When I started writing essays they were in the form of letters to my sons who no longer lived with me.  I began the practice of writing my thoughts down to share “me” with my absent children.  I desperately wanted to talk with each of them in the way that fathers and sons grow together rather than grow up and grow apart. I have saved most of those letters that began in longhand and then on a typewriter. Things changed when Monmouth College committed to computers and held a class for any professor who wanted to learn how to use the miraculous and cheap Apple II. That class immediately grabbed me and instead of listening to an excellent lecture about the innards and science involved, I saw the keys that looked exactly like my typewriter and you could go back and forward and change things without carbon paper and whiteout. I began my first computerized essay in that class.

My essays became a way of expressing what I had to say without anyone else around to correct me or complain that I didn’t express myself the way he or she wanted me to say what was on my mind.  I believe I early on decided to write about the world about me in the sense of a diary without too much being said about me. A friend suggested that THINKING ALLOWED was a good title and he, being the punster that he was, also thought that “Published now and then” should be part of the masthead telling where the piece was composed and the date. I eventually got Hal, my son in Silicon Valley to produce a masthead that pleased me mightily and a web site that I could never learn how to add to. For the last five years I have produced almost one essay for every day except for brief - away from the office – periods. While still teaching and a short time after, I was published, albeit reluctantly by the College Newspaper, the Outlook, and their complaint was that I wrote on and on and on.

Since then, a page a day seems to be just right and I begin the day reading the papers dropped in front of my door and sometimes collect ideas from the two to three weeklies that are mailed to me and from the journals and magazines that also arrive.  I would rather read than watch TV news reports and the analyses that take the place of telling the truth as seen by eye-witnesses.

As an institution, THINKING ALLOWED is published almost daily and is about ideas, issues and my reflections on the times. A copy is sent to the several hundred people who have graciously given me their e-mail addresses. A copy is sent to my website, www.aaron.schectman.com and my son updates it each New Year. I say this knowing that he will have to make some adjustments for 2005, a time I never thought I would reach. According to calculations made many years ago a good round number would have been the summit of the millennium that is now receding into history. Yet, here I am thinking about what the New Year will bring.