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 in his supply closet. The pine scent floor polish and a strict discipline of machine…… Continue reading Limestone School part 4 sliding candy and crooked forks
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 somethings missing, that perfection or wholeness or actualization or some other buzzword of fulfillment is…… Continue reading Do You Ever Yearn?
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 spring of 1981, it still stood…barely…just months from institutional progress in the form of a…… Continue reading Gushing Well Water
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 Saban’s roots as a detail freak. Asked Sunday at a press conference about his father, Big Nick, and…… Continue reading Roots of Alabama’s National Championship in a full service gas station
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 great books because they frame the body of work like neon parentheses. Here are some…… Continue reading My favorites lines
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 cold hard stone, the sheer structural mass of those Limestone walls, along with the soft…… Continue reading Limestone school part 3 a time to tear down and a time to build
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 posture. It was my first brush with the imagined upper class whom I’d never met…… Continue reading Limestone School part 2 paying attention to things we love
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, ancient words from ancient texts, devolved into hollow shells of confectionary meaninglessness? And then I…… Continue reading Newtown
Limestone School part 1 red tab levis and open mouth wonder
I was five years old as I headed across the undulating back lawns along the west side of Mission road headed to my kindergarten class at Limestone school. The smothering late August Oklahoma heat of 1964 dictated my dress, white riveted red-tab Levi’s and a red mock v-neck shirt. My head was shaved tight and…… Continue reading Limestone School part 1 red tab levis and open mouth wonder
