Stuff I remember from back in the day that I felt was worth writing down and chewing on for a spell.
In the summer after my 4th grade year of elementary school, my parents bought a home way out north in Albuquerque (at the time) and moved us to a street that was near the edge of town. The development was new enough that the land on the south side of the main road we...
Read more →It’s amazing how memories of a book that you read can become heavily associated with the place or places where you read it. I thought it’d be fun to make a short list of some of the books I’ve read that have strong ties to places and moments in my history and memory. “An...
Read more →When I started high school, I was a kid in transition. I was growing at odd intervals. My acne ebbed and receded like waves on a beach. I was in a lot of activities, and I was pretty anonymous in all of them. And I was adrift socially (as I have often been since)....
Read more →After finishing seminary, I had an opportunity to hop a plane and then ride trains all around western Europe for six weeks. One morning near the end of my journey, I was wandering a busy street in the center of Oxford, England, when I witnessed one of the most amazing and beautiful performances of...
Read more →Anytime I hear a song by Chicago, and specifically from albums 16 or 17, I am carried back to my sophomore and junior years in high school. I think this is in part because both albums had singles in heavy airplay as either new releases or recurrent singles during those years- Chicago was hot...
Read more →I was digging around in a few boxes in the garage tonight when I came across a thin hard-covered little book I hadn’t seen in a while. The little book was a journal from the summer of 1994. A travel notebook. Decorating the front cover of the notebook is an old map with hand-drawn...
Read more →For whatever reason, whenever I hear a Richard Marx song, I think mainly of two things- one, the killer CD boom box my brother bought back in the day, and the other, mowing yards on sweltering summer afternoons in 1988. I think of the killer CD boom box because it had exceptional bass, complete...
Read more →I have never considered myself a very competent reader. I don’t have a memory for ideas and details like my brother, who can recall peculiar lines from movies verbatim after one sitting, and facts from articles and books that are relevant to life, for which I have no filing system in my brain. I...
Read more →At age 43, I often think I should be farther along in life than I am. In love. In a profession. In handling the daily grind. I’ve been on this planet for four decades, and have seen more minutes of living than a number of people I have liked or appreciated: Chris Farley was...
Read more →