During a leadership team meeting at an earlier time in my life, we’d been asked to go around the table and offer observations about where each of our colleagues could improve. It felt like a set-up of some sort so consequently I felt myself becoming […]
I’d been trying to write a story about a close friend who had died, reaching for something beyond my grasp with only puny words to get me there. What I was trying to capture was the way the first annual camping trip to Baxter without […]
Something in my mind said “Plum,” so I circled back home on my green Schwinn 10-speed once again. I’d already done this 7, 8, 9 times. It was a beautiful summer afternoon, not too hot for an aimless cruise around town, but those plums were […]
One of life’s big existential mysteries grabs up a 3-year-old, his middle-aged grandmother and a random old guy walking by. We drove up under the canopy of the retirement community, opened the trunk and the passenger side door and grabbed the first load of birthday […]
I was trying to inflate myself, make myself important in some way I hadn’t earned by tagging onto something noble I was told my parents had done. Though self-elevation wasn’t new to me, I was especially driven to it in the writing class I was […]
“You look happy.” I had to say it. He was using his big round belly as a table for three Werther’s Originals as he lounged back in the Adirondack chair, looking content to a degree you rarely see. “I am,” he said, a middle-age poster child […]
Be cool. 