Bespoke

writing

  • Flashes of Wonder

    If I wrote like my wife talks, I’d write narrative like a kid writing home from summer camp, “I had oatmeal for breakfast and we played softball and I outran all the boys in a foot race and we had hamburgers for dinner…” But, I write like a Red Bull-drinking cat on a hot tin…

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  • Stealing Back Cool from Kerouac

    I’ve always loved cool…have no idea what it is but I love it. Perhaps I have no idea because cool expresses not one meaning or attitude but many, a cross-pollinated adjective moving fluidly in many cultures and languages. An Anglo can say cool in Chinese (kù 酷) and it means essentially the same as in…

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  • The Sole of My Father

    Before soft comfortable velcro secured shoes I remember my Dad’s brown wingtip leather-sole shoes tied with dark cords and buffed brilliantly with Kiwi shoe polish. I thought of my Dad and how i once watched him polish those shoes, as i wrote this today. Happy Fathers Day Dad The sole of my father Shoe leather…

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  • The Funniest People I Know: Ralph Rowand

    I left home in the stifling heat of August 1977 at the same time Elvis left the building for good. My destination was Searcy, Arkansas and Harding University. I had no inkling that the friends I made in college would affect my thinking, my life, my politics, my spirituality, my love life and my sense…

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  • It’s Sweet to Play Like You Are Loved

    One of the most memorable rounds of golf I’ve ever played, I played angry. And it came on the heels of an exchange with a man we called Sweet, even though decorum and his given name, Edward Muir Sweet, demanded we call him, Mr. Sweet. The elimination of the honorary title, Mr., was not an…

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  • The Man from 1933

    I walked through my front door this morning and was startled by the dense mechanical ring of the oak & metal Bell Telephone Company phone mounted on the wall of our living room facing out to the east garden. I had never heard it ring before since it’s only an antique, so my curiosity piqued,…

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  • The Funniest People: Tom Achey

    My brother-in-law lives near the edge of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. His 56-year-old hair lives on the edge of a Bon Jovi mullet and a Lynyrd Skynyrd hippy frazzle. His laid back demeanor along with the hair masks the fact that he is one of the funniest people I know, while belying his career…

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  • The Funniest People I Know: Introduction

    When I began writing again this past December, my intention was to shed light on good things and good people. Isn’t there enough angst already? Yesterday, an idea lit my corpus callosum like a pin ball machine hitting 100,000 points. I’ll write about the funniest people I know. They are everywhere…you just have to look…

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  • There’s a tornado in my coffee

    My son is writing his undergraduate thesis for Honors Meteorology on the topic, The Genesis of Tornadoes. I was wondering if The Revelation of Tornadoes might be easier to write. Tornado prediction is a non-linear dart tossed into the misty morning fog. It’s fraught with downdrafts of hope and gusts of unfounded certitude. Yet we…

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  • “Fill Up the Back of that Shovel, Son”

    Iron Spring Mousetrap – National Museum of American History Smithsonian “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door,” is a phrase I first learned in a Harding University Marketing class. The phrase originated with Ralph Waldo Emerson although Mr. Emerson’s original statement was a bit different. “If a man…

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