Youth
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reminiscence draws us back to a place when feelings were intense and the world was our oyster. As Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote, “Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.”
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I grew up in a world of rote learning. For instance, I once knew all the abbreviations for the states before someone got wise and decided you only need two letters for each state. Kansas was rendered as Kans. which if you are scoring at home, saves you two letters but costs you a period.…
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People ask me, “What are you doing in Denver?” I tell them I’m helping Karen Taylor and Tammy Ross cook 700 meals for our youth group from Bartlesville, with very little refrigerator space which means I’m on a first name basis with grocery clerks on Colorado avenue. In the midst of cooking, washing dishes, and…
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Tuesday August 22 When my brother the doctor is not on call, he decompresses by setting his smart phone to airplane mode. I am on airplane mode at this moment, serene at 39,000 feet viewing the fruited plain from a 737, untethered from the constancy of digital connection and liberated from the tyranny of the…
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I’m sitting in skybox 306 in the BOK center and the Broken Arrow band is playing Pomp and Circumstance as 1,137 Broken Arrow Seniors stream down eight aisles like ants who have discovered a donut on the sidewalk. This isn’t anything like my graduation except it was also in a gymnasium, where I sat by…
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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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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.”
Bespoke 