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Newsletter Volume 7 Issue 14 March 17, 2021
I recently had the pleasure of talking with Tom Burns, whom I had known for decades as a colleague, but who moved to Minnesota in retirement. As he was talking about the many activities he and his wife Carol were engaged in, I chided him for not letting me know about any of those activities. I like to feature the activities of our members, but it is difficult to find out about them if I am not told! Both he and Carol agreed to write about some of their activities, and you can read their accounts below. Several themes emerge. “Successful” retirements can take many forms, some of which may look similar to what one did before retirement, whereas others may, on the surface, look different. In Tom’s case, he has been publishing some scholarly articles in his field and teaching courses at the University for Seniors of the University of Minnesota, Duluth (that I believe is similar to our OLLI). In addition to that, both he and Carol are working in different ways with school-aged children and volunteering with local organizations. Just by reading their descriptions, it is easy to see that in their volunteer work they bring their decades of professional experience into play in ways that make use of their knowledge and skills. Thank to both Tom and Carol for giving us a peek into their current passions!

I am very grateful to Gretchen Schulz, Ann Hartle, and Marge Crouse for help with editing and proofing.
In this issue:
Lunch Colloquium - Monday, March 22
Raymond Hill
“Considerations for a Post-COVID Economy”
Please scroll to read more below


Lunch Colloquium - Monday, March 29
Bradd Shore
“The Body Politic, The Body Poetic: Julius Caesar and Legacy of ‘The King’s Two Bodies’ “
Please scroll to read more below


Report - Lunch Colloquium - Tuesday, March 2
Stephen Crist
“Dave Brubeck’s Time Out: An Insider’s View of an Iconic Jazz Album”
Please scroll to read more below


Report - Lunch Colloquium - Monday, March 8
“Binge-Fest 2020-21: Seen Any Good Shows Lately?”
Please scroll to read more below


New Members
Karen Kuehn Howell
Please scroll to read more below


Faculty Activities
Gene Bianchi, Carol Burns, Tom Burns
Please scroll to read more below


Walking the Campus with Dianne
Please scroll to read more below
Lunch Colloquium - Monday, March 22, 2021
“Considerations for a Post-COVID Economy”

Raymond Hill
Senior Lecturer in Finance, Goizueta Business School

Zoom Meeting
11:30 am - 1:00 pm

Forecasting the future path of the economy is always an uncertain business, but even more so now when the path of medical recovery from the COVID virus is uncertain. In this Colloquium, Dr. Ray Hill, Senior Lecturer in Finance at Goizueta Business School, will discuss how we might think about the path to the post-COVID 19 economy. How quickly is the economy likely to snap back? Should we expect that the experience of the last year will result in permanent changes for some sectors of the economy? What does the tremendous increase in Federal government borrowing mean for future interest rates? Should we expect higher inflation as a result of the Federal Reserve’s injections of liquidity and the government’s huge fiscal deficit? Do economists have any reliable answers to any of these questions? And will Dr. Hill have any reliable answers to ours? Do come and find out.

About Raymond Hill:

Ray Hill earned his undergraduate degree at Princeton and his PhD in economics at MIT. He also studied at the Institut de Hautes Etudes Internationales in Geneva under the Fulbright Fellowship program. He began his academic career by teaching economics at Princeton, before leaving in 1982 to become an investment banker with Lehman Brothers. His work at Lehman included a seven-year stay in Hong Kong as managing director of its investment banking business in Asia outside of Japan. He returned to his native Georgia in 1993 and worked for ten years at Mirant Corporation and its predecessor, a subsidiary of Southern Company. During that time, he served as the company’s chief financial officer, except for an eighteen month stint as a CEO of one of the largest independent power companies in Asia, which was owned by Southern. In 2003, he joined Goizueta Business School where he is a Senior Lecturer in Finance.
Lunch Colloquium - Monday, March 29, 2021

“The Body Politic, The Body Poetic: Julius Caesar and Legacy of
‘The King’s Two Bodies’ “

