How do you knock a person unconscious? Movies make it look so easy and convenient. I’ve actually lost consciousness twice that I can remember. One time, I was about twelve and my friends and I were playing a stupid and dangerous game. We called it Blackout. What you did was you breathed hard and fast […]
Category: Musings about Language and Life
My version of “what’s it all about anyway?”
You big bully!
There is, apparently, a large portion or our brains that thinks we still live in caves and chase gazelles with sharpened sticks. Such a paradox we are. I’ve heard it said that even depression serves, or rather did serve, a critical function in the run-and-hide period of our history. The rationale goes like this: the […]
Fancy footwear
For a kid who spent at least 40% of the year barefoot, I sure set a store by my shoes. Scene: I’d been trying to be cool with some other kids, and we went to a shoe store in the mall to try on the platform sandals, some of which increased our height by at […]
Sunday morning
There is nothing in my life that has caused me greater ambivalence than religion. I was raised in a religious family, although we didn’t attend traditional church. Sometime before I was old enough to remember, my parents had a parting of the ways with the local Episcopal church and decided to instead join the Anglican […]
Point it straight
As my sister Laura mentioned, “Point it straight” was another thing our dad liked to say. He would pull out this old saw when one of us was heading out behind the wheel of a car (to my mind, that car was usually the Warthog (see an earlier post), in which case he had reason […]
“Gimme them keys, boy!”
Some months ago, in Ketchikan, a 92-year-old driver struck and killed a woman in a crosswalk. The state’s consequences for the driver were to rescind his driver’s license. What, I wonder, have been the extent of the natural consequences for him and his family? Somewhere, somebody is thinking, if only I had taken Dad’s keys […]
Mother’s Day
This picture shows me sitting in the family cemetery at Judes Ferry. The date is January 21, 2018, just after we had buried my father. To the right of that fresh patch of red clay is my mother, buried in October of 1994. Further still to the right is my baby brother, born and buried […]
Pay attention. . .on purpose. . .to this moment. . .right now
I brought this phrase home with me today from a presentation on mindfulness that I otherwise half-listened to. It reminded me of a moment when I was about fourteen. I was walking up that part of the driveway that we called the Gray Hill (couldn’t tell you why, as it was all red clay). It […]
“Hold still, boy.”
When my father was three years old, he followed his older sisters and parents up the steps of a house. On the porch was a large German shepherd, and he happily reached out to pet the dear puppy. He told me that the last words he heard before the huge jaws closed on his face […]
My little iron horse
When I was growing up, my sisters and I were enamored by the stories written by Laura Ingalls Wilder, also known as the Little House on the Prairie series. (For those of you thinking, “Oh, I remember that TV show,” it’s not your turn to talk. These are books.) Early on, my favorite part was […]