These days, when I am toodling down Spain Road from Juan Tabo and my truck passes her old street, I often forget to look, like I used to. Then, I would take a glance to see if her garage door was open, to see if her car was out in the driveway, to see...
Read more →Yesterday, after my mom’s birthday gathering at my parents’ house, I stuck around and told my dad I needed to go ahead and look at the boxes of books he had there in storage that were owned by my aunt. He had asked several weeks ago if I would take a look at them...
Read more →It’s funny what sticks with you over the years. When I was a freshman at Eldorado High School, unsure and unconfident, I remember one fall evening sitting out on the big rock by the east parking lot waiting for a ride home. It was following an evening tryout for the school’s basketball teams. It...
Read more →I have thoroughly enjoyed seeing my nephews grow up a little bit at a time in their school activities. When my sister’s eldest was in school, he was in drama for a while, and it was great to see him on stage, growing from a kid to a young adult. In the last few...
Read more →You can never quite get inside what really happened to someone else. You can try, I guess, but how far can you really go? How much can you really know? When I met him, he set me up in my room in the men’s dorm when I first arrived early that misty fall in...
Read more →I think often of certain moments back when I was in seminary in the Bay Area in the early 1990’s, and am reminded what an important period those years were in my life. Going away to seminary, it was my first time “living away from home”, in a real sense. I completed college in...
Read more →I wish I knew why I always go back to dark and gray moments, when the silence was loud, and the words were left unsaid, and glances were shared or avoided, and the pregnant awkwardness was packageable, palpable, electrical. Those are the images that ended up written into the hallowed chambers of my heart,...
Read more →Walking through Walmart tonight, I passed by an employee who smelled like cigarette smoke and tobacco, and for a moment, I was small and back in Kansas, inching up the thinly-slabbed concrete sections of the walk from the parking port behind the house in the alley towards the tall white home. The air is...
Read more →Funny how many days of our lives we live, and how few specific moments come back when we try and remember things. Well, maybe that’s just my case. It’s probably different when you have a family, because you have a bunch of big moments stored away with high emotional associations. Marriages, anniversaries, children born,...
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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...
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I don’t know what the deal is, but I am enjoying a round of nausea this afternoon. My guess it is the result of re-upping on a medication, but it could also be my stomach’s unhappy handling of a mug of coffee this morning, or a reaction to something else I have eaten. I...
Read more →It’s always a precarious thing to wade back into our memories. When time passes and life batters us by waves of experiences, it’s easy to lose clarity about the things that have happened to us- especially those that happened long ago from where we are now. What we cannot remember clearly, we forget. And...
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...
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