Family
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This morning, over coffee and my digital newspaper, I caught the image of a spider on my shirt at the upper right breast area and I brushed it off but it didn’t move. It was a Ralph Lauren horse logo. My shirt was inside out. This would have bothered me in my early years before…
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Sunday morning during communion while the church sang, “How deep the Father’s love for us,” I sat and listened unable to sing, because I had a softball stuck in my throat. I had just read a text from my brother Toby, “Played a little chess Drew is beating me without even looking. Washing his hair…
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Kid these days. They aren’t like Karen and me, just as we weren’t like our parents, just like they…well, for instance, Great-Grandma Beck was 14 when she married, Mom and Dad 19 when they married, and I was 25. My kids will be drawing a pension by the time they marry. And they probably won’t…
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Billy Graham and my Grandma Mildred, side by side, illustrate a conundrum of mine; why do some folks talk non-stop and others hardly at all? Billy Graham was one with the gift of gab, my Grandma Mildred Davis went the way of minimal expression. The soft-spoken and the vocal are both gifted. But I relate…
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This detachment from the materialism of the season reminds me of the time we took the kids to California and Uncle Clark gave all eight children a lump of coal. It’s the conundrum of Christmas.
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My brother Toby is six years younger than me. As a three-year old lad, he was universally adored by teenage girls at church, wooed and cooed over because his dark eyelashes fluttered like lazy cabana fans and his black hair was licked by cream-fed cows at the center of his hairline in a cool-to-be-square duck-tail.…
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I once saw a list of things Dad’s should teach their sons. How to balance a checking account, how to ask a girl out, how to change a tire, and so on. But as I think about my failure to teach my son these skills, I realize how much nurturing help I’ve had. Saturday I…
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When Belinda Carlisle of the Go-Go’s sings “Heaven is a place on earth” I stop whatever I’m doing and sing along. ‘Ooh baby do you know what that’s worth, you make heaven a place on earth’ It happened today, in my truck while driving to Tulsa and a blue-haired lady with a handicap sign hanging…
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Leaving Wittenberg after a European breakfast of assorted cheeses, Nuremberg sausage, fruit, danishes, croissants, tea and coffee, we drove through the German countryside near Potsdam on our way to Berlin. Crisp asphalt lanes lined with white wooden posts streamed past our periphery like toppled bowling pins and leafy hardwood trees formed a canopy over our…
Bespoke 