October—A Month for Renewing Connections

I was fortunate to renew connections to six old friends this month and am delighted to be in touch with them again. I'll also be beginning a new collaborative project with my dear friend Carla Arena in a couple of days, and I'm equally pleased with this development.

Among the six old friends, at least four (and possibly five) have a connection to ELS, where I worked from late 1972 until early 1983. Two of my ELS connections are in Oregon, one is in California, one is in Texas, and another is here in Phoenix. The last old friend may well have an ELS connection, but I remember him most from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where I did graduate work in ELT and Applied Linguistics in the early 1970s.

The Oregonians are the wife of one of the founders of ELS and a talented video editor whom I worked with on the Oregon Coast and in Portland from 1983 until 1990. The Californian was the CEO of ELS until it was sold to Berlitz and now owns and operates an ELT-related company that sets up schools and has developed a very fine English language proficiency test. The Texan was a regional director for ELS when I worked in the company headquarters in the L.A. area, and the Phoenix connection was once with ELS but is now involved in an entirely different field.

It's only natural that friendships sometimes go dormant over time, but it's wonderful when they're reawakened. I hope these renewed contacts remain vital for a long, long time.