I've been kind of collecting some quotes and some of my own random thoughts over the past month or so and instead of, or maybe in hopes of, trying to make them go together in some coherent way, I'm going to throw these here morsels into this blog stew and see how it tastes in the end.

They are mostly related to things I would want to convey to the students I am honored and thrilled to teach when I get the chance. Whether or not I'll ever actually pass any of them along, I don't know.

 -Your test score is a snapshot in time, not a prediction of your future.

- When you feel anxiety, ignore the condescending cliche "Go touch grass"...but do it anyway. Go outside. Feel the vibe. Touch trees. Really feel them. Listen to them. Breathe deep. Now do it again and as many times as you need. You'll never ever regret it.

 - Who is the one person, the only person you need to impress? Yourself. Not your teachers, parents, or friends. Just you. And when you do, revel in it, but part of impressing only yourself means...keeping it to yourself. If someone else notices and compliments you? Yeah, go ahead and revel in that too. 

 - Give more validation than you want to receive.

- The real value of a good education isn't how much you know, it's how you choose to share what you know.

- How many of us spend our lives afraid of looking foolish? And how many of us make sure to always support someone who has said or done something foolish, even if it was at our expense?

- Are we more interested in judging someone or being curious about them?

- If you don’t believe in judging people, don’t judge people who do.

My friend since 11th grade, Terry Lefton, forwarded me this photo, which is appropriate both because he is in it, more or less alongside me, and because without him, I wouldn't have been at this game.

As I may have noted previously, besides family-related events, this was the happiest day of my life for reasons that are neither particularly explainable or defensible. 

The date was May 19, 1974 and the event was the Flyers winning the Stanley Cup. One would have to look it up to see how important it was to the city of Philadelphia, but the quote I remember that may have explained it best came from the Flyers back-up goalie Bobby Taylor who actually came to be a friend of mine just 6 years later when I joined him in the broadcast booth as the statistician for the telecasts thanks to Pete Silverman. Pete had been my boss when I interned at 1210 WCAU-AM on the Philadelphia program my junior year at Earlham. 

"It took a bunch of Canadians to come in here to blow away a big dark cloud from over the city of Philadelphia."

Anyway, this photo shows the celebration on the ice at the Spectrum as the NHL Commissioner handed the Stanley Cup to Bobby Clarke and Bernie Parent for them to skate it around the ice as was the tradition for decades in the NHL. When the buzzer had sounded and the Flyers had won 1-0, Terry and I hugged - first time I had ever hugged another male - and when we saw fans starting to climb over the plexiglass onto the ice, we looked at each other and didn't need to say a word. We were going too!

And so...if you zoom way in to the guys I circled in green, yup - the guy on the right with the light brown jacket is Lefty and the guy on the right with the light blue shirt and white pants, well, guess who.

Yup. This guy.