Because my Lenten practice is to write everyday, I have found that means I must also read. I need to find fellow travelers — generally those who have walked the road ahead of me leaving something of a path to follow. What cooking and theology share in common is there’s not much that is…
My friend David Gentiles knew how to make gumbo. His mama taught him how to do it and he used her recipe. I never had a chance to let him teach me how to do it before he died, but on more than one occasion I would call him from Boston and say, “I tried…
my job tonight was to mix the ashes and the oil making from the charred remains a paste of penitence the sacred soot stared from the bottom of the plate as I poured olive oil from home and began to stir the ashes stuck to me like skin like they knew me turning the lines…
For Valentine’s Day, Ginger gave me a waffle iron. Actually, she gave me a replacement waffle iron. She gave me one several years ago that I wore out making waffles when I worked at the restaurant at Duke and I wanted to put chicken and waffles on the menu. One of our friends suggested we…
On my last trip to Texas, I was passing through Fort Worth and called an old friend to meet me for lunch. When he asked what I wanted to eat, I said, “Chicken fried steak,” since, for all of its wonderful food, that is not a part of the Carolina culinary lexicon. As I was…
who knows how many pictures of you I’ve taken how many times we’ve walked down our street — in sun and snow — on our way to coffee and conversation yet you still steal my heart in the simplest of ways the singlest of frames the hope and ache of a lifetime caught…
One of the things I have had to unlearn from my childhood is how people were described when telling a story of something that happened. What was modeled for me was white people were simply described as people: a man, a woman. People of any other ethnic or racial background were given a qualifier: “I…
I have work to do this morning but I keep running into poems that give me pause and pull my gaze out my second-story window to the dance of sunshine and shadows on the fence line, the blanket of dead leaves turning to soil and the trees, their bare branches reaching or — perhaps —…
The Christmas tide is going out . . . the waves of wonder which crashed against the sea wall of my heart are sliding away reminding me that the tides come and go, neap and spring: this is the rhythm of redemption. Along the now silent sands in my mind’s eye I still see…
I wrote this poem several years ago, and I thought of it this morning. the morning after Mary rose before sunrise; the baby was still sleeping, as was Joseph and most of the animals, except for one cow who looked a little sheepish. The shepherds were long gone. In their excitement, they had not cleaned…