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dear daddy
I’m sitting in the fourth row from the stage at a bluegrass festival, listening to the final band – a famous band – and the bass player’s licks are coming down the steps of the stage, cutting across,...
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dried bird shit as an allegory
We climbed into The Kid’s Prius last night so he could drive a bit, and when he closed his door, he was startled by the splatter of bird shit on his door window that he somehow missed at first. It was...
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pen cap
Part I – The Dining Room Table Me: “Here, set the table, forks and just butter knives. The pancakes are paleo but that’s how I can eat low carb ones, so deal. No, not that bottle of syrup. It...
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the german shepherd in me
Fetch. 1,000 times. They’re lying sleeping now, exhausted from the morning romp in the yard. Rose is lying on the hardwood floor on her side, beside her memory foam bed instead of on it, because she...
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rock music
(This is difficult for me to write, to put out here, but if Neil Gaiman can put a little more of himself than is comfortable into his writing, then I can do the same.) The Kid got his driver’s license...
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leaf-peeping season
It’s leaf-peeping season; that’s why you came here, the pull-out just after the “Overlook Ahead” sign on the Blue Ridge Parkway. It’s a good one, isn’t it? You can see forever. There’s a lot of brown...
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toilet paper
The man walking into the grocery store tipped his head toward Jane as she went past him with her chin up, out the door and toward her car, proud with a large package of toilet paper tucked under her...
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shine
You should back up your bed timeincrementally every weekYou’ll be a morning personbefore you know it She sleeps through each dawn whileother people rise and stretch andshine right in her eyeseveryone...
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the way of things
It’s the kind of whiplash no chiropractor can pretend to cure. The Kid got his driver’s license two weeks ago. Then he went out on his own and got a job at Wendy’s. My old stomping grounds (though not...
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why i use facebook
Around the time The Kid turned three years old, he asked me one day to define “soon” for him. It was quite possibly the most difficult question I’ve been asked in four decades of life. Last night, a...
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carried on the breeze
It was in the mid-fifties last night. This morning, when I arrived at work and got out of my RAV4, a chilly breeze blew. Then it dropped to calm, the air barely moving around me. Normally, the first...
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the social experiment
The last straw in the subtle, systematic bullying fell the morning I stood bleary-eyed in the tiny kitchen of the student apartment, pouring Apple Jacks into a melamine bowl. I was always the first up...
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dan rather
When I was a childI made God in my brainThey told me He reignedSo God looked like Dick ClarkCommanding $10,000 PyramidThey told me He knew allSo God looked like Dan RatherBehind his desk at CBSKnowing...
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the turd knife
No one talks about this sort of thing. Not civilized people, anyway. Not unless copious amounts of high-proof alcohol are involved, and that doesn’t count because they won’t remember it the next day...
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coming home from work
I don’t understand my own psychology. I don’t understand the contradictions that exist side by side in my brain, how they can do that. You’d think that in an effort to resolve them, all the grey,...
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heartswell (part one)
Like so many others, I reveled yesterday in the honking horns and cheers, the spontaneous street parties, the unbridled joy at the halt of our descent into a dictatorship, the weight of seeming doom....
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heartswell (part two)
Fear. I scrape the Biden/Harris bumper sticker off my car before I drive to the grocery store today. I see no benefit to inviting, inciting, retaliation for my vote. Fear. It swells in my heart. “If...
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sticky notes: fork edition
A couple of weeks ago I forgot to pack a fork in my lunch bag and I had to use one that was sitting in the dish rack in the break room at work. And instead of diligently washing it at home and...
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heather cox richardson
I walk casually with my hands stuffed into the pockets of my brown trench coat, over to the counter. The owner of the general store wipes his hands on a towel and comes over, asks if he can help me. I...
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TLOSTNTBDTOHBNOWEBISJTOC
The other day, I found myself telling someone, “I used to have a blog.” The doings of the world have run me dry. Only in the past few weeks have I noticed snippets tip-toeing by in my mind, things...
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