Bespoke

writing

  • 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… Continue reading

  • 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… Continue reading

  • 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… Continue reading

  • 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… Continue reading

  • 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… Continue reading

  • 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… Continue reading

  • 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.… Continue reading

  • 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… Continue reading

  • “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… Continue reading

  • Alone at Eve

    John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis and Grace Walker Taylor all died on November 22nd. Just hours after my grandmother Grace passed on that date in 1993, my niece, Ashley Grace Taylor was born early on a Sunday morning. Her birth… Continue reading