Month: January 2013
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Limestone School part 6 walking home
As John Welch’s arm exploded through the safety glass just above the brass push bar he realized the race had been won and the battle lost. Our third and fourth grade classes routinely made the sixty yard sprint across the playground from the north wing to the south wing of Limestone School rewarding the win,…
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Reflection in a mirror
We toured the National Weather Center building at Oklahoma University with our son Brandon before his decision to attend Oklahoma University to study Meteorology. We sat in a 360 degree tower with expansive views of the Oklahoma prairie. I asked the guide, “Is this building tornado-proof?” The answer was, “Yes, and bomb proof also…the glass…
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The Boy The Man & Gravel Baseball
I’ve always loved baseball. Even though it’s a team game, I found solitary ways to embrace it’s poetic rhythms. I was a baseball Walter Mitty, transported to Busch Stadium in St. Louis. I straddled the mound glaring at the batter with annoyed disdain. I emulated Bob Gibson, throwing a rubber baseball against the brick wall…
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Abraham, Martin & Me
It was the first time I ever prayed with my face touching the earth…and the first time I have ever had a prayer interrupted by a President of the United States. I lay prostrate on the green grass surrounding the Washington Monument, praying with ten other men in a tight circle, and a half million…
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Limestone School part 5 the neighborhood
I grew up alongside Kevin Arnold of the Wonder Years only without a Jets letter jacket. Those neighborhood landmarks and watershed moments and the guys I ran with, through the streets and adjacent woods just a couple blocks north of Limestone School, are etched in the granite of my adolescent memory. So this section is…
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Wine and Song
I love music that changes me, softens the edges, sands down the burrs, raises my hackles. Some songs will forever move me…others not so much. I’ve noticed songs have a useful life with an expiration date just like stock options, yogurt and my hairline. I’m reminded of my coming of age decade, the seventies, when a…
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Do You Ever Yearn?
Do you ever yearn? Some folks yearn to write. Others yearn to paint, or to capture images with a camera, or yearn to connect to a husband or wife or daughter or son…or to God. Yearning embraces a sense that somethings missing, that perfection or wholeness or actualization or some other buzzword of fulfillment is…
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Gushing Well Water
During my final two years at Harding University, I lived in a dilapidated house with eight guys on the edge of campus in Searcy, Arkansas. Rector House stood on North Grand Street and has since been demolished, but in the spring of 1981, it still stood…barely…just months from institutional progress in the form of a…
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Roots of Alabama’s National Championship in a full service gas station
Alabama football coach Nick Saban has guided the Crimson Tide to national championships in three of the previous four years. Mr. Saban is famously and professionally attentive to details. Jason Gay recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal about Coach Saban’s roots as a detail freak. Asked Sunday at a press conference about his father, Big Nick, and…
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