“Commit to something you believe in,” was the title of one of the twenty-two email messages that greeted me when I signed on this morning. I considered it a bit of a sign, or at least a nudge. I opened the letter from Sojourners Magazine (I’m on their sojomail list) to find they were asking…
My friend Patty drives from Higgins Lake to Ann Arbor, Michigan regularly. She calls when she’s on the road. Just south of St. John’s, the highway flattens out into farm country, which is usually when my phone rings because I think the landscape gets boring, or at least hypnotizing. One day last year she called…
I got home from the restaurant about 10:30 Saturday night, put on my pajamas and Ginger and I hunkered down for the storm. It’s now Monday morning and neither of us have left the house or changed out of our pajamas. Both our congregations cancelled services. We watched a couple of movies – Millions (highly…
We’ve not had our usual winter here in New England: very little cold or snow. Seems that’s about to change. A Nor’easter is blowing in tomorrow. By Sunday afternoon we could have about a foot and a half of snow on the ground and I will be out shoveling the driveway. Though the mild days…
A couple of weeks ago, my brother left a message on my cell phone: “I just finished a book you have to read. You’ll love it. It’s called Blue Like Jazz.” Since recommending reading is not one of his usual things, I went and bought the book. He’s right. It’s good. I’m reading it slowly…
It’s hard to write when you feel stupid. I’ve run up against something I didn’t know about that should have been on my radar. I’m deeply disturbed, convicted, and dumb. It’s also hard to write when you have too strong an agenda. I’m pissed. I want to preach, to rant, to tell everyone what they…
I heard this story on All Things Considered last night. You gotta hear the symphony of truck horns. Peace,Milton
In the early nineties, Robert Olen Butler wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning short story collection called A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain. I read it for a Fiction Writing course I took while working on my MA in English. My favorite story was “Fairy Tale,” mostly because of the first paragraph: I like the…
Any time we have a discussion about a meal at church and the discussion turns to how we are going to pay for it before we talk about why we are having the meal or what we are going to have, I’m afraid the folks in the room know what I’m going to say because,…
Today I’m cooking for a Teacher Appreciation Dinner at church and I’m making fresh pasta (report and recipes tomorrow), which brings me to pass on another poem shared with me by another friend. She found it through the Writer’s Almanac. The poet is Kate Scott, from her book Stitches. Pasta In the yellow kitchen her…