At age 15 they say the Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus. At age 15 they say Juliet fell in love with Romeo. At age 15 they say my great grandmother immigrated to the United States from Poland. At age 15 they say a girl took a gun to her Christian school…
I love old books. I have one in front of me now. It lies open on my desk. One of twenty volumes bound in watered silk entitled Author’s Digest, The World’s Great Stories In Brief, Prepared By A Staff Of Literary Experts, With The Assistance Of Many Living Novelists, printed in 1908 on thick vellum…
My grandather tried to teach me how to tie a bowline. It’s a knot. I couldn’t do it. My father taught me to tie my shoes on the very first try. Bragged about it. Told my Mom. “On the very first try.” Couldn’t get over it. But Gramps gave up. Stood there with his Pall…
I’ve got a picture I want to show you. I want to show it to you this way. It’s a picture of my grandfather, my father’s father. A man born in 1898. My grandfather stands among eighteen other men in the picture and seven horses in the winter in front of a raw, unpainted frame…
You got no class. Sorry. You got no idea. Tough luck. You weren’t born soon enough. That’s the way it goes. Call me old enough to know better. Call me too old to get it up. Call me anything you like. I don’t have to call you anything at all. Because you got no style.…
I attended a concert by the Rolling Stones on July 11, 1966 in Houston, Texas at the Sam Houston Coliseum the day before my seventeenth birthday. I recall Mick Jagger strutting across the stage wearing a white blazer decorated all over with large blotches of caramel color and he couldn’t get no satisfaction. Neither could…
My father once said, “I don’t care if you love me, as long as you respect me.” My father once said, “If you go to war I’ll pray for your death.” My father once cursed me, in response to my answer to his question, “Why do you think I spent all that money on you?”…
I took a ride yesterday, the last good day to ride if you like temperatures in the seventies. A very windy day. I didn’t know how windy until I got out in the country. Then I knew. It blew me off my line, that invisible line you travel left of center near the opposing traffic…
In 1964 my mother bought a clock in the city where we lived. A clock to stand in the hall, purchased with money when her mother died she received. Not a lot of money. Enough to buy the clock when I had only just begun to enter high school. The clock ticked in the hall.…
I think it is important to go home a winner. I think it is important to allow no dream to die, else it is no dream worth dreaming. If a dream dies, it is mortal and no dream should be made of such rotten stuff. We live in a world of change, but what makes…