Bradd Shore
Goodrich C. White Professor of Anthropology Emeritus


Zoom Meeting
11:30 am - 1:00 pm

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, long a staple of American High School English classes, has found new and disturbing relevance in contemporary American politics. Despite its familiarity to audiences, the play is far from easy to interpret. Generations of critics have failed to agree on the hero of Julius Caesar. Neither Caesar nor Brutus seems to qualify. Despite all the gorgeous speeches in the play, Shakespeare's view of Caesar's assassination remains murky. The old and politically sensitive “tyrannicide debate” made it hard for an Elizabethan playwright to condone Caesar’s assassination, while Caesar’s ambitions and personal weakness made (and still make) him an unlikely hero. But Shakespeare does have a point we can understand if we recognize the conflicted “body politic” of Rome itself as the play’s tragic hero. The opposed representations of Rome in the play mirror changing ideas of the nature of society alive in Shakespeare’s day (and far from dead in our own). Julius Caesar comes into view in a surprising new way when we see it as Shakespeare’s staging of grand social theory framed as a political tragedy.

About Bradd Shore:

Bradd Shore, who retired in 2018 as the Goodrich C. White Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department, has been at Emory since 1982. He did his undergraduate work in English literature at the University of California, Berkeley and his graduate work in anthropology at the University of Chicago. His graduate research was done in Western Samoa and was focused on the local modeling of personhood and selfhood – with an emphasis on ethics, conflict and social control. It resulted in his first book, Sala’ilua: A Samoan Mystery (1982), considered one of the earliest studies of ethnopsychology. He has long been known as a leading authority on Samoan culture and also as a foundational theorist of the cultural models school of cognitive and psychological anthropology. His 1996 monograph, Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture and the Problem of Meaning, was among the first studies to link multiculturalism to cognitive psychology, and was an effort to reformulate a conception of culture that could bridge the fields of anthropology and the cognitive sciences. It has become a keystone text in the field of cognitive anthropology.
 
The Heinz Werner Lectures he was invited to offer in 1997-98 yielded his third book, What Culture Means, How Culture Means (1998). And he has just completed another book, due out from Routledge later this year, in which he returns to the subject he’s loved since his undergrad days at Berkeley--Shakespeare and Social Theory: The Play of Great Ideas. (He has shared insights from chapters in that book with us before—in talks on Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet—and of course it’s the source of the talk on Julius Caesar he’ll give us at our Zoom Colloquium on April 5.)
 
At Emory, Bradd has been the recipient of the Emory Williams Teaching Award and served as Emory’s first Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Sciences and Social Sciences. For 10 years he served as director of Emory’s Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life (the MARIAL Center), securing three major grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the establishment and continuation and renewal of the Center.
 
Beyond Emory, Bradd has served as president of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, and in 2019, he received the SPA Lifetime Achievement Award that honors career-long contributions to psychological anthropology that have substantially influenced the field and its development.
Report - Lunch Colloquium - Tuesday, March 2, 2021
“Dave Brubeck’s Time Out: An Insider’s View of an Iconic Jazz Album”

Stephen Crist
Professor of Music History, Chair, Department of Music

Even if some of us are not jazz fans, for those of us present for the Emeritus College Colloquium on Tuesday, March 2, Stephen Crist’s exploration of Dave Brubeck’s iconic album, Time Out, was a true “session in the studio” for us all. More than the clips involving the music-making itself-- which were their own delight--we were introduced to an extraordinary human being. We were treated to the sense and sensibility of one of the great globe-traveling ambassadors of American jazz. Brubeck’s music and personal integrity illuminated the whole program. Beginning with this one famous album of Brubeck’s legendary quartet as a focal point, Stephen opened the larger horizon of a life-well-lived. The story of jazz seen through Brubeck’s life and achievements is both a quintessential American and a global story.
    
