Bespoke

brent taylor

  • 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… Continue reading

  • 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… Continue reading

  • Limestone School part 4 sliding candy and crooked forks

    Brach’s hard candy slid across the gleaming tile floors of the main hall at Limestone school like tiny hockey pucks propelled by the hand of Rusty the janitor who kept the cinnamon, butterscotch and peppermint treats in a coffee can… Continue reading

  • 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… Continue reading

  • 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… Continue reading

  • 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… Continue reading

  • My favorites lines

    When I slip into a neurotic moment (pretty common for me) while wandering about bookstores, I read the first line of a book and then skip to the final page and read the last line. I love the first and last lines of… Continue reading

  • Limestone school part 3 a time to tear down and a time to build

    When they tore down the limestone walls of my grade school in 2008 part of me came tumbling down into the Oklahoma dust. It was the part of my childhood that soaked into my pores through simple exposure to the… Continue reading

  • Limestone School part 2 paying attention to things we love

    My 4th grade teacher, Mrs. Karbosky, brought a new element of deportment into my informal midwestern upbringing, an air of dignified carriage replete with reading glasses strung around the neck with a silver chain and an erect and sometimes stiff… Continue reading

  • Newtown

    December 24, 2012 On December 14th, I wept for twenty six souls in Newtown, Connecticut. The despair I felt was a sense that we’ve lost control as a nation, abandoned universal morality for individual amorality. Have faith, hope and love,… Continue reading