Happy Independence Day, U.S.A.

I love this version of God Bless America sung by one of the greatest voices of our time, Celine Dion.
I wish all of my U.S. readers a safe and happy holiday weekend.

Sail Away

Every time I go to Calabash, N.C., I like to stroll the dock on restaurant row and look at the fishing boats. Boats of all sizes can be found there from small trawlers to the beauty below that's made for deep sea excursions. I know that fishing is a very hard way of life, but there must be a huge sense of freedom there, too, out on the open water. Sometimes, I look at the boats and wish that I could sail away. Photo by L.K. Campbell

Advice

I've received a lot of good advice over the years from many different sources. The one I've adhered to more than any other comes from the Bible and is credited to Jesus. "Do not worry about tomorrow. Today's troubles are enough for today." I think of that Bible verse every time I catch myself worrying too much about stuff down the road that may never happen.
What's the best advice you've ever received?
Photo by L.K. Campbell

The Teachers You Remember

The other day, I was trying to remember all of the teachers I've had during my lifetime. Sadly, I couldn't remember them all, but I got to thinking that the ones I do remember are the ones who really impacted me in some way. One of those was my high school Short Story & Novel teacher, Lillian Buie.
Mrs. Buie was a brilliant lady who made me love classic literature. However, there's one particular lesson that I haven't forgotten and probably never will. During one class session, Mrs. Buie was talking to us about the complexity of the English language and what makes it one of the hardest languages to learn. Aside from all of our regional dialects and colloquialisms, we have tons of words with multiple meanings and homophones (words that sound alike but are spelled differently) etc. Mrs. Buie told us a story that was related to her by one of her college professors. George Bernard Shaw, the famous Irish writer, had once said that it was possible—in English—to spell the word fish as ghoti. You take the "gh" from rough, which sounds like "f". The "o" from women and the "ti" from nation, which also sounds like "sh". Afterward, we did an exercise on alternate spellings.
Here's a link with more information about ghoti and George Bernard Shaw.
I have to admit that I probably wasn't the best student before I entered Mrs. Buie's 10th grade English class. However, I was a better one after I moved on, because she taught me how to read (and think about what I was reading) in a different way than I'd been taught before. Twenty years after I'd taken her class, she wrote a letter to me when my first newspaper column appeared in our hometown paper. She told me how it always made her proud when one of her former students pursued writing as a career. Mrs. Buie certainly did the right thing when she pursued teaching as a career.