On Veterans Day
This post on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y_JunZ-ZwQ&feature=youtu.be I parked at a rest stop about two hours from home and an hour away from the care facility where my 96-year-old mother lives. Before heading back to the highway, I checked...
But I don’t want that, I want this
It was late afternoon on Halloween, and I decided to give my young children baths before taking them trick-or-treating. That way, we’d get home, settle into story time, and go to bed reasonably close to our usual for a school night. Four-year-old Jessica offered to...
Quest for Our Fathers, Living Still
This coming Saturday is my father’s 96th birthday. Though he’s been gone for over twenty years, I still think of him on Father’s Day and his birthday. I remember him on Thanksgiving, carving the turkey, his Ho-Ho-Ho’s at Christmastime, plowing snow in winter,...
So here we are all human beings
To listen to or view this illustrated post on YouTube, click this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMjMB2W2IAA&feature=youtu.be “How did you begin to write?” asked a high school freshman I’ll call Mary. We sat across from one another in the lounge...
Columbus Day as story and history
It’s October 1957, and I’m in first grade, coloring a worksheet that features outline drawings of three ships. With colored pencils in hand, I carefully print the ships’ names: Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. A year and a half later, in second grade, my classmates...
Why didn’t someone tell me?
On the way to choir practice last Wednesday, I heard a tick-tick-tick in the car engine, slower when idling and faster with acceleration. I stopped in a parking lot, grabbed my phone, and searched the internet for “engine knocking." The possibilities were dire. I...