After a deft analysis of the quartet’s innovative experiment in musical time signatures in “Blue Rondo á la Turk,” “Take Five,” “Kathy’s Waltz” (we learned his daughter’s name was actually Catherine!) and other tracks on the album, we realized that Stephen was introducing us to the heart-beat of jazz itself: improvisation. Who knew that “Blue Rondo” grew out of Brubeck’s experience of classic Turkish rhythms heard in the streets of Ankara? Who knew that the lovely, lyrical “Strange Meadow Lark” issued from a Western meadowlark’s call and a train ride, and involved splicing in outtakes of an earlier piano solo introduction? Who knew that Brubeck cancelled an entire tour in the South in 1960 because questions were raised about his bringing his African American bassist, Eugene Wright, simply because he was black? Who knew that the quartet toured extensively to immense welcome and praise in Europe and the Middle East as emissaries of jazz under the auspices of the State Department? Who realized that 9/8 meters are co-equal in Bach (one of Brubeck’s favorite composers) and in the legacy of the quartet? How many of us can now actually hear 5/4 rhythms because of one cut from that extraordinary album?
    
As Stephen Crist took us to multiple “back stories,” we heard references to key figures in American jazz: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Lenny Bernstein, to name a few.  We were treated to what excellent musical research can do—illuminate the incalculable riches given to the world in the living traditions of jazz performance. We were captivated by the delight in detail that filled the presentation. And during the Q & A, we were motivated to raise many questions and to share cross-disciplinary insights, as is our wont, this time on neurophysiology and sound, jazz and the classical tradition, and the creative tension among personal temperaments in the original quartet.
   
I suspect that many of us will now search out other Brubeck recordings, especially the new album, Time Outtakes (2020), celebrating the centennial of Brubeck’s birth. As someone who headed a jazz quintet in college, listening to this music I am reliving a whole era--musical, cultural, and personal. And this collection of previously unreleased takes from the original 1959 sessions, released on Brubeck Editions, a new label run by Brubeck’s family, can take all listeners right back to that era, that very studio, again, with “performances that are every bit as compelling as their famous counterparts.”
 
Of course, I myself and many others present at Professor Crist’s presentation had the pleasure of hearing Brubeck play in person, sometimes here at Emory, as during the sessions he did here in 2002 when Stephen organized a five-day festival and symposium “exploring the contributions of Dave Brubeck to the arts and humanities . . . provid[ing] an overview of Brubeck's career, with a special look at his role in the civil rights movement, his musical compositions and style, and his impact on the history of jazz.” The press release describing that wonderful programming can be found at https://www.emory.edu/news/Releases/brubeck1032549073.html

Our present jazz studies program owes much to the long relationship between Dave Brubeck and Stephen Crist that yielded that festival and symposium programming—and that has now also yielded Stephen’s most recent book, the basis of his talk at our Colloquium, Dave Brubeck’s Time Out: An Insider’s View of an Iconic Jazz Album. Emory is privileged to have him heading up our Music Department. Thanks, Stephen. Now take five!

--Don Saliers
Report - Lunch Colloquium - Monday, March 8, 2021
“Binge-Fest 2020-21: Seen Any Good Shows Lately?”

Voracious Viewers Anonymous, Assorted Members of the Emeritus College
 
As regular attendees at our EUEC Lunch Colloquiums will know, we like to complement our usual schedule of single-presenter sessions with participatory sessions of one sort or another in which volunteers from among us offer multiple presentations—perhaps sharing poems they have written or memories of “the way we were” or recommendations for reading. In the “Binge-Fest” we scheduled for Monday, March 8, we enjoyed recommendations for viewing—for movies, TV series, and other sorts of shows that our home-bound members have binged on during this year-of-the-plague. Though you had to be there to feel the full effect of the enthusiasm with which people described their choices, urging the rest of us to choose them, too, we did want to at least list those choices here, with a little info about each, for those who missed the Colloquium entirely or might want a reminder of what they heard there.
 
