Category Archives: autobiography

June 26, 2015 · 2:52 pm

The Flower Wagon

My life has more-or-less become an exercise in making the best out of a bad situation. Believe me, I know yours is probably the same and I am bemoaning the common condition of us all, but we do what we do and it doesn’t get easier just because we do it daily. So today’s post is about the flower wagon.

Now, if you are truly fool enough to read a lot of my purple paisley prose in this basically boring blog, you may have seen references to the flower wagon before this.

Last year, doing yard work, I had an inordinate amount of crushed live-oak acorns from the street near where we park our cars. Our oaks were excessively reproductive that year because, I guess they found the weather unusually sexy or something. So I had copious amounts of crushed acorn. In fact, before I got it all scooped up, a little bit of rain had turned it into the acorn-equivalent of peanut butter… goopy, sticky, and unpleasant to touch. Most of it went into the compost bin, but the last little-red-wagon load got left in the little red wagon to get snowed on, frozen solid, and snowed on again.

We love that little red wagon. When the kids were small, we used it to pull them around SeaWorld in San Antonio and AstroWorld in Houston. It went all over the country with us on summer vacation, and was the Princess’ personal coach and four (provided she allowed the cooler full of ice for water, soda, and fruit to share the ride).

So, the neglected little red wagon turned into a rust-bucket lawn ornament this spring, and it was busy growing a bumper crop of weeds in all that acorn peanut butter… fertile stuff, acorn peanut butter. So I decided to plant flowers. I got some Walmart zinnias and some wildflowers, spending about a dollar fifty all told, pulled the weeds by hand, and sprinkled flower seeds all over it. We are all sad to see the lonely little wagon deteriorating and being demoted to lawn ornament status, but it seemed like we had a possibility of new life within reach.

This spring, with the monsoon rains Texas apparently borrowed from Asia and the Philippines, I did not even have to bother myself with watering. If anything, there was too much water… flash-flood-warning-daily sort of too much water. So I have been patient… watching and weeding. And then…

The first blossom bloomed and turned color yesterday while we were picking up number one son from the airport. Old things can produce new things. Decay and age lead to blossoming new life. There has to be a balance between happy and sad. I am trying like heck to be a humorist, but I have learned the lesson that you can’t be laughing all the time. But here is proof that after the rains come the flowers. And I am laughing now.

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Tagged as autobiography, flowers, humor, little red wagon, photo Paffooney

June 25, 2015 · 1:36 pm

Texas Airport Adventures

Ah, Love Field, the scent of baking asphalt heavy in the air… even indoors where it is nominally air-conditioned (the word nominally here meaning “in name only”), people rushing about like lemmings and hamsters (though not the cool hamster-people of the recent car commercials), and air-port workers moving at the speed of airport business transactions (slower than molasses outdoors at Christmas during a blizzard).

Number One Son, the Marine home on leave, gave me the heads-up when he texted me at 7:45 am that he would be arriving “around 11:00”. I knew he would be flying in… but it didn’t occur to him to give me any details. What is the flight number? What airline are you on? What airport? Remember, there are two big ones in the DFW area. So, like all men who don’t know which end their own heads are attached to, I asked my wife. “Love Field” was all she said.

Now, this is partially good news. Love Field is small… compared to DFW. I could most probably catch him at the cattle-gate where all the passengers come out of the concourse through the same door. If you look carefully at the picture, you may spot the reflection of my be-hatted old head forlornly watching the ramp up to the cattle-gate.

My number-two son, Henry, and my daughter, the Princess, were both waiting with me. While we were waiting, they were bickering again.

“Jeez, Princess, if you bathed more often, you would smell a lot better than you do now!”

“I don’t stink any worse than you do, Henry!” she retorted, “And I bathe as often as you do.”

“I just had a shower last night!”

“Well, so did I. I took a shower right after you!”

Before the blows and the beatings began I said in a grouchy voice, “Can we not have a stink-fight right now, please?” The air-conditioner in the car only works poorly and part of the time… We also had to park out in the sun on the deck of the airport parking garage. And it was a long walk in the sunshine of hot-old Texas to get where we were at that moment. All of that pretty much was the reason for verbal combat and aroma follies.

“Where is he, Dad?” asked the Princess who complains right up to my patience-capacity red-line. “Shouldn’t he be here already?”

“I texted him, but I don’t think that Houston flight at 11:00 was actually the one that he is on.”

