by | March 14, 2015 · 11:19 pm

In the Beginning – Chapter 1.1

It was strangely warm and humid that winter day. The pretty, 20 year-old girl with brown hair and matching eyes looked as though she might burst from the life kicking inside her. She occupied herself with chores around the humble mobile home that was our abode in the tiny hamlet of Mineral Wells, Texas.

TimAndDadAnd she waited.

The date was January 15th 1982, and there was hope. Hope and optimism were ever present on that unusually warm winter day.

And we waited.

A warm meal, a night of television, and a warm blanket filled the time as we noticed a sudden shift in the temperature. This is a common phenomenon in Texas. It’s not unusual for the weather to turn on a dime. An undeniable maxim in Texas is that if the weather is balmy in winter, a glacial freeze is coming—and come it did. Continue reading →

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by | March 9, 2015 · 5:32 pm

Pounding Sand

“How did it get so late so soon?”

― Dr. Seuss

Once upon a time—I mean in 1895, there was an amateur entomologist, living in New Zealand named George Vernon Hudson. Vern liked bugs—a lot. On a typical day, after work was done, he would eagerly gather insects so he could study them. His obsession with bugs became so intense, in fact, he eventually became very upset in late fall and early winter because daylight was shorter and it cut his time short with his bugs.

ClockVern was so upset he wrote a paper explaining that if we all set our clocks forward two hours, he would be able to have more time after work to collect bugs. He presented the paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society. They replied with a thoughtful “hmmm.” And then everyone told Vern to go pound sand. Vern responded with a second paper in 1898, which everyone ignored, hoping that Vern would go back to being preoccupied with bugs.

Continue reading →

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by | March 1, 2015 · 8:45 pm

Child’s Play

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

– James Baldwin

I have several friends who are raising teenagers and I use the term “raising” loosely. By the time they are teenagers your direct influence has waned to the point of near-nonexistence. If you’re raising these post-adolescent humans (“human” also being a loosely used term), you probably haven’t considered the reality that you actually do influence them indirectly.

ParentalDrinkingThe values you instilled in them in their formative years, believe it or not, continue to guide them throughout their lives. Further, they do listen to you even when they fray your nerves and drive you to the brink of insanity.

Over the holidays, I listened at a party to a couple with a continually irate teenage boy who simply can’t get his homework turned in. My divorced friend and drinking buddy, also raising a teenage boy, ranted at length last Friday about how his son thinks the world comprises nothing but Internet gaming.

My friend raising a teenage girl on her own declined an invitation to lunch yesterday because she was in the middle of grounding her daughter for a series of violations she kept to herself. Finally, my friend with a teenage boy and girl was brought to tears last night by her daughter who was suspended from UIL competition because she’s failing nearly all of her classes and didn’t want to be told to bring her grades up. Well, these things are typically more complicated than that, but it began with a simple exhortation that you have to pass to play. Continue reading →

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