When Ginger and I fly, she always takes the window seat and I always opt for the aisle, which means, from time to time, someone unrelated to us sits in the middle. Last night on the flight home from Texas, a rather chatty woman sat between us and covered a wide variety of subjects from…
We took Ella walking in the middle of the night last night, so I didn’t get my daily dose of Jon Stewart, so, when I got home tonight, Ginger and I watched last night’s episode of The Daily Show, which included this report from John Oliver at both McCain and Obama campaign rallies. The clip…
Every so often, I come across a Cheers episode on television. For all the years between now and the days when it set my Thursday night schedule, the show holds up pretty well. My favorite scene is Norm walking in and heading to his usual perch. Woody: How are you doing, Mr. Peterson?Norm: Woody, it’s…
Over the past several weeks I’ve had to learn how to send text messages because it is my boss’ preferred way of mobile communication. By accident one day, I pressed a button on my phone that read, “T9word,” and discovered my choice enabled my phone to anticipate the word I was typing, thus speeding up…
Lesson One: Remember What It Feels Like. Sunday nights I work at the Durham restaurant. The guy who is my second at Duke works there also, after doing the brunch shift on campus. When he got to work, he told me our Duke dishwasher had not shown up, which meant the cook got to wash…
“Whose picture is on the money?”he asked, before there was paper moneypeopled with presidents. I’ve got a Lincoln,Hamilton, and a couple of Washingtonsbunched up in my pants pocket; wait –lucky day: there’s a Jackson in there, too.Not too many Benjamins around our house. “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,”he said, centuries before rendering hadanything to…
Peace,Milton
Tuesday morning I went hiking. I’m not sure I’ve ever written that sentence before because I’m not a hiker, particularly. But Bob, a fellow Pilgrim (as we, at our church, like to identify ourselves) asked me if I wanted to walk the trails along the Eno river, which he likes to do, and so I…
To get up at five-thirty on a Thursday morning in the middle of a week where, thanks to presidential debates and baseball playoff games, I’ve not gotten enough sleep anyway seemed like a ridiculous idea. To spend a couple of hours walking from Chavis Park to the State Capitol in Raleigh when I had a…
Ginger is headed to the big house — MDA jail, that is. She was notified recently of her plight, though she was not told who snitched on her, since that person is now in “witness protection.” Though the actual charges remain unclear, the long and short of it all is she has to raise $2000…