Taking a Trip on Market Street Today, @mattdelapena. Thank You

This year, through a Connecticut State turnaround grant and the support of many, I'm providing professional development for a K-8 school, helping them to think through their writing instruction and the potential young people have when effective practices are implemented. In the plan, I proposed using Last Stop on Market Street as a model text, and have assigned it in my courses as Fairfield University. Today, I'm hosting a workshop on the "writer's workshop" and introducing Matt de la Peña's Newbery-Award winning children's book to help me. I'm thankful for his words, storytelling, and sharing of wisdom.

In honor of Last Stop on Market Street and Matt de la Peña's gift to us all, I thought it would be smart to take myself through one of the prompts I'm working with today: the beauty I find in the every day (or what Ralph Fletcher would call the 'little things"). Perhaps these seeds will blossom into other writing, as my writer's notebooks moved to the blogosphere over the last ten years.

Beautiful.

• I love walking down the stairs each morning after Chitunga's departed for work, I've heard him stirring/doing what kids do to get ready, and I can smell the coffee while the daylight whispers through the curtains in my room.
• I've come to terms with the unpredictability of I-95 traffic as I work to meander my way to campus life and find myself at a desk for a day of planning, writing, grading, advising, and collaborating. On good days, the 11 miles is 12 minutes, but on the majority of days I've come to terms with the 35 to 60 minutes it can be.
• Sneakers. I write about them all the time. My grandmother taught me to be a fat lover of life and my genetics have kept the pace, too, making a midlife need for necessary now more than ever before. I'm so much slower than yesterday, but I keep at it, and every time my sneakers hit the gym, the streets, or a path, I'm simply in awe.
• My end of the year montages have come to mean everything to me, recapping 365 days of photographs that capture moments of the year with family and friends. They are adding up, but I visit them often to keep pep in my step and a want to continue tiptoeing through the roses and stopping to smell the daffodils.
• Text messages, emails, tweets, and other 21st century hellos. It's not everyday, but there's nothing more rewarding from the teaching profession than receiving a hello from a student of yesteryear with updates on their lives.
• Books. I don't get to as many as I set out to each year, but when I do, I'm overjoyed. I enter my home or my office and look at what my dad sees as an excessive hobby to break my back whenever I move, but I see friends.
• Everything National Writing Project. Everything. There are not enough words and I'm blessed to have a Director's position.
• Working one on one with a kid, no matter the background, the school, the struggle or the obstacles. There is nothing like having one-on-one time with a developing writer offering sparks to make them fall in love with words the way that I've been fortunate enough to do.
• The damn dog. And the damn dog before her. And the damn dog before that. Everyone's damn dog. Damn cats, too. Fuzzy, furry, selfish, selfless beasts of love. What would any of us be without them?
• Reflection. Since I was 19 I've written my life every day with this or that nugget of insight, worry, or epiphany (with year ten being in a public forum here....crazy)

Yes, beautiful. 

I am forever thankful to Matt de la Peña for his passion, the books he creates as he explores them, and his insight into what it means to be a human being. I'm looking forward to today's professional development and sharing Last Stop of Market Street with them. Seeing beauty (feeling it, smelling it, tasting it, hearing it, smelling it) is a choice. Today I'm realizing that a positive/hopeful/optimistic choice is easier because Matt de la Peña was willing to capture it in this book.