When I signed on as a teaching assistant with the Emerson Prison Initiative in the fall of 2018, I had 48 years of teaching experience. But when I walked through the series of locked doors and mechanical gates to get to the education building at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord for the first time, I felt like a rookie.

I was sympathetic to the circumstances of some people who are incarcerated even before I’d been inside a prison.

Like lots of victories, the wide, deep and heroic results of Tuesday’s election have lots of fathers... and mothers.

I hope you won’t conclude from this that I am out of sorts. And I am not complaining I no longer write of sports. The times provide, as I have found, and so there is no dearth Of more significant concerns here and around the earth.

Would a diversion from the daily weight of the grim fact of the virus and the discouraging, shameful failure of the Trump administration to respond to the emergency be welcome? Sure. But sports? I don’t think so.

I decided to volunteer in the education program at a medium security prison, because, as a recent retiree, I had the time, and because I wanted to do something that might make me uncomfortable.