The elderly woman praying a rosary in the front pew of church? Her daughter is married to Ernest Hemingway’s son. The district judge who serves on the pastoral council? He was General Schwarzkopf’s driver during the first Iraq war.
I was fired up. I could hear conviction in my voice and felt intensity in my glare. But, as often happens when I assume the role of teacher, the instructor learned more than the students.
When I was a boy, my grandmother lived on a farm across the road from my parents’ farm. Like all grandmothers, she was the best grandmother in all the world.
It is late when I put the novel aside, but tiredness is not the reason that I close the book. I stop reading because the kid in the story is getting to me.
I received a call to visit a mother and infant in a neo-natal intensive care unit. When I arrived at the desk, the nurse directed me to the wrong room.
Every defensive line has a weak player or two. Mine is a wide receiver who runs for the sideline to avoid getting tackled. I’m referring to my tendency to avoid conflict at all costs.
Mid-November finds me in the Midwest. Hunkered inside a cabin , I watch hickory boughs outside the window sway in the wind. Flurries swirl. Swaths of snow, thin as muslin, drape the ground.