Suddenly I got the “Where are you?” text from number one son.

“We’re at the exit waiting.”

“At DFW?”

“Oh, gawd no!” I said. I started to hustle the two stink-warriors back towards the distant car. “We’re at loVe FIeld.” I hate when my finger is too big to hit the right key while texting and not simultaneously hit another key as well.

“Oh, hang on.”

I held my breath.

“That may be the one I’m at,” said the next text.

So, I halted the rushed exodus towards the $6 parking fee and the mad rush across the metroplex to the other airport. I was still holding my breath a bit… and turning slightly purple when… There he was with his guitar case, Marine backpack, and a rather silly grin on his face.

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Tagged as adventure, autobiography, Dallas airport, humor, photo Paffooney

May 12, 2015 · 12:21 pm

Garrison Keillor

Sometimes it is good to acknowledge your influences and the people whose work has changed your life into what it now appears to be. Such a person, a profound influence on my story-telling habits, is Garrison Keillor.

“GKpress” by Prairie Home Productions. Licensed under Attribution via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GKpress.jpg#/media/File:GKpress.jpg

This man in the picture who looks like one of my relatives, is the story-teller, writer, and radio personality Garrison Keillor.

The only way to accurately explain this whole honorarium-business is to tell you a story… You see, Great Grandma Hinckley, when she was reaching the tarnished end of her golden years, the latter part of her 90’s, the nearly-a-century mark, always called me “Donny”. Apparently “Michael” was too hard a name to actually remember. To be fair, though, it was my Uncle’s name, and I did look in the 1970’s very much like Uncle Don when he was a youth in the 1950’s. And though Great Grandma had more great grandchildren to keep track of than “Carter had little liver pills,” she always knew that I was one of the smart ones. When I graduated from high school I earned a full four-year scholarship from my dad’s company due to my high grades and test scores. She was very proud of that fact. She told all of her friends at the nursing home that of all of the awards presented at the senior awards assembly, I had won most of them. This was not even remotely true, except when viewed through the smoky, rose-colored lens of great grandmother-hood, but it led to all the people at the home saying things like, “You must be Donny! Congratulations on your great big brain!” Some of them even knew already that my name was Michael. Only now that I am getting old do I begin to understand old-people humor a bit better.

So, Great Grandma wanted to give me a really good graduation present. She gave most of her obligatory grandkid presents as hand-crocheted Afghans in bright neon colors that were wildly mismatched because she was color blind. But me, she gave me her radio. Yes, a portable radio roughly the size of a large school lunchbox. It was an RCA… that’s a brand of radio for you young whippersnappers who don’t know anything about what was irreplacebly good in the mid-20th Century. It was one of the most valuable things she still owned, and the TV set was too big to take to college (thank goodness). So I took that ultra-valuable old radio along to college to listen to music while I studied. Dad had hooked me on classical music, so I listened to the Public Broadcasting channel KLYF in Des Moines.

That is how I came to be a fan of Garrison Keillor. Every Saturday night, along about 7 p.m., KLYF broadcast another episode of A Prairie Home Companion. I would listen to the gospel music and ads for Powdermilk Biscuits and gossip from the Chatterbox Cafe in Lake Wobegone, Minnesota. And Garrison Keillor, old G.K., would tell stories about the doings in Lake Wobegone, his old (fictional) home town “Where all the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and the children are above average.” It was there that I learned that every good story may ramble on a bit and have a long pause or two, or twenty, but always came to the point in the end. I learned that from Garrison Keillor. But I may owe a bit of that to Great Grandma Hinckley too.

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Tagged as autobiography, Garrison Keillor, Great Grandma, humor, writing

May 6, 2015 · 6:28 pm

Doctor Who

(All images in this post are borrowed from BBC, BBC America, Bowties are cool on Facebook, The Third Doctor on Facebook, Doctor Who Worldwide, and Doctor Who and the Tardis fan page)

The first picture in this post is my Paffooney for the day, a picture I drew myself in pen and ink and colored pencil. I felt it was about time that I wrote a post on Dr. Who. And that is a pun in more than one way. The Doctor? Doctor Who? Back up in time four sentences… or is that three? I felt it was about TIME that I wrote about the Doctor. You see, now that I am retired, I have become more than ever a time-traveler. Really. I mean it. We are ALL time-travelers. We normally go from the present into the future, traveling in one perceived direction. But yesterday I spoke to the ghost of a teacher who taught me in 1965 and 1966. Through the magic of memory we can revisit the past. Through the magic of dreams we can alter what happened and how we perceived it.

