most of our stories go untold to those around us or perhaps they are unheard misunderstood because they we are not fluent in each other it’s unfair I suppose to say anything about most of our stories as though they could be collected in a single volume the library of humanity isn’t so easily contained…
In this last week before my sixty-sixth birthday, I started something new: I became a Lyft driver. The idea came from my cousin who does so herself in Texas. We were catching up and talking about ways to make a little cash and she suggested I look into the service. She went on to tell…
One of the realities of my life is I am not hard to overhear. I would love to say my hearing loss is primarily to blame, but I have talked loudly all of my life. I have a booming voice, as they say. As my hearing loss has become profound (the official word), I have…
I would love to tell you I remember who gave me this recipe. As you can see from the photograph, it has been around a long time and, based on the “this one” written and circled, it replaced one I had used previously. It has also erased the memory of the former recipe. For all…
repeating myself if someone says they are going through the motions we take it to mean the motions are meaningless acts of resignation things we can do in our sleep but I would suggest that the story is not so simple the motions are memories or at least they hold them to repeat what I…
measured existence I can measure a cup of flour, pour a pound of sugar but I am at a loss to quantify how much grief weighs how long a heart stays bro- ken how far it is to forgiveness or the speed of the sound of loneliness I cannot serve slices of starlight or morsels…
I have no idea how long Guilford has hosted a tree lighting on the Green, but we have managed to be there with several hundred of our closest neighbors for all but one of the seven Christmases we have been in town, the one exception being 2020. You remember 2020. Our first year was also…
Here is a story I haven’t told in a while. In December of 1983 I was working as a chaplain at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas. My roommate, Bruce Reece, owned the condo we shared in North Dallas–well, then it was North Dallas; now it is almost downtown. Bruce traveled a lot with his…
catching a breath in the small town where we lived before this one one of the houses on our way home filled their yard with inflatable Christmas things Santa snowmen reindeer to name a few each was filled with air and light and made their corner lot the beacon of the neighborhood until daybreak when…
For the Advent season, I am returning to a book I have not finished–The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times, edited by Paul Rogat Loeb. The nearly five hundred page book is an expansive collection of essays and poems intended to inspire us “to join the community of those…