My social media fans might have seen that I was sick the past week. I was pretty sick with what was probably influenza, or “flu.” Someone asked me recently why I thought toilet paper got scarce at the start of the pandemic, and upon giving it more thought, I sort of settled on the idea…
Continue reading →My cousin Lori Wade and her husband Bill Wade invited my sister Nicole Hammill, her husband Tracey Hammill, and me to join them for Thanksgiving at Lori’s home in rural Platt City, Missouri. We were joined by Lori’s father Wes on Thanksgiving Day