The first Doctor to me was John Pertwee, actually the Third Doctor. He was on PBS Channel 9 out of Des Moines. We watched him on Friday night, mostly my father and I, but sometimes my sisters too. As I went to college, Tom Baker took over as the Doctor, and we watched every episode we could. PBS went all the way back to William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton and I watched those too. I was devastated when Baker left in the 1980’s, but then was completely renewed as a fan when they chose Peter Davison to play the new Doctor. I was completely devastated when they canceled the series. When it came back in 2005, I could share it with my sons… though only the eldest showed any interest at all. My younger sister still watches Doctor Who and she watches with her kids. There is an element of this thing that runs in families.

This goofy Time Lord from Gallifrey has been gallivanting through time back and forth since 1963. He picks up young, pretty girls, and sometimes guys, and takes them with him, totally endangering their lives and even getting them killed. He fights malignant talking trash cans called Daleks, some dude who can also completely change out a new body called The Master, and all sorts of bizarre monsters from space and time The stories are always complex, loaded with comedy and occasionally science fiction, and the actor doing the juggling act of the title role has so far always been a totally unique and totally eccentric individual. The Doctor continues on now, for more than 50 years, and he keeps connecting the past to the future to the present and rewrites entire lifetimes of galaxies in the process.

I love Doctor Who, and will probably be watching it whenever I can right up to the time when I myself ultimately run out of time. I am quirky just like he is. I travel through time too. And I identify with him in ways I can’t even begin to describe. So, Who am I? Yes, I think I am.

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Tagged as autobiography, Dr. Who, fan boy, humor, paffooney, television, time travel

May 3, 2015 · 3:07 pm

This and That

Okay, I know I claim to be a conspiracy theorist when it comes to aliens and 9-11… I am… totally loony and tinfoil-hat-wearing… can’t let those men in black read my mind, right? But those crazy ideas are based on facts that I have uncovered and investigations into the obvious and admitted manipulations of those facts that have come out over time… from credible whistle-blowers and witnesses. What is going on in Texas right now is not that, and not my fault. I don’t adhere to any Alex-Jones-2nd-Amendment-FEMA-death-camps sort of conspiracy theories. President Obama is NOT planning an attack on Texas with these routine military exercises involving Green Berets and Navy Seals. The crap thinking that motivated Governor Greg Abbott to activate the Texas National Guard to oversee the military exercises is stupid-headed paranoid Republican propaganda. I am trying to make humor here out of scary Texas political poop, but this is too wacko to even joke about.

To totally change the topic and talk about something else, I may have inadvertently changed one of my collections that feed my hoarding disorder mental illness… I was very poetically snapping pictures of the sunrise when I walked the dog every morning and calling that “collecting sunrises”. But I started taking other dog-walking photos, like cloud shots and moon shots and sunset shots. Uh-oh! More time lost to collecting things pointlessly… or is that how art happens? the artist finding certain observations to be spiritually and creatively fulfilling… and tries to share that fulfillment? Or when you consider the Avengers Coke cans… is it clinically a concern?

Okay, let’s switch again… Friday night my daughter, the Princess, was inducted into the National Junior Honor Society. This happened at her middle school, Dan F. Long, home of the Falcons.

They had this wonderful candle-lighting ceremony filled with wonderful things. I experienced several of what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls “spots of time” in which there is a transcendent moment that carries you far beyond the daily dose of mundane. The first one was when the Falcon orchestra, complete with cellos and violins, was playing a waltz. The principal was in the hallway with his young daughter to greet the parents and friends attending the ceremony. The two of them, the extremely competent and hard-nosed black principal and his pretty little black daughter began to waltz together, not even thinking that some of us seated in the cafetorium might see them do it. I couldn’t help but think, “while Baltimore burns… if only we had more of this!” And more wonderful things followed. The NJHS faculty sponsor was a teacher I subbed for a decade ago. She is a determined and bubbly little woman who impressed me once upon a time with her detailed planning and sharp methods. This little woman could throw big bad trouble-making boys around the room (metaphorically of course) to get her point across and make lessons happen. I saw her in action. She was tough and ambitious in spite of being small and always smiling. And the Princess was inducted with a candle ceremony (a potential disaster waiting to happen in a middle school setting) in which she was in the middle of three rows on the stairs… and no one set anyone else’s hair on fire. And we’re talking seventh-grade nerd-boys standing with a lighted candle behind seventh-grade girls with long hair!

