I grew up in and around the small town of Maryville, Tennessee. In one direction lay the big city of Knoxville. In the other lay the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I preferred the mountains to big cities, and still do. So I spent more time in the park than in Knoxville. …
My body has accepted its 6-month old hip enough that I have resumed bicycle riding. Last week I rode to work and back two days, and yesterday I went out in rolling Maryland countryside on a glorious spring day for a 19 mile ride. That isn’t a very long ride by my previous standards, but given my recent restrictions it seemed like a hundred. I rode out near the Potomac River that has some tough hills. …
Skinny, 5th grade Malcomb was at the pool with his swim team. They had finished swimming and were horsing around in the dressing room as boys that age will do. Malcomb was at the end of the bench where he had a good view of the area. And that was fortunate because in came an older man with the ugliest foot and leg he had ever seen. The foot was large and stubby and overly red in color. It had no toes whatsoever and was attached to a somewhat matching leg that looked no better. It looked like something from a freak show. …
Leaving Barstow is about people feeling and being trapped in their life situations but still trying to rise above them. Mostly it is about 18-year old Andrew, played by Kevin Sheridan who also wrote the the screenplay. Andrew is smart and promising but seems tied to his mother’s problems and doomed to live the life of an underachiever in Barstow, California. His teacher is trying to change that but literally dies while trying. …
To frame my thoughts about A Song for Martin, I painfully recall taking my 90-year-old college professor father to buy a pair of pants. Dad did not believe he needed the pants, but he went along at my insistence. He took the selection into the dressing room. I stood at the door, waiting. Dad emerged with pants in hand and took me to be a salesman. He began to inform me that the store should be ashamed to charge so much for pants like these, and he was not about to buy them. I remember his confusion, something like fright, when I said that I was his son, Edward, and not a salesman. The pain and embarrassment of that moment was shared by us both. …
I’ve used GPS since the early days when they degraded the signals to keep non-military uses from being as accurate. I’ve had several automobile units and my present unit is a Garmin Nuvi. What I’d like to do in this article is provide non-users with a good idea of what this technology provides, and to give some useful tips to others based on my practical experience. …
Anyone who loves war and hates anti-war movies should avoid Joyeux Noel. Although it is not anti-war overtly, but it undermines the “us good people against them bad people” premise of wars. It tells the story of events that occurred in 1914 as German and Allied troups faced each other across their trenches on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. These are sometimes called “The Christmas Truce of 1914.” …
We feed the birds, squirrels, chipmunks, and other visiting animals such as foxes and possums and raccoons on occasion. We try to provide special nourishment during snows and blizzards, such as we have been having lately. Our usual birds are the doves, blue jays, various woodpeckers, cardinals, sparrows, finches, grackles, and others. But for the last few days we have had gangs of crows, sometimes numbering in the dozens. They sit in the distant trees and swoop in when the coast is clear. They are beautifully black against the white snow. When Dylan Thomas described night time in his mythical town of Milkwood as “crow-black,” he was using an apt image. …
This is not a cry for help, but we are having a lot of winter this winter in the Washington D.C. and Mid-Atlantic region. Up to 250,000 homes have been without power, including my home and neighborhood. A man who works with me has been out of power for nearly a week. We are breaking the all-time snowfall record of 54 inches for one winter. The air is white with it just now and blizzard-force winds are blowing it sideways. We have the heat turned up and the candles and flashlights laid out and ready. There have been discussions about portable generators and other preparations. …
Take Care of Your Snow Plow Driver and He Will Take Care of YouRead More »
I went out running through the neighborhood on a Saturday afternoon. I heard the sound of helicopters overhead and discovered they were spraying. I had heard about the spraying on the radio. It was to kill something they wanted to kill. …