Today marks a significant anniversary for me personally and, as I consider its import, I’m struck by how little attention it has received—how little attention it always receives, year after year.
Author Archives: Guy Oliver
A Humble Inception – Chapter 1.3
In their lives together, my parents, like most of us, experienced many failings but it was their self-perceived failures before their marriage that would galvanize their union in a way so many of us aspire to in a marriage. Yet a step back and a retrospective view of these events suggests that they were not actually failures at all. They were instead merely life-shaping events that led them both to where they believed they were ultimately meant to be. Continue reading
Filed under Life or Something Like It
A Humble Inception – Chapter 1.2
He was born to working class parents in Cushing, Oklahoma, a very small community not far from Tulsa. His given name was Ted Lester Oliver, though he went by the moniker TL, and he arrived in his humble surroundings on July 8, 1933, the very nadir of the Great Depression.
We have no cultural memory of this time in American history. We do not as a people recall that it was a time that shunned hope and extinguished dreams, and that no corner of the industrialized world was untouched. The entire planet, it seemed, was on the precipice of a collapse and imagination fails me as I think of my grandparents’ determination. To spend each day looking for work, to turn to each other and their community for hope, at times, perhaps, knowing that the day would bring only desperation with no fruitful outcome. Continue reading
Filed under Life or Something Like It, Marriage, Parenting