And finally I wanted to share with you the progress I have made on cardboard castles. I have made all of this so far with my own two arthritic claws using Ritz Cracker boxes, Honey Nut Cheerios boxes, tape, scissors, and glue. I have only glued fingers together once and managed not to accidentally cut off any necessary part of my body (fingernails don’t actually count, do they?). Why am I doing nutty stuff like this? Well, I’m retired. What am I supposed to do? Sensible real-world stuff? Get real.

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Tagged as collecting, conspiracy theory, goofiness, humor, opinions, photo Paffooney

May 1, 2015 · 12:24 pm

Hydra Hair

No, this isn’t a post about the Avengers… but that’s a cool idea. I just haven’t seen the new movie yet. I will… so be patient. You probably don’t really need a lot of comic-book fan-boy love right now anyway… That is such a nerd-need, and you are not a nerd… at least, I haven’t been corrected about nerd-things on my blog, which leads me to conclude there are no nerds reading my squishy-goofy-gallywumpas. This post is about my daughter, the Princess.

Specifically, this is a post about the Princess’ hair. You see, the Princess was unfortunate enough to be exactly between two opposite extremes of hair-genes. She inherited her mother’s thick, dark wire-hair, but the wild-hair, mind-of-its-own crazy go-every-direction hair she got from me. She inherits the worst hair-features from both of us. So how do you to tame your hair in the mornings when you have thick, unruly hair that not only refuses to be tamed, but will willingly grab the brush out of your hand and throw it across the room? Well, you apparently borrow your brother’s comb without permission and give the hair 500 rat-nest-dislodging yanks and then lose the comb so that your brother is mad at you for the rest of the day… I mean, the rest of the week… er, the month, the year… maybe the rest of the Princess’ life.

This morning;

Me; “Please don’t eat your brother’s comb when you are finished doing that. Put it back on the sink in the bathroom before we go to school.” (This is a helpful dad-statement used every morning when I watch her battling the hair at the breakfast table, but inevitably the comb is missing the next time brother Henry looks for it. She must eat it when my back is turned to go start the car.)

Princess; “I will, Dad… Geez…. But I can’t believe all the hair I have now on my pants and shirt. How can I lose this much hair every day and not be bald?”

“Princess, you are really, really good at growing hair.”

“Oh, I know it. In fact, I’m pretty sure when I pull out one hair, three grow back to take its place.”

“Wow! That’s like mythological, or something. Do you wake up in the night to find little Hercules-type guys climbing up on your pillow trying to cut your hair with swords?”

“Yeah, it keeps me awake at night. But you know in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson Books, the hydra has to be turned to stone or be burned with fire to defeat it.” (I cannot, of course, argue this point as she has read all of the books and is an irrefutable expert on the subject of Rick Riordan’s mythology.)

“Oh, mercy! You mean the little Hercules-guys are climbing on your pillow with torches?”

“Yes, but I got a bunch of little Minotaur-guys to fight them off, so my hair hasn’t been burned.”

“Well, that’s good… but what about all the little cow patties they leave in your blankets?”

“Dad, hair problems are hard. You can’t expect to have it all easy, right?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s right.”

Chicken Soup Days Once Again

Texas has been rainy-er than usual this spring. The sky has been constantly dripping… the grass is green…and the worst kinds of pollen have been thicker in the air than most kinds of soup. I already have breathing problems and COPD, so the soupy air is potentially fatal, but allergies on top of it have made my whole family miserable. Middle son missed school today with bad sinus congestion. I am laid out with headaches, back-aches… even my dang aches have aches attached to them. The dog is unwell. God help us, we need a miracle.

Free advertising for Campbell’s

Well, there’s always that miracle food… Great Grandma Hinckley always firmly believed that the only food for a sick kid was Chicken Noodle Soup. I used to hate it as a kid because I only ever ate it when I was sick and had to stay in bed… couldn’t watch cartoons, couldn’t play… all day with aching head and runny nose, eating Chicken Noodle Soup. It even had to be the capitalized kind, or it just wouldn’t do. Chicken Noodle Soup made me sick of being sick.