Our first volunteer was Holly York, who recommended “three comedies for times when we really need the medicine of laughter.” The first was Schitt’s Creek (2015, 6 seasons on Netflix), about the culture clash between a wealthy Hollywood family hit by grave financial reverses and the inhabitants of the Podunk town where they are forced to move. The second was The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017, season 4 coming up on Amazon), which introduces a bright young woman from an upscale, proper Jewish family in 1950’s Manhattan whose ideal marriage suddenly fails, leading her to a secret life as a standup comic. Both Schitt’s Creek and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel have garnered much critical and popular acclaim, of course—and for good reason. But Holly’s third recommendation is newer on the scene and less well known: Dickinson (2019, season 3 coming up on Apple), a highly fictionalized comic imagining of Emily Dickinson’s young adult years, with each episode twining around a poem or two. Sounds like a winner to me. Watching might make for some “Wild Nights.”
 
The first two recommendations from Liza Davis had 19th century literary origins, too—Dickensian ones, in particular—both being wonderfully well done BBC versions of novels his readers enjoyed in the serialized form of their own day. Little Dorrit (PBS Passport), starring such fine actors as Tom Courtenay, Claire Foy, and Matthew Macfayden, tells the rags to riches story of a spirited young woman who’s living with her father in a debtor’s prison as their tale begins. And Bleak House (BritBox), with just as impressive a cast (including Gillian Anderson, Denis Lawson, and Charles Dance) brings this account of the dreadful injustices of the English legal system to suspenseful life. Something to make the worst of our times a little bit better perhaps. And mindful that some of us might prefer depictions of our own times—and our own legal system—Liza also recommended a British series many consider the best police procedural ever offered, namely, Unforgotten (Amazon Prime), in which Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar play London detectives solving cold cases of disappearance and murder.
 
Katherine Mitchell recommended that we spend yet more time in England, this time in the Yorkshire Dales of the 1930s, with James Herriot, the young veterinarian who began his practice there and then, in the employ of the eccentric Siegfried Farnon, working alongside Siegfried’s equally eccentric brother, Tristan. Of course, Katherine was talking about the newest version of All Creatures Great and Small (Amazon Prime), the current dramatization of the first of the wonderful series of memoirs by the real-life Herriot (Alf Wright) that we’d certainly recommend to you, too. As we would the earlier dramatization of the whole of that series that the BBC made available to American viewers throughout the 1980s. Though the love story of James and his Helen is central to all versions of this story material, the love of place, of the splendid countryside of the Dales that all involved in the story exude, may be even more central—a phenomenon that the filming on site helps us enjoy, as well.  
 
It was Lee Pasackow who first recommended viewing possibilities that would take us beyond the boundaries of our English-speaking world, among them The Bureau (Amazon Prime with a Sundance Now or AMC+ addition), a much acclaimed French TV thriller (dubbed in English) about the External Security Service that trains and handles undercover agents working in areas of interest to France around the world. Lee’s other two suggestions were Israeli TV series, both available on Netflix. Fauda deals with a unit in the Israel Defense Forces that is pursuing a Hamas terrorist called “The Panther,” and Shitsel deals with four generations of an Haredi or very orthodox family, focusing on the patriarch, a widower, and his 20-something son, both of whom are in the market for a mate. Shitsel was broadcast in Hebrew with English subtitles. And though Netflix has dubbed Fauda for English-speaking audiences, word is it’s best to change settings and watch with the original Hebrew-and-Arabic dialogue with English subtitles.
 
Brenda Bynum next recommended a visit to the Far East via episodes of a TV show called Midnight Diner (in its first two seasons) and Midnight Dinner Tokyo (in seasons three to five), all available from Netflix, with English subtitles. Brenda assured us that the foreign-language soundtrack wouldn’t keep us from feeling right at home in this place, a tiny restaurant open only in the wee hours, and with these people, “The Master” who runs the place and those who turn up (some recurring characters, some not) to share special meals and stories, maybe learning more than a little something in the process. Of course, like so many of us, Brenda is a sucker for a well done English police procedural, too, and the one she recommended is called River, after the detective inspector whose brilliant work at solving crimes is complicated by the fragility of his mind and spirit. He is played by Stellan Skarsgard, ably supported by the ubiquitous Nicola Walker. And the series is available on Amazon Prime.
 
