It’s New Year’s, which means it’s time to get up close and personal with ourselves. We get to wipe the slate clean and think about all the things we would differently if we could this year. Some things we can change, and some we can’t. It is the season of resolutions, though, and as...
Read more →It’s Christmas, so it’s as good a time as any to think about the holiday, and what it means to me. It is, after all, besides a commercial boon, a religious holiday, focused on the birth of a child according to a very popular book, who was all human and, at the same time,...
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He had grown up in the area and spent his childhood hiking the hills and running the ridges that jut out above the beaches. He knew the bushes and the berries, the migration paths of the deer and the rock holds that sheltered the turkey and pheasant hiding amongst the trees. His step-father Ansel...
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It wasn’t the ideal weekend for us to get together, but it worked out great anyways. At least it did for me. Steve was in town for the sorrowful reason of seeing his wife’s father laid to rest. The service completed on Friday (well-attended and honored by the words of his children), Steve had...
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While I’ve scribbled in notebooks and on computer hard drives for years, there was really just one time that I made a concerted effort to really try “that writing thing” sort of seriously. It was a good experiment. When I was a junior in undergrad at UNM, I ended up taking a creative writing...
Read more →When I was a boy, for some reason Aunt Ruth liked me. Aunt Ruth was, in reality, my father’s aunt, but to the rest of our family, that was her name, and she fit a bit of the Welton mold: she was a strong-minded and strong-willed woman who was fiercely independent and, common to...
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I’ve been pretty fortunate throughout my life. Instead of being born in Liberia or in Croatia or in Palestine, I somehow drew the lucky stick to fall out into this world in the United States. I made the cut to hit the tail end of the 20th century, and I also drew the middle...
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Today was a good day, although it started with the sky so melancholy that it quietly cried for a spell before the sun fully awoke and worked on cheering everyone up. I got up during its sadness and felt fall chill throughout the house and pet the kitties before I headed to church and...
Read more →This morning, I needed to write, and I wasn’t sure about what, so I have sat here looking around in a little coffee shop downtown, across from the UNM campus. It’s a converted house that is loosely filled with mix-and-match tables and chairs. The wood floors are nice. The walls are white or soft...
Read more →“No man needs sympathy because he has to work, because he has a burden to carry. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” ― Theodore Roosevelt Thinking as I do about meaning and purpose and Biblical answers, I’ve wondered a lot about...
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My guess is we all have those moments when it feels like the walls of life are pressing in on us. Or, rather, the walls of being alive press on us. Decisions squeeze us, and choices ask for a decision. Sometimes, it’s the wheeze of mortality heard way to close to us, through a...
Read more →Listening to my country station on Pandora today, this song came on. At first I thought, hmmm, pop- gotta chuck it. But the drums grabbed me, and then the vocals pulled me in. Never heard of Parachute. Wow. Powerful little song.
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I was delighted to see my cousin Kevin Scruggs’s company, Bro Corp United, had this video posted on its Facebook timeline today. Evidently, Terry Bradshaw hosts a show called “Today in America” which is billed as “the first show of its genre… that’s geared towards the educated, affluent viewer… Today in America successfully blends...
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Things were getting a little kooky this afternoon as much of the world (or at least a few people in the U.S., most specifically in Miami and Cleveland) were getting amped about LeBron James and where he would land next year in the NBA. I ended up coming across this tweet that said locals...
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I don’t know what I ate the night before, but Thursday morning I woke from one of those lucid dreams wondering what I had done. The dream, from what I had of it still in memory at the time, went something like this… I’m sitting in a lobby to the training room in an...
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