As I grew up into a sickly adult (Great Grandma’s dedication to certain medicinal foods, cod liver oil, Vick’s Vapo Rub, and all remedies of the nasty and smelly sort never completely cured me of anything beyond the enjoyment of being sick), I routinely returned to the old remedies that Great Grandma taught me.

So, today, I cooked Chicken Noodle Soup for my son, along with a healthy dose of anti-histamines. I didn’t have a second can for myself, so I did the next best thing. Cambell’s French Onion Soup.

I got ahold of a can of that from the back of the cupboard where the fossilized lima beans and canned vegetables all lurk menacingly with expiration dates on them that rival the ages of my three kids. French Onion soup has a unique stench to it that actually relaxes inflamed airways and nasal passages. It helps me breathe. So, I have come to rely on soup in the way that makes Great Grandma smile now, wherever she is (and I guarantee you it is not the hot place… Old Nick could never stand up to Great Grandma’s willpower and righteous indignation). I have grown to like the taste of these medicinal soups… at the very least because they do make me feel better. So, colds and flu, you better look out! I have eaten soup and I defy you… and if that doesn’t scare you, then I will tell Great Grandma Hinckley on you.

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Tagged as autobiography, curatives, Great Grandma, humor, illness, remedies, soup

April 26, 2015 · 2:30 pm

The Blues

Down again… oh, oh, oh, down deep and so blue again…

They did it to me again this year.

Since 1967 when the St. Louis Blues were a first year expansion NHL hockey team, I have loved and lived for the Blues. Their first three years in the league they were in the Stanley Cup finals. I got to watch them play on my family’s old black-and-white Motorola against the Boston Bruins, their third try at winning the cup. (My best friend preferred the Bruins and every other kid in town who could even stand hockey sided with them… Hence old Tiger Bates crooning at me “St. Louie is gonna be Blue tonight!” after every single game.) They didn’t realistically have a chance. They were the representative from the expansion half of the league. They dominated teams like the Minnesota North Stars, the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Philadelphia Flyers, and the California Golden Seals because they managed to land aging Hall-of-Famers like goalies Glenn Hall, Jaques Plante, and scorers like Dickie Moore and Doug Harvey in the expansion draft… there’s more to read about their history here;

http://blues.nhl.com/club/page.htm?id=39464

I also loved the next generation of heroes, like Red Berensen here, the old Red Baron of Hockey, and future Hall of Famers like Bernie Federko, Brett Hull, and did you know that the Great Wayne Gretzky played a season with the Blues before he retired? Almost every year of their existence since that fateful first three years of Stanley Cup play they have been a legitimate contender to go back and actually win the cup. Philadelphia did it in the 70’s, Pittsburgh in the 80’s and 90’s, the Stars did it after moving to Dallas. But the Blues have never made it back to the Stanley Cup Finals. Something always goes wrong.

photos from the St. Lpuis Blues home page and Arch City Sports

photos from the St. Louis Blues home page and Arch City Sports

We never seem to be able to get past arch rivals. The Chicago Blackhawks beat us and go on to win the cup. The Los Angeles Kings beat us and go on to win the cup. The last three years in a row we’ve been taken out in the very first round of the playoffs… This year, despite winning the toughest division in hockey, they lose to the Minnesota Wild (the team that filled the hole the North Stars left when they moved to Dallas). I am totally confusticated and fristumbobulated… and I mean in the worst possible way! (Those are bad words in the language of the fairy-folk from Iowa… terrible curse words.) It couldn’t be worse… well… except, of course for being a fan of Chicago Cubs baseball. (Yeah, I guess it could be worse.)

Anyway… after such high hopes… I am once again singing the Blues.

Retirement Sinks In…

There comes a time in every career when the career is over and it has to end. I spent 310 years teaching in Middle School and High School and loved every minute of it. (Okay, divide the years by ten and subtract about twelve thousand minutes from the love… but I did love it.) And I was good at it. (At least, in my own confused little mind… I have photographic proof that I did help students get some quality sleep time in, but… hey, English is supposed to be boring.)

