After raising three children to adulthood and after having had a busy career as a college professor, teaching English courses, I was very thankful for the opportunity to retire about six years ago. I taught at a university in Oklahoma for 33 years and spent a lot of time grading students' tests and essays.

I enjoyed teaching a humorous writing class in which the students had the option of writing cartoon captions. I published a story in a magazine devoted to humor, but my focus was on writing cartoon captions for various cartoonists.

I sold more than 150 cartoon captions to various cartoonists, who in turn, used my captions for cartoons that they sold to various newspapers and magazines. I sold many cartoons to Woman's World.

After retiring, I continued to write captions for a cartoonist that I know. Here are two captions that he used in cartoons that he sold to Woman's World. In one cartoon, a girl and her mother are sitting at a table. The girl says, "Mom, if you didn't have a cell phone when you were my age, how did you take photos and send them to your Facebook page?" In the second cartoon, a girl sits in front of a computer. She looks at her mother and says, "Mom, if you didn't have Facebook when you were my age, how did you keep in touch with your friends?"

When I was in college, I had trouble deciding between a career as an artist and a career as an English teacher. My love of drawing started in grade school. My family did not have a TV until I was 11.

I spent a lot of time drawing pictures. In high school, I published cartoons in the school newspaper. In college, I published cartoons in the college humor magazine. I also painted some portraits of family members and landscapes when I was a teenager.

I think that I enjoyed drawing and writing captions partly because it gave me an opportunity to escape reality. I have an obsessive-compulsive disorder and have a tendency to obsess on problems and deadlines, so escaping from reality helped me to deal with my obsessions.

When my son lived in Ballwin, I enjoyed spending time with my granddaughters. I tried to teach Chloe, who is now 6, how to draw faces. I would draw a face, two eyes, and a nose and would ask her to draw a mouth. I hoped that Chloe might enjoy drawing as much as I had at her age.

This Christmas I was delighted to receive a book of her drawings. In the book, she said, "One of the things that I like about Pappy is that he taught me how to draw. Now I can draw lots of things."

She has told her mother that she wants to be an artist when she grows up. Of course, there is no way of knowing what she may decide to do when she grows up.

Kenneth Solstad is a retired college professor, who taught English at Cameron University in Lawton, Okla., He moved to St. Louis with his wife six years ago. He has sold more than 150 cartoon captions to cartoonists. he can be reached at solsfam@aol.com