Several Things About Arnie

Arnie is a student in one of my classes.

1. He is a small, youthful looking man for his late 80s or early 90s.
2. He is genuinely kind fellow, who tells me that a lot of my teaching is just what the instructors at Seattle's old Burnley school of Art taught in the 1950s, after he got out of the marines, and how grateful he was to them. I am fairly astonished by this, by how close the language is- almost all my teaching style came out of an unwritten art school tradition.
3. He was a marine, in WWII , and at Chosin in the Korean War. He says: "war is murder and starvation and that's pretty well it."
4. He lost his wife of 63 years this year, and so he is very careful, every day, to find great pleasure in the beauty of life, and in the power of art. 
5. He believes in the power of a kind of secular remote healing, and gave me a nice book on self-actualization, mentioning "this is a gift- you don't really get a book back when you lend it."

Hard not to like Arnie.