In retrospect, it was a mean trick to pull. But in my defense, Cousin Ollie had it coming. Ollie was one of those little twerps who, no matter what you did, claimed that he did it first, better or both. When I was laid up with the measles, Ollie sent me a get-well card signed, “Your a big ...
As I write these words, it is Sept. 21, and yes, I remember. It’s when Earth, Wind & Fire sang, “Do you remember / The 21st night of September?” Straight forward enough. But by the time the group makes it to the chorus of their hit, “September,” they are singing nonsense words like ...
I must have been dreaming. There I was, floating around in ethereal form, filling in family and coworkers about my unfinished to-do list, now that I no longer walked in the land of the living. They say that dead men tell no tales, but in my dream, I wouldn’t shut up. I hovered five feet ...
Remember waiting six to eight weeks for delivery? And the weeks you invested in eating enough cereal that you didn’t like to collect the required number of box tops? Now all a kid has to do is pop open Amazon or some other shopping link and the prize that used to come in the mail will be delivered to your front door tomorrow. What we’ve gained in speed we’ve lost in patience. When I was a kid, we had to snap the TV on five minutes before the show started. The TV needed a couple minutes to warm up before we could begin to adjust the vertical and horizontal holds. We were ...
I ambled toward my usual pew, the one where everyone in church knows that I ALWAYS sit. If someone has a message for me, she leaves it on my seat. If a congregant returns a book he borrowed from me, he leaves it on my seat. It’s MY seat. But this morning, a lady — and a regular who knew better at that — was settled into my seat, relaxed and comfortable as if she always parked there. I offered a polite nod. She gave a bemused smile. She knew she was in MY seat. I tried a different spot. The padding bunched differently. The backrest bumped my shoulder blades all wrong. I was ...
I do not count the dust bunnies hopping around under my bed as one of my official collections. Also gathering dust is what used to be my across her dashboard. “It’s what we Jeep people do. We collect rubber ducks.” Traffic came to a halt. She grabbed a duck from a bag of them behind her seat, ran to another Jeep three vehicles ahead of us, and passed a rubber duck through the window to that driver to add to his army of rubber ducks in formation on his dash. “It’s what we Jeep drivers do,” she told me when she got back behind the wheel. “We greet each other with ...
