Dr. John Townsend: Unhelpful things people say

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The Day Our World Changed

November 13, 1989. 11:30 AM I had just finished my lunch in the teacher's workroom and was walking back to my classroom. I was teaching at San Jacinto Elementary in San Angelo, Texas at the time. Up until then, it had been a typical November day. As I walked past the school office, the door swung open, and a fellow teacher stepped out with a look of concern on her face. She spoke directly to me and said, “Your wife’s on the phone, and it sounds serious.” I ran into the office, took the phone, and heard my wife say, “I don’t know what happened, but your brother is on life support in a hospital in Austin.” Twelve hours later, my father and I were sharing a room in a hotel on I-35 in Austin. My sister-in-law, Sandy, and her six-year-old daughter, Araceli, were in a room across the hall. I hardly slept that night. I would doze off and suddenly wake up to my father crying and calling out my brother’s name. My brother was dead. Osiel had collapsed that morning while his h...

Try not to laugh too hard

So we finally gave in and bought a Wii. It turns out that it's a lot of fun. Unfortunately, my kids were having fun at my expense. I was trying out the boxing and had no idea Bethany was video taping me. The jerky movement at the end of the clip is Bethany shaking because she was laughing so hard.

Lessons from a cross country meet

This past Saturday morning, Lillian, Ryan, and I went to Ballinger for a cross country meet. Ryan and Micah are part of the Cornerstone team that came in second place in their division. It was a great meet, but the the real drama came at the end of the race. There was a young man running in the race that was so far back from the rest of the pack that he came in about 10 minutes after the rest of the field had finished. In fact, most of the people watching the meet had already left, thinking the last runner had finished. Several of the workers had already put some of the equipment away, and the water girl was rolling the water containers away when she was told to come back because there was one more runner still out. Finally, the young man came into view as he entered the stadium for the final few yards. As he approached the finish line, the few people who remained, including me and my wife, encouraged him with applause and tears. Why tears? Because we knew the background story. Just on...

Jehu Hernandez

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