A Summer's Day

This summer I came home on leave from Abu Dhabi where I was teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) to the Arabs of the United Arab Emirates. I was surprised while I was home by being recalled to my old teaching job by Holland Public Schools. I had been laid off almost three years ago. I was also surprised to find that my certification was still good.
Some might think it was a simple decision to make. I should be home with my family. But I loved working with the Emirati (Arabs of the UAE) and I loved interacting and finding out about people from different places and cultures. EFL was interesting work. It was not an easy decision to make and I didn’t have much time to think about it. I decided to put in a year here at Holland and keep my options open. This had the wonderful advantage of being able to spend my son’s senior year with him and also allow me to get at least one more year in so I could become invested in the retirement system in the state of Michigan.

But I want to go back someday. What I want in life is to do interesting things. If you have read my past blogs you should know how much Emerson and Thoreau have influenced my thinking. I do not want to get to the end of my life and find out that I had not truly lived.

But this discussion is far from where I am going with the video I have made just for this blog. As I have said, this blog is kind of my scrapbook. I wanted to record some of my impressions of my summer’s leave, not realizing that it wouldn’t just be a leave but a move home.
I did have a wonderful leave. One of the things that struck me this summer as my son and I went on walks is the presence of nature even in cities and developed areas. In my life I have seen the cities encroach more and more on farm lands and forests to the point that wild life has been forced to survive in what are now urban settings. All of the wildlife shown in this video are within cities. The wild canaries (American Gold Finches) are all in a little park in Holland called, Window on the waterfront; the heron was in “The Hundred Acre Woods” behind the Indianapolis Museum of Art on the north side of Indianapolis, and the rest of the wild life, the foxes and etc. were all behind my Parents house on the south side of Indianapolis, Indiana. For all that I was able to catch with my camera, there were many more I was not able to: red-tailed hawks, killdeer, tit mice, chickadees, deer and much more.
I’m kind of tuned in to nature. My eyes seem to naturally scan for trees, flowers, animals and, most particularly, birds. Birds are a moderate obsession with me. When I was in the UAE I would take note of the birds I saw quickly making metal sketches of them, their size, shape, tail length, colors, bands and so forth, so I could look them up later. One site I found very helpful was called, “Birds of Al Ain” which had quite a variety of birds that were collected by many people who had visited the UAE or had made outings and snapped their pictures and posted them with information about it.
So I took my little JVC video camera everywhere and when I had the chance, I took pictures of the birds and beasts, forest and fauna of the North American mid-west to post here for your enjoyment (inshallah) or for my “scrapbook”.