The Boys Scouts of America turned 100 years old a few weeks ago. My family’s involvement in scouting doesn’t go back quite that far, but it does go back more than 75 years. It continues to this day, thanks to my youngest brother’s volunteer efforts and that of his son, a third-generation Eagle Scout.
I don’t tell you all this to brag, being no great shakes as a Scout. I made it to the rank of Life, which is the one below Eagle, but I was nowhere close to reaching that rarified echelon when the lure of girls, earning money working at this newspaper to put gasoline in Suzuki motorcycle...
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First time I met Charlie Wilson was in 1978, inside the motor coach that served as his portable campaign office. I was a photographer for the Nacogdoches paper. He was running for re-election to Congress, something he did every two years from the time he was sent there in 1972 until he retired in 1996. Despite his well-earned reputation for drinking, partying, squiring around beautiful women and saying outrageous things, “Good Time Charlie” was handily re-elected every time by the voters of his district in Deep East Texas.
I covered Charlie’s return trips home for most of the next two decades,...
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“I can’t help feeling that our punctuation system, which has served the written word with grace and ingenuity for centuries, must not be allowed to disappear without a fight.”
—Lynne Truss, “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”
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I trust Ms. Truss is manning the barricades in her native Britain, where in Birmingham the city elders have decided to drop all apostrophes from street signs. An Associated Press story says officials concluded the pesky little tear-dropped symbol is “confusing and old-fashioned.” The phrase sparks the image of a slightly loopy aunt, perhaps too fond...
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I stopped by the nursing home early last week to tell my mom I would pick her up the next day, to take her to lunch to celebrate her 80th birthday. She looked startled at the news.
“Jeez, I’m old,” she said.
Three years ago, my mom spent her birthday in Good Shepherd Medical Center, bouncing back from once again having received the Last Rites. At the time, I wouldn’t have taken 10-to-1 odds that we would be heading to Cotton Patch Café on a sunny winter morning to mark her birthday with a plate of fried catfish.
She is a tough old bird. That will be her epitaph, in my mind if not on the actual...
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Although the weather has thawed out considerably since the Great Freeze of January 2010, it is still the Indoor Season. The sun disappears early so yard work is on hiatus. I find nothing better than settling near a fireplace, listening to soft music and escaping into a good book. Here is a quintet of recently published selections that I have read, or nearly finished, since winter began. Perhaps you will find something of interest here to curl up with as well.
• “The Help,” by Kathryn Stockett. If you read just read one novel this year, this is the one. It is the story of a young white...
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During those dreadful days of August, when sweat pours off my body as I trudge through the neighborhood at 6 a.m, even though the sun hasn’t quite decided to rise above the pine trees, I fantasize about retiring someday to my native New Hampshire. Or perhaps I could split my time between here and there — winters in Texas, summers up north. Not that I know how to afford this, but it has its appeal.
I am terribly drawn to the beauty of New England — the saltbox homes built two centuries ago or more, the beauty of the White Mountains, covered bridges across clear brooks, the rugged coastline...
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Do you think life goes on forever? You think behind every chance there’s another one? And another one?
It is the worst kind of extravagance, spending chances.
It is the way you spend your chances.
“Hope Floats”
That piece of dialogue comes from the scene where Ms. Ramona Calvert, superbly portrayed by Gena Rowland, dresses down her daughter, Birdee Pruitt, played by Sandra Bullock, who has returned home and spends her days hiding under the covers from the world. Her husband has left her and their two young children. As both a New Year and decade dawn, I’ve thought a lot about second...
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