In the final one of our six ten-minute-recommendation time slots, Marilynne McKay also went Anglophile, but not with another police procedural. Rather she suggested we might enjoy Good Omens (on Amazon Prime), the British sci-fi fantasy miniseries based on the 1990 cult classic book by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (names to reckon with in the world of such wonderful confections for sure). In the series, as Marilynne explained, “Immortal colleagues David Tennant (a demon) and Michael Sheen (an angel) negotiate history, religion, genders, and satirical comedy as they track down the Antichrist to prevent Armageddon." Sounds like a wonderful way to escape the burden of the Armageddon that’s threatening us right now—for a little while, at least.
 
As we switched to the volunteers who got in touch later—those to whom we were able to allot only five minutes each, max—Ron Johnson recommended The Biggest Little Farm, a documentary about a couple who acquire an environmentally sustainable farm in California, a “chronicle of dedicated do-gooders who actually do good” (available via Hulu or Amazon rental), The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a romantic drama about a London-based writer who exchanges letters with a resident of Guernsey when it was under occupation during World War II, “delightful comfort food for fans of period drama” (available via Netflix), and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the recent film about a troubled journalist, played by Matthew Rhys, who’s asked to profile Mr. Rogers, played by Tom Hanks (available on Amazon and Hulu, for a price).
 
Susa Nahmias reported that she and Andy have been watching and much enjoying “light fare” they’ve discovered on the MHZ-Choice channel that carries European television series from Italy, France, Germany, Scandinavia, etc. (available by subscription, $7.99 a month, on Prime video channels). She mentioned in particular the Inspector Montalbano series, based on the police procedural books by Andrea Camilleri set in southern Sicily, the Inspector Vivaldi series, set in Trieste, and the Bulletproof Heart series, set in Rome, as well as The Sandham Murders, set in Sweden, and different versions of the Spanish soap opera Grand Hotel, like one in Arabic, set in Aswan, Egypt, and one in Italian, set in northern Italy. It’s tempting to take advantage of the opportunity for a little armchair travel, isn’t it?
 
Selden Deemer hadn’t time to describe the online adventures that led him through a series of Youtube music videos to the find he especially wanted to recommend, but he did have time to persuade us that a documentary called Flamekeeper: The Michael Cleveland Story (available on Amazon Prime) is well worth a watch, telling, as it does, the story of a man born with disabilities that left him blind and partially deaf who has nonetheless come to be considered the greatest fiddler of all time. And Woody Hunter wasn’t able to attend our Binge-Fest at all, but he wrote to ask that we pass along two suggestions from him and Susan. One is a movie that tells the story of One Night in Miami, a supposed night in 1964 when Malcom X, Sam Cooke, Jim Brown, and Cassius Clay (as he still was known at that point in time) gather and discuss their roles in the Civil Rights movement (This is the newly named winner of the Critics’ Choice Award for Best Picture, available on Amazon Prime.) The other, also a new movie, is Nomadland, with the marvelous Frances McDormand as a woman who hits the road in a van after losing all in the Great Recession (available on Hulu).
 
Our Binge-Fest wrapped up with our own Dianne Becht recommending “my absolute favorite thing to watch . . .Moving Art . . . a series with no dialogue, simply gorgeous visuals with beautiful music . . . with each episode focusing on either a place (such as Tahiti or New Zealand) or a theme (waterfalls, forests, flowers)." She said she views it on Netflix, but she thinks it is available on other platforms, too.
 
Perhaps lucky for all in attendance, we ran out of time before Gretchen Schulz could say much about the Australian soap opera she intended to recommend—the one with 80-some episodes (!!!) she binged on over a couple of weeks (!!!) in January. About all she had time to tell us was that it’s called Offspring—and it’s available on Netflix. ‘Nuff said.
 
