This week has been a grey one for me—one in which I have brushed up against my depression. Some of it is weather related, but that’s too easy an attribution. Some of it is grief. Monday marked what would have been my parents’ fifty-ninth wedding anniversary; Tuesday marked nineteen months since Dad died. Some of…
Last week I was supposed to drive up to Raleigh, as Andy and Barney used to say, to speak to the Presbyterian Campus Ministries group at North Carolina State University. I was deterred by freezing precipitation, so I went this week instead. The group meets for a meal and a meeting each Wednesday in the…
One of the things I love about my job as a trainer at the computer store is I get to know people. Mine is the one position in the store that sees repeat customers because they have purchased a one-year membership that allows them to come in as often as they can make appointments. Getting…
The woman who wrote the article I talked about yesterday said one of the ways she tried to reach her daughter was to put poems in her shoes because, she said, “What I wanted her to know is: People have been in pain before, struggled to find hope, and look what they’ve done with it.”…
My friend Paul pointed me to an article in the New York Times that has stuck with me for several days now titled “Bringing a Daughter Back From the Brink With Poetry.” The author told a simple story of how she worked to reach out to her teenage daughter as she was going through a…
I am writing late tonight because I have been at a wedding. The daughter of church friends got married this evening. Several weeks ago, they contacted me about baking pies for the wedding. They didn’t want a cake. Instead they wanted individual mini pies—equal amounts of key lime and chocolate chess. We came up with…
Content. How you pronounce the word in your head as you read will determine the definition you infer. con-TENT in a state of peaceful happiness. satisfied with a certain level of achievement, good fortune, etc., and not wishing for more. CON-tent the things that are held or included in something. the amount of a particular…
It’s Thursday, which means I spent a good part of my day getting ready for Thursday Night Dinner, our weekly gathering with friends and whoever else shows up to share the meal. Tonight it was all “regulars,” if you will—friends who come most every week and who help make both our house and our town…
Liberal. It’s a word that most certainly elicits a response. In the media, it’s a lightning rod. In the dictionary, it means generous and open-minded. I’ve been thinking about the word for a couple of days now after having read an article about a professor at my alma mater who was calling for those in…
The last two Sundays I have had the privilege of playing music in church with my friend Terry, who is one of the best harmonica players I have ever heard. Soon after we moved to Durham I was asked to sing at the sixtieth birthday party of one of our church members. I sang “Angel…