Every so often I find myself thinking about Claude Wheeler in Willa Cather’s novel, “One of Ours”. It happens mostly when my life seems to hit another prolonged lull, or plows full on into a series of roadblocks and whatever momentum I thought I had going is stamped out cold. I go back to...
Read more →I wish I knew why I am always looking back. It’s like I am constantly trying to find answers for things that happened back then, as if those answers would change something in my life now. Not that having those answers would change anything. I guess many people are like this. Maybe that is...
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I was grateful this last Christmas when my Facebook friend Derek surprised me with a box of books to read. It was an amazing gesture not only because he was thoughtful enough to send a (sizable) gift, but more importantly, he sent me a parcel of books that he has loved over the years,...
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On Monday, my old friend Chris and I took an opportunity to go see a movie together. It’s rare we get to do that, mostly because he’s a busy guy with work and with lots of family activities. But for this occasion, we both wanted to get to this film. since, to us, It...
Read more →The truth is, if you want to write, like in any other great venture in life, you have to take some risks. True, you aren’t high-wire walking over a 150 foot canyon. You aren’t riding your motorcycle in that metal sphere with two other bikers circling in the same tiny space. You aren’t letting...
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It was during summer in ’98, even before I picked up my somewhat ordered life and threw it 1300 miles east at that huge Midwestern metropolis, that I had started to pay attention to them. Maybe it was because they were often on WGN, filling afternoon and evening time slots on the national cable...
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It’s not because I am a great athlete that I caught the bug. Or maybe it is because I’m not a great athlete that I did. I don’t know. And it’s not that it’s been this lifelong passion. There were probably 15 to 20 years that I didn’t think about it at all, between...
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This weekend I wanted to celebrate the arrival of spring with a night out camping somewhere, so on Saturday afternoon I consulted my little New Mexico campgrounds book for locales near Albuquerque. One chapter focused on campgrounds east and southeast of Albuquerque- locations within an hour of the city, behind the Manzanos. Among the...
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I was driving home from work last night when I thought of that book. It had been years, perhaps decades since I thought about it, but at one time that book embodied a big chunk of what I wanted in life at the time. When I got it, I was almost a junior in...
Read more →Most of the time, I sit down to write and I just stare. Indescript images bubble up in my mind and then fade, unattached to clarity or meaning or significance. I don’t know how writers do it. I always think I’d be a decent writer if I had something to write about. I sift...
Read more →I try to make sense of it, as the days come and go, why some things spin off like they do. There probably is no making sense of it really. Why some people we want to love us want nothing to do with us. Why some people we struggle to like want to be...
Read more →It was a little after one, after our daily stair climb at work, when Nathan sent the note. At first I thought it was peculiar because he and I are friends but we don’t really chat (I’m not a big chatter”), so I just thought may be he was writing to ask a question....
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Then, it was midday, and the sky was a light shade of blue. I sat on a metal bench in front of the long gray brick hall, the light hurting my eyes. People trickled in and out of the gray building. Behind me were rectangles of gardens where, again, a few people walked here...
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I felt fortunate this morning, dealing with a head cold and nowhere to go, to be able to dig into a game I had wanted to play as a teen but that I never had access to. Thankfully, included in the massive haul I picked up at Christmas last year was Avalon Hill’s game...
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“What are you doing there, kid?” He is about nine and chunky, with a squarish head and sparse black curly hair. His brown-striped t-shirt has a quarter-sized ketchup spot near the center of his belly. He stiffens up quickly, as if the voice was from God. “Nothing. I’m doing nothing.” “You go on home....
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After I drove into the lot and parked this morning, I got out of my truck and fumbled around trying to drape my backpack on my right shoulder while holding a phone and a coffee mug in one hand and a folder of papers and a lunch bag in the other, and the backpack...
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