One of my earliest memories of my mom comes from when I was four, or possibly five. I was playing with one of those toys where kids pound plastic objects of different shapes into the corresponding shaped holes. As usual, I was trying to put a square peg in a round hole. My mom came outside to say she was going to the store and asked if I wanted to go with her. Normally I would have jumped at the chance and the prospect of perhaps talking my way into a piece of candy. But this time I said no, I would rather stay home and play.
She looked vaguely disappointed, but said OK and left. I’m sure...
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Busking — Chiefly British: To entertain by dancing, singing, or reciting on the street or in a public place. (From dictionary.com.)
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Guy Forsyth said while on stage in Longview a few weeks ago that he started out busking in Austin, a word with which I was just vaguely familiar. I thought I knew what it meant, but I have learned not to rely on guesswork when it comes to words I don’t really know. Such carelessness has caused past problems when I mangle words, using them in the opposite way as intended. Once I used “opprobrium” when I should have used “approbation.” The latter...
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WRIGHT PATMAN LAKE, ATLANTA STATE PARK — A soft drizzle falls across the lake as the wind blows out of the south. Everything is a uniform shade of gray on this unseasonably cool final day of April in East Texas, as my future father-in-law and I whiz across the placid water in a flatbottom boat. We are running two sets of trotlines, each containing 50 hooks with plastic jugs bobbing on either line. We hope to have landed a mess of catfish.
H.K. Teel will turn 80 in October. He complains about having slowed down in old age, that he is not as strong as he used to be. That certainly is true, but he’s...
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My middle brother Scott and I got into a mild argument the other day about what our phone number was when growing up in Allenstown, N.H. in the 1960s. That is where we lived until June 1968 when my parents came to their senses and came to Texas. They hired a mover to load up most of our possessions and pulled a U-Haul trailer with their 1964 Mercury Comet containing the immediate necessities — clothes, etc.
It was a grand adventure, three sons and the parents leisurely winding our way south, stopping at Gettysburg, in the Smokey Mountains, finally arriving in Longview — where I learned that...
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