--Gretchen Schulz
New Members
New members are the lifeblood of any organization.
Please make a special effort to welcome them to EUEC! 


Karen Kuehn Howell, PhD, Assistant Professor Emerita of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Faculty Activities
Eugene Bianchi
Professor Emeritus of Religion
Wipf and Stock has just published Gene Bianchi's fourth book of poems.


Interbeing is Eugene Bianchi's fourth collection of poems. It reflects two concerns of later years: first, his own experience of nature--ecology--which has become a spiritual road for his own self-awareness; and secondly, in a larger context, the increasing threat to all life on earth which looms ever-larger with global warming. These concerns reflect Bianchi's long career as a writer and teacher, first as a member of the Jesuit order and then as a professor of religious studies at Emory University in Atlanta for over thirty years. This book of poems, coming late in life, makes Bianchi especially aware of the gradual development of one's spirituality. The poems blend the secular and the religious into one voice as specific life events unfold in immigrant beginnings, Jesuit experiences, the ups and downs of being married, the professorial life at Emory, novel and memoir writing, ethical issues of war and peace, and participation in a local Buddhist sangha in the spirit of Thich Nhat Hanh.
Tom and Carol Burns in Duluth, MN!

Carol A. Burns
Health Sciences Center Librarian, Emerita

In the years leading up to my retirement, I actively volunteered with Outward Bound as part of their program at Renfroe Middle School in Decatur. The program focused on confidence- and trust-building activities, appealing to my interests in outdoor activities and helping kids. I assumed I would spend a lot of time on these activities in retirement. But, alas, the program closed and I was left to consider other ideas. 
 
At about that time, the librarian at the CDC asked me to lead a project to develop a robust data gathering and analysis system to better inform the library about the types of information requests it received and the resources used in answering those questions. It was a great project, but I quickly learned that I did not want to be a library consultant in my retirement.
 
What next? That’s the million-dollar question for retirees: finding a way to spend your time that is both rewarding and interesting. Travel and home repair jobs can lose their luster after a while. Even spending more time with kids and grandkids doesn’t occupy all your time. No matter where you choose to live, there will be organizations that seek volunteers. For me, it was a big disappointment to learn that while most organizations have clearly defined volunteer opportunities, it’s more complicated if you want to bring your talents to bear in ways the organization had not previously considered. After a lot of trial-and-error with the Decatur School System, I finally discovered how I could help in the classroom working with kids needing extra help with reading, writing and math. In fact, several other Emory Emeriti joined the effort, volunteering to work with kids in the Decatur elementary, middle and high schools. I had found something I could do that was rewarding for me and useful to my community. When Tom retired and we moved to Duluth, MN, I found similar opportunities in the Duluth School System. Helping kids is still the lynchpin of my retirement. I also actively volunteer with the League of Women Voters, especially with their voter registration initiatives, and with the Friends of the Lakewalk, a 7-mile paved pathway along the shores of Lake Superior.
 
But all work and no play is not “retirement," right? We chose Duluth because of its beautiful setting on the shores of Lake Superior, its fantastic year-round access to outdoor activities, and its excellent health care infrastructure. In pre-Covid days, I combined my volunteer “teaching” with hiking, snowshoeing, kayaking and canoeing. During the pandemic, schools were closed, but I was able to continue corresponding with students and eventually signed up as a “virtual tutor” through the Mentor North organization. Duluth also increased the opportunities for outdoor exercise by closing off several segments of scenic roads and reserving them for walking and biking. 
 
I look forward to getting back to my pre-Covid life: volunteering in the schools, visiting grandkids in California, traveling abroad from time-to-time, and remaining physically active in the outdoors. Sharing that life with Tom is, of course, the crowning aspect.
 
P.S. Duluth, MN is becoming well known as a destination city for climate refugees!



