Tell me your life story in 4 minutes. This is a question I have been asking my friends and family. Their first reaction is stunned silence, a deer in headlights. Then slowly, the wheels begin to turn and they speak, measured and careful words, maneuvering around covered landmines. The years roll away and they become…
We pulled our car into the driveway, narrowly missing a huge sycamore tree while striking the curb with the front wheel, and I told Karen that one can guess the age of a particular house by the width of the driveway. This house was from the Leave it to Beaver era. Dinner at Picasso's in…
August 24-25, 2017 We drove to the Adirondack Mountains with Toby & Debbie Taylor with plans to kayak the Moose River near the village of Old Forge. We wandered through Old Forge Hardware established in 1900. It’s squeaking groaning oak floors tells stories of those from another time walking these same boards with hunting boots,…
I always loved talking to Harry Whittaker. He made you feel better than you had the right to feel about yourself. We played the same position on the football team, wide receiver and cornerback, and during scrimmages, we blocked and pass covered one another. On one particular play from scrimmage, Harry was getting pretty vocal…
I remember watching my Dad fold a road map on vacation while driving the highway. It is a lost art and the original texting while driving. Those maps had memory, and if you ignored the memory creases, there could be a thousand ways to fold the map, but only if you got in a hurry.…
The man with the shepherd crook disguised as a dust mop has died. There is a melancholy in the closet where the mops lean against the wall and the Folger's can is empty, no longer filled with Brach's candy. Rusty gave it all away. General Douglass MacArthur said, "Old soldiers never die; they just fade…
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. ~ Victor Hugo I had a reputation as a youngster that enshrouded me like cigar smoke hovering over Churchill on a still summer evening. I sang pretty well. I sang because my church sang a capella and everyone sang. If…
He said goodbye in the same graceful and light-hearted way that he lived, revelling in his answers to aggressive sales folks on the phone when asked why he was cancelling his phone service or subscriptions, “The reason I’m cancelling is I’m dying, I’m going home.”
I grew up in a home that severely limited my creative outlet of language...I wasn’t allowed to curse, nor was I given the freedom to vent with words that hinted of the real four-letter curse words, the baby curse words like heck and shoot and darn. These were deemed unpolished and tainted by the very…
Once in my youth, I felt heaven unreachable, sterile, a place of thou shalt not have fun, and my fervor was not equal to the pill-box hatted lady sitting in the pew in front of me blocking my view of a preacher imploring me to get right and ready to go home. Since I didn’t…