A year ago I was forced to make the decision to leave the job I loved. Failing health and failing finances made it increasingly hard to do the job. I was never a sit-behind-the-desk teacher. I had to do the dance… up this row, down that one… lean over the spit-wad shooter before he could adequately aim and pull the stray cafeteria straw out of his mouth… suggest the verb needs to have an “s” on it if the subject of the sentence the student just wrote for me is singular… stand in front of the boy who can’t listen to my wonderful teaching because the girl across the room is wearing a dress and block his view… and he doesn’t even like that girl, but she’s wearing a dress… you can see her legs… and he’s a teenager… you know, the dance of teaching. When you walk with a cane and have a back brace on every single work day, the dance becomes harder and harder as the year wears on. I got to spend my days with Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut and Maya Angelou and Robert Frost… and even more important I got to spend my days with Pablo and Sofie and Ruben and Rita and Keith… I had so many more favorite students than I ever had those black-banes-of-a-teacher’s-existence kids that other teachers were always talking about in the faculty lounge. (I rarely hung out in the faculty lounge because they tended to talk bad about kids I really loved and enjoyed teaching… and besides, I had crap to actually do before the next class came in. Lounging was rarely an option.)

I confess that I have spent a good deal of this school year depressed and feeling sorry for myself. No kids to talk to on a daily basis except my own, and even with them, only after school. My wife is still teaching… so I rarely see her. (Am I married? I need to double-check.) I fill the lonely hours with writing and story-telling and recollections of days past… and I am beginning to come to terms with my loss. In retirement I can do more of the things that I always wanted to do… but never had time for. I can draw and paint and write and sing (pray hard I don’t start posting videos of me singing!) and play with my toys… I have even decided to write a novel about people playing with toys. Would I ever teach again if suddenly I was healthy and could do it again…? YOU BETTER BELIEVE I WOULD!

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Tagged as autobiography, humor, Mark Twain, photo Paffooney, retirement, teaching

April 12, 2015 · 6:31 pm

{Old Photographs}

One of Facebook’s gifts that I actually appreciate is the connection it has given me to old photos. Being connected to family members and old high school friends that live far away and I haven’t met face to face for a very, very long time gives me access to shared photos that have existed for a very long time. I never would have gotten access to them if somebody hadn’t posted it on Facebook. Example number one is a photo of Son Number One who is now a Marine stationed in (No the government did not remove this portion. That is paranoid old me.) The picture shows Dorin as a ring-bearer at a family wedding in the Philippines when he was not yet two. I was teaching at the time and couldn’t go with them, so, though I have seen copies of this Photo in relatives’ houses, I never had access to it until photo-mania hit Facebook.

Here’s another case in point. There was a time when my Iowegian farm family had lots of four-generation photos and even some five-generation photos. This one makes me a little sad. Only the two little girls in this photo are still living. Great Grandma Hinckley (I can use her real name here because she’s been gone since before desktop computers… who is going to be able to exploit that in any way?) lived to be almost 100 years old. This shows not only her, but her eldest daughter, that daughter’s only son, and that son’s three kids. John was younger than me, but his heart did not last anywhere near as long as mine has at this writing. My own three kids would never have even an inkling of who these people were and their blood connection without the Facebook posts of a cousin who is still kicking. (Thank you for that, Louise.) Four-generation photos have not occurred again in my family for a long time now. And before this photo was taken, Iowans did not live long enough on average to do photos like this. My Great Grandma (who actually was pretty Great and doesn’t get the Great just for being old) took a lot of these, as did both of my Grandmas. Big farming families generate lots and lots of family photos.

The photo from the train station in Yugoslavia was a gift from a time when my cousins hosted a foreign exchange student and the whole family got to broaden its world. I am able to be Facebook friends with the Yugoslavian girl (Whose name translates to Snow White in English) even though she has lived most of her life in Eastern Europe. I can even collect pictures of her grandchildren if I wish. (Can’t return the favor, though, as I don’t have any grandkids and probably won’t for a few years. Mom has to settle for a three-generation picture. And it is harder and harder now to get the whole clan together, (especially since my younger brother has become a Tea Party Republican and swore off both logic and the use of facts in shaping his thinking). But I think the best gift of all is how these old photos can keep my family alive for me in ways mere memory can’t manage. We lost Uncle Larry a couple of years ago now to lung cancer. Still, life and love and laughter live on…

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Tagged as autobiography, family photos, humor, magic, memories, nostalgia, old photos

Category Archives: autobiography

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Texas Airport Adventures

Garrison Keillor

Doctor Who

This and That

Hydra Hair

Chicken Soup Days Once Again

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Retirement Sinks In…

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