Memoir
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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.”
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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…
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At the age of four, I doubted Santa for the first time. Not his girth or beard or constant jolliness, but rather my own worthiness to receive his gifts, and the weight of guilt rang in my ears with every chorus of, “He knows if you’ve been bad or good so be good for goodness…
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Karen and I have twenty-three children ranging in age from fourteen to thirty-three. We aren’t on the hook for college education on all of our children since twenty of them are nieces and nephews. But we do feel like they’re ours and that they bless us by calling us Uncle Brent and Aunt Karen. Sometimes…
Bespoke 