Posts by Nathan Graziano
For 20 years, we had the pleasure of watching the greatest quarterback of all-time play the game. He helped to procure six Super Bowl rings here, and during the Brady-era from 2000-2018, New England sports fans enjoyed halcyon days unknowable to any other regional fans in recent history.
Here’s something not many people know about me: I possess an encyclopedic knowledge of the ’70s sitcom “The Brady Bunch.”
“What’s it really like for teachers right now?”
“Let me tell you,” I said.
We’re enervated, we’re demoralized, and we’re feeling handcuffed as our own mental health hangs from the most tenuous of strings—which is to say nothing of our students’ mental health that has been profoundly affected by a virus that shows no signs of relent.
I was driving to the store with my daughter, who is home for college break, when we passed a house with a “Let’s Go Brandon” sign posted on the front lawn. I shook my head, muttered something to myself, and kept driving.
Rip a piece of paper from the notebook you vowed to diligently write in each day last year. The last entry is dated February 2, 2021. Write down your list of resolutions, the road map to finding your Best Self.
It’s not that I’m some kind of Scrooge or a holiday curmudgeon. I’m simply too lazy and indifferent to string lights on my house and trees. Besides taking the dog out [4], I seldom leave the house or, more specifically, my Man-Cave in the basement.
The music is, indeed, a prodigious part of Peterson’s lineage. She is the granddaughter of the late Jean M. Jones, who was deemed Portsmouth’s “Lady of Song.” Her great uncle was the Seacoast’s famed “Sweet” Roy Jones and her great-aunt is Sharon “Brown Sugar” Jones, who continues to perform in her 70s.
And for God’s sake, if anyone reading this is struggling to manage right now, know that you’re not alone and please reach out to someone[9]. In this battle with our mental health, we need to have each other’s backs.
I fully acknowledge your venerable positions as the gatekeepers of the English language—and completely appreciate the stressors associated with being the experts who study the fickle nature of etymology. Yet I need to make a pressing and ardent plea for the addition of a single word in 2022: “shitification.”
Guitarist Liam Spain, the 47-year-old Manchester-native and journeyman musician, nods to bandmate Peter Gustafson—the other guitarist and vocalist—as the drums kick in, and Spain starts to strum the rhythm to “Sympathy for the Devil.” Smooth as a beach stone, Scalawag slips into the groove.