Observed

Brief trip reveals my inner Canadian

Critics of a single-payer health care system described the Canadian system as “socialized medicine,” so my inner Joe McCarthy was not surprised to find the Gao brothers’ controversial temporary art installation of Vladimir Lenin with “Miss Mao” perched on his head just a block from my hotel in Richmond, British Columbia. The installation was part of the Vancouver Biennale.

Dennis Sparks/Contributor

Jet travel has become commonplace, but for me it remains a miracle of sorts. On Thursday I got up in Ann Arbor at 5 a.m. and around 3 p.m. PT walked from the Vancouver airport into the splendor of British Columbia. To do so, I hurtled at hundreds of miles an hour some 35,000 feet about the earth inside a relatively modest sized metal tube that landed in the correct city on the right runway at its scheduled time. My inner child thinks that’s pretty amazing!

Things Observed

What this generation owes its children

Dennis Sparks/Contributor

Things Observed

Living on the steep part of the learning curve

“For children in past eras, participating in the culture of childhood was a socializing process. They learned to settle their own quarrels, to make and break their own rules, and to respect the rights of others. They learned that friends could be mean as well as kind, and that life was not always fair.” —David Elkind

Dennis Sparks/Contributor

“I’ll take my chances, I don’t mind working without a net. . . .”
—Mary Chapin Carpenter & Don Schlitz

Someone recently told me that she missed the old-fashioned card catalogues in libraries because of the books she would stumble upon while searching for others. While we talked I realized that, because I now almost exclusively use my computer’s dictionary, I no longer experience the joy of discovery in finding interesting new words while looking up a definition.

Things Observed

Things left unsaid from times of war

“Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.” —Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dennis Sparks/Contributor

I fell into conversation with someone I had known only slightly decades earlier while attending an informal social event on a Lake Michigan beach. We were alone by a bonfire in the gathering darkness as a light drizzle fell that drove the other partygoers inside. We stood silently, and then he began speaking slowly about spending time near this spot the evening before he was to report for induction into military service in the 1960s, the first step in a process that would take him to Vietnam a few months later.

Over the next half hour he haltingly told me about being a prisoner of war and about his escape to freedom months later. We were silent again for a very long time, both of us deeply moved by his story. He said he hadn’t spoken of those experiences in many years. I asked if he had told his wife and children. “No,” he said.

Things Observed

What I've learned from hospice patients and their families

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was within me an invincible summer." — Albert Camus

Dennis Sparks/Contributor

When asked on NPR’s “Morning Edition” about the enduring popularity of his 30-year-old best-selling book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Harold Kushner responded, "I feel just a little bit conflicted about the fact that it continues to resonate, because it means there are more people confronting new problems of suffering. There's always a fresh supply of grieving people asking, 'Where was God when I needed him most?'"

It’s only human to avoid human suffering whenever possible, so when I tell people that I am a hospice volunteer, they often say, “Why would you do that?” or, “I couldn’t do it, but I admire you for spending your time that way.”

Things Observed

Old age can be more than a death sentence

“Old age” can cast a long shadow over our life span, a shadow whose depth and length is diminishing due to advancements in our understanding of health, longevity and end-of-life care.

Dennis Sparks/Contributor

“I thought aging was just a horrible fact of life. I'm growing older, I'm going to fall apart — soon by the looks of it — and die,” a commentator on a recent NPR “Market Place Money” segment said. Upon second thought, he added, “But now, apparently, we have options.”

When I was in high school in the 1960s, my parents and other adults told me to enjoy those years because they would be the best of my life. (That was not good news because those were not the best of years.) Their experiences in the early and middle decades of the last century had taught them that the quality of life gradually declined across the decades until the infirmities of “old age” inevitably occurred in one’s 60s or even before.

Things Observed

When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground

Just as libraries connect the past and the present to the future, oral histories of a community’s elders extend the legacies of these individuals to generations yet unborn. They are a source of wisdom and experience that need not be lost when they are no longer with us.

Dennis Sparks/Contributor

I recently read that Canada’s last surviving veteran of World War I had died at age 109. Noticing the passing of this historic figure was not a chance occurrence for me because for decades I’ve been a regular reader of obituaries. I read them not so much to find out who has died or whether they are younger than me, but to appreciate and learn from the mini-biographies they offer and the social history they provide, particularly obituaries that appear in publications like the New York Times.

For example, recent issues of the Times included obituaries for a “writer in the window” who posted aphoristic responses to questions passersby taped to storefront windows behind which she sat, a 99 year old who had been the force behind New York City’s 1978 pooper-scooper law, and the savior of Jugtown Pottery in the Piedmont hills of North Carolina who the National Endowment for the Arts declared a “national treasure.”