I’m a prisoner of Covid-19.  Are you a prisoner, too?  Oregon, my home state, is doing a miserable job of keeping the number of viral infections down.  Maybe your state is the same. In any case, for the past few months, we Oregonians have been required to wear masks in public and

When I was a teacher, I impressed upon my students that failure was part of the learning process. “Imagine where you’d be today,” I’d tell them, “if, as an infant, you were afraid of falling and skinning your knees to the extent that you decided to stay in your crib. Failure