I studied for a Masters degree at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in Mill Valley, California, from 1991 to 1994. While there, I collected a range of memories that bubble up in my head from time to time. Here are a few of those. The whirr of windshield wipers as beads of water streak...
Read more →As part of my week of medical wackiness, I went in to TriCore yesterday to get blood work done to see if we could get any insight into my blotchy foot. Last week, before my back decided to give up on me, I came home from work and took off my socks one night,...
Read more →Tonight, I was home after 8 and there wasn’t a Cubs ballgame on for me to watch. It was just house and clutter and two limp cats trying to ignore the heat. I went to the doctor this morning to get an opinion on a chain of blotchy red spots ringing my ankle and...
Read more →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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