Thomas S. Burns
Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor Emeritus of History

As of August 31, 2010, I was no longer regarded as an active faculty member, but, of course, emeriti are not like the autumn leaves. We do not fall and just blow away, we do things. I thought that I knew precisely what those “things” would be for me. I thought in terms of continuing to do research and publication in my chosen field and pursuing hobbies, especially wilderness canoeing and kayaking with my wife, Carol, who had retired from Emory ten years earlier.
 
Our shared passion for the outdoors and each other continues with canoeing trips at least twice a year to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and Quetico Provincial Park in Canada; however, those are not new “things” to my life. What is new, is volunteering in an afterschool program for underserved and disadvantaged children in Duluth, MN, from age six through high school, but I have concentrated working with kids 6 to 10. Since our grandchildren, now 10 and 12, live in California, perhaps I feel most comfortable working with their peer group. I work alongside two friends also of my age, 70s, and we will resume our volunteer efforts as soon as the pandemic allows. We use any idea that we can come up with to not appear to be teaching math and reading, but doing so nonetheless, typically while having fun building things and playing games with them. Another of my “things” is being an official observer for the League of Women Voters – yes, men can and should be members – at all meetings of the City of Duluth’s Parks and Recreation Commission. Along with two male colleagues, I write a monthly report for the League’s newsletter, The Voter.
 
My research has continued, albeit at a slower pace and one primarily designed around courses that I wish to teach at the University for Seniors of the University of Minnesota, Duluth, the second largest university in the state. Teaching with ZOOM throughout 2020 provided me with new skills and much technical humility. I continue to publish a few articles, but after retiring, I had bigger aspirations, was under contract with Johns Hopkins UP for another book, and held a second Fulbright Fellowship, this to Hungary where I had excavated with colleagues from Hungary and Germany for twenty years. Little by little, I felt torn between those little kids and writing more chapters. Finally I made the decision that volunteering with kids and being an unpaid instructor in the University for Seniors were right for me, and so I resigned my contract with Hopkins. Reflecting upon being a volunteer with these two organizations for almost eight years, I have learned that it takes time and patience to discover and explore volunteering opportunities that make you feel good about doing. It surely takes time to win the trust of children, especially of those who have little dependability in their lives.
 
The above paragraphs may make it seem easy, much easier than the realities of finding new directions in retirement. In retrospect, letting go of that book contract was like shedding the mantel of my former identity. Finding any old volunteer opportunity is not difficult; there are many organizations in every community that need unpaid help. Remember as you search that you are, after all, a freelancer. You are not the CEO; you do not win, or lose when funding and licensing fail to materialize.
Walking the Campus with Dianne
Did anyone recognize the structure from our last walk? It's the 1599 Building -- you can find it at, yes....1599 Clifton Road, next door to Emory Point and the Emory Conference Center Hotel.

As mentioned before, the building is a very busy, behind-the-scenes kind of place. Emory acquired 1599 Clifton Road in the mid-2000s and uses it to house mostly central administrative departments. The six story building includes a circular drive in back, two-story lobby, computer labs, conference rooms, offices, teaching classrooms, a parking deck, and a top floor balcony with skyline views (see photo below).

And the very important first--this building boasts the first campus rooftop to house a connected solar panel installation through a partnership between Emory and Cherry Street Energy, an Atlanta-based power company. The installation was connected on August 7, 2020. with the panels generating over 42.37 MWh of solar energy and saving a quantity of carbon emissions which is equivalent to the planting of about 500 trees!

To view a short video of the installation ribbon cutting click here.

Click here to read a short article from the Emory News Center on the installation.
Warmer weather, Covid vaccinations for many in our community, and, trees and flowers blooming!

I'm beginning to venture outdoors a little more often now and recently rode my bike (while fully masked, of course) along the edges of campus. I've featured our next structure before in this newsletter, but with the blossoming tulip poplar in the foreground, it's too pretty not to post again.
Where will you find this on the Emory Campus?
Emory University Emeritus College
The Luce Center
825 Houston Mill Road NE #206
Atlanta, GA 30329