In just one trip to the Giant Eagle grocery store I hear about a drunken host with a mynah bird that spewed racial insults, a greedy nightclub owner with a drawer full of stolen watches, and a girl singer with balloon boobs who would always blank out when trying to remember the words to "Accentuate the Positive."
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Suprise Me
The Notes That Got Away
Prompted By Father's Day
/ Stories
In just one trip to the Giant Eagle grocery store I hear about a drunken host with a mynah bird that spewed racial insults, a greedy nightclub owner with a drawer full of stolen watches, and a girl singer with balloon boobs who would always blank out when trying to remember the words to "Accentuate the Positive."
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Room & Board
Prompted By Retirement
/ Stories
“Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there's no more music in them” Louis Armstrong
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Too close for comfort
Prompted By 9/11 Twenty Years Later
/ Stories
Events were too close for comfort on that day.
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How My Dad and I Shared a City
Prompted By Father's Day
/ Stories
...this day would prove full of little revelations about Dad.
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Someone’s at the Door
Prompted By Door-to-Door Sales
/ Stories
The schtick was to make the parents guilty that their children were falling behind in school and things would get dire if they didn't get the encyclopedia.
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After the Storm
Prompted By All’s Well That Ends Well
/ Stories
(Excerpted from my book, The Long Pivot Home: Based on a true story of love and loss in Oklahoma.) For five years, from 1995-2000, I had been trying to complete a giant pivot in my life, charting a new course away from the loss of my beloved wife Selena, then away from my experience in…
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Long Term Marriages
Prompted By Marriage
/ Stories
David Brooks wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on August 17, 2023 stating that a long, successful marriage is more important to a happy life than a successful career. Let’s think about that for a moment; so many people strive for money, thinking it will buy happiness. But the position stated here is…
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Burning Down the House
Prompted By Quick Take: New Movies
/ Stories
As you can see from the movie poster above, the name of the movie I am writing about is Knock Down the House, but I kept thinking that the 1983 song by the Talking Heads, Burning Down the House, would have made a better title. Maybe the filmmakers wanted to call it that, but the…
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This Land Is Your Land
Prompted By Inaugurations
/ Stories
I had been desperately awaiting this day for more than two months, but the insurrection two weeks earlier had me terrified.
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The Other Changing of the Guard
Prompted By Inaugurations
/ Stories
Past inaugurations have also brought dramatic changes in approaches to governing.
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