Dear Addie K,
You burst into life a year and half ago! At first, we loved you solely on whose you were, but now we love you because of who you are. Your first 1 1/2 years of life have gone by way too fast!
Life is like that. Before you know it, you’ll be looking back and remembering in sepia toned colors.
Seek wisdom, Addie. When you look back, you’ll smile at the vibrant, bright memories that wisdom can bring!
Continue reading Dear Addie K,A group of parents and kids were sitting around five or six tables strung together at a seafood restaurant. They’d been at a sports tournament and the kids had on various versions of their team paraphernalia.
Most of the adults sat at one end of the long chain of tables. The kids instantly gravitated to the other, with the boys in the middle and girls on end.
As is usually the case, the girls were quietly enjoying themselves, but the boys, they were loud, excited and boisterous.
Whether by conscious decision or not, a mother was sitting in the middle between the adults and kids. She was actively involved in the conversations on the adult side, but at the same time, completely aware of the actions and antics of the eleven to twelve year old boys at the table with her. Continue reading An Inconspicuous Smile
Seriously, it was the best love letter!
I was in high school. The summer before my sophomore year, I lived with and worked for my uncle in another town about an hour away. Through their church, I met two sisters, one also about to be a sophomore and one a junior.
I was pretty naïve then, like Forest Gump at a dogfight naïve.
Continue reading The Best Love Letter Ever!From the time I was a seedling, I wanted to be something worthwhile. Every day I stretched higher, farther, reaching for the sun to bathe my leaves in life giving photosynthesis.
My life in the forest ended when soldiers wearing helmets, red cloaks and armor cut me down.
I hoped the soldiers would form me into an honorable, useful item, like a fine chair, magnificent bed, or maybe a grand formal dining table. I would’ve even been satisfied to be a powerful support post in a house or mansion holding it all up.
Instead, their axes hacked me into a long, rough beam. Still, I hoped.
They loaded me in a wagon and hauled me to a city. There they cut off a smaller beam from my top, notched a side to fit over the beam, and secured my pieces with long spikes and rope.
Continue reading Cross TalkLast Friday I took my wife Janet out on the town! A five-course dinner date! I know! Right!?
But we live in the oldest town in Texas, and there’s not a great deal of five star restaurants in Nacogdoches, Texas. So we created our own “fine dining” experience in a mobile, drive around way.
I wrote down twenty restaurants and fast food joints up and down our hometown main drag. Each place was cut to its own little strip, and I put them all in a styrofoam cup that had all 5 courses scribbled on the outside. Janet blindly reached in the cup and pulled the first slip for the first course.
It was Subway. Janet objected. She said Subway had the most expensive drinks in town, so she wanted to go somewhere else. Eventually, she acquiesced, and we ordered one large half and half tea, two straws.
The second course was Bottle Cap Alley for appetizers. A quarter mile drive and we were there, but they didn’t have many choices. Basically, we settled for fried onion rings. Besides, the next course was vegetables, so we could get something healthy then.
The third course drawn, however, was another fast food place, Taco Bueno! My five-course meal deal idea was falling apart.
We had to be creative, but guacamole with fried chips was as close as we could get to vegetables.
The fourth draw for the main course drew a groan from both of us, and then the laughter. Dominos Pizza!
While they made the extra thin crust vegetable pizza, we munched on the chips, guacamole and onion rings. After that, the pizza tasted like saltine crackers with onions and tomato sauce on it.
There’s a bloated, clog up your arteries with grease feeling that was kicking in, but we were committed to a 5 course meal…
Dessert! Should’ve started there! A quick draw from the cup and it was Whataburger, the Texas standard for fast food burgers. It was a no brainer choice!
But ice cream and milkshakes don’t mix with lactose intolerance, and the scrumptious home style cinnamon rolls were 580 calories a piece! We settled on apple pies that were only 200 calories each. Did I mention they were fried?
It was fun though, and totally random! We’ll do it again, but not tonight.
Tonight Janet will be in the hospital.
We’re in Houston. At this very moment, Janet is in surgery to remove cancer from a kidney. She was diagnosed three weeks ago.
I’m scribbling to redirect my emotions, blind my thoughts, dull the heightened awareness that the future has changed.
How much, and to what extent it’s changed, we won’t know until the pathology report comes in next week.
If all goes well, this will be a one and done surgery.
If it goes really, really well, next Friday we’ll be celebrating the 15% chance that the cancer is benign.
That’ll be worth a five course meal for sure! 
I stopped in the grocery store on the way home two nights ago. Inside was a mini-madhouse of people planning to rush in to run out, but the checkout aisles were clogged.
I grabbed my items and stopped to look at candy on the Valentine’s Day aisle. A high school boy, no more than 16 years old, stood wide mouthed staring.
He was obviously self-conscience and felt out of place, rubbing his thumbs in the palms of his hands. I’m guessing his palms were moist, but his mouth was dry. Nonetheless, he stood there gawking at the candy, cards and stuffed animals.
The fact that the young man was shopping three days ahead of time for a Valentine’s gift was a little surprising. Good for him!
So after I had looked up and down the aisle, the young fellow was still standing there shell shocked. I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I asked if he was buying for his girlfriend. He looked surprised, like I was a mind reader! Everyone in the store who cared to notice him instantly knew the same thing.
He quickly nodded. “Yes sir! There’s a lot of stuff here!” Continue reading Valentine’s Day Quandry
I’ve been thinking back about an older couple I knew when I was in college. Loved them! Great, rock solid, influential people!
He developed cancer. After a valiant fight, Hospice was called. Hospice was there round the clock during his last days at home.
They were always a very kind, loving couple, quite expressive in their love and admiration for each other. They used pet names, like Sweetie Pie and Sugar Plum, Honey Bear and Honey Bunny, along with other pet names as terms of endearment.
They would greet each other, usually in a higher pitch voice with great emphasis on their tones, sounding like they were talking to a bouncing baby or a favorite animal.
Their transparent physical, emotional and verbal affection for each other was fun to watch. I learned a lot from them.
But that was in life. Death was a little different. Continue reading Sweetie Pie
One of my sons, Todd, told me a story that still lingers several years later.
He had several jobs at once in college, but quit them all to work in a college intern. He continued to work, however, for a gentleman in his 80’s he’d met a couple of years before. The man was in great shape, but hired Todd to do heavy labor work around his farm.
As Todd got to know the man and his wife, he really liked them, a lot.
Unfortunately, she had Alzheimer’s, and was getting progressively worse in the short time he’d known them.
One day sitting in the gentleman’s pickup, he told Todd he would need him to work more to help look after the place.
Staring out the front windshield, he spoke quietly, as if thinking out loud. He said his wife’s memory lapses were becoming longer, and more frequent.
Occasionally, she would snap out of it and be back to herself instead of the confused, absent minded stranger. He was was forced to move her to a nursing home for proper care. Continue reading A Thought To Remember
She smiled, then flashed her big beautiful brown eyes before scooting over beside me and asking what I knew she would ask.
“Daddy, will you dance with me?”
Dancing. It terrifies me. On the other hand, I don’t mind looking like a fool on the dance floor because other than a slow dance, I know that’s how I’ll look.
Now my oldest daughter, Shawnna, who was 14 years old at the time, was asking to dance with me at her basketball fund-raiser in the school cafeteria.
There’s only one answer. “Absolutely!”
There were lots of girls there, only a handful of guys, and even fewer fathers. If you lined all the other males up and rated them from first to last on the dance floor, I would by far be last, dead last. I didn’t, no wait, I still don’t know how to two-step.
Shawnna is a very kind, observant daughter and knew I would dance, but also knew I didn’t like dancing because quite frankly, I don’t know how. As if our roles reversed, she smiled, took my hand and said, “Come with me. I’ll teach you.” Continue reading Dance On
The callousness of day-to-day activities seem to dwarf moments in life that make it real, alive and special.
If life were an onion, the outer shell is work, chores and all the necessary tasks of living. The outer, crusty shell of the onion can easily overwhelm the core and inner layers where the best and most treasured memories, events and times are held.
Peel life back layer by layer, day by day, and most days aren’t really appreciated, truly experienced, or even remembered, at least by me. It’s an observation, not a condemnation.
Nature itself seems to place our mind on auto pilot to mindlessly glide through the events of the day. Continue reading Taste an Apple
RabBits 