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  • This Quilted Shore

    This Quilted Shore

    It is summer in Ocean City. Biplanes pull banners advertising seafood buffets while below dolphins arc through the surf. The lettuce and peas are out of the ground and the tiny gardens fronting the summer houses are blooming hydrangeas, daylilies and lavender. It is June and summer is still cool and refreshing here.    Karen…

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  • Writing, Baking, and Making Toys

    I’m writing a book. My daughter is baking and selling bread. My brother runs a wood shop, making wooden blocks for children.

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  • Driving Through East Texas and the Garden of Gilgamesh

    “Why are we here?” Karen asked this nonchalantly, as if she were wondering why roosters have combs on their heads. I was hoping she was talking to herself—or that the question was rhetorical. But since we were driving to Houston, I was a captive audience. She persisted. “Why are we here?” “Well,” I said, “maybe…

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  • Bless the Beasts and the Children

    Last night, Karen and I spent an evening at Kiddie Park. Some of the rides from my childhood are still operating. What an uplifting place. It exists for one reason. To make children laugh and smile. Not to mention the taller children like me. And if you are becoming a little jaded and cynical, one…

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  • Wind Dancer

    My granddaughter, Holland, just got a new pair of sneakers. She looks down at her feet and marvels that just fourteen months before her feet were tucked in the fetal position. Okay, maybe she can’t recall those moments in the womb before she burst into the world like shimmering sunlit foil. So I imagine for…

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  • Treatment begins

    Saw this quote and thought how appropriate for Karen’s life. “If every single person who has liked you in your lifetime, were to light up on a map, it would create the most glitteringly beautiful network you could imagine. Throw in the strangers you’ve been kind to, the people you’ve made laugh, or inspired along…

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  • Roger’s Library Books

    Roger’s Library Books

    I’m not such an unaware narcissist that I believe that I’m the only one Roger Hladky blessed in a powerful way. I was one among many.  It was long after Roger performed our wedding ceremony, his first to officiate. I was a father, my children grown and flown, an elder at our church back in…

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  • Buying Crayons for Charlotte Ann

    They say grand-parenting is grand. So I’ve been told a thousand times by friends whose worlds have been changed by their children’s children. We have names waiting for the tender voices of our grand little ones. My name is Bubs and Karen is Keke. Who knows if those names will stick. The only thing I…

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  • This Land That I Loved Young

    Karen and I decided to do something this summer that we had never done before. We rented an RV and drove through Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Colorado with our friends Bob & Sheila. Why? Perhaps this western wandering was a grasping after the nomadic ideal, a searching after stories about the land and…

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  • RV 7 . Coming Home: These are the Days

    RV 7 . Coming Home: These are the Days

    We have wandered the west lassoing Wyoming, and taking in OK, KS, NE, SD, ID, and CO. My Dad loved wandering vacations so he took his teenage brother, his parents and three Taylor children and drove the eight of us to California in a Chrysler Imperial that looked like a batmobile. My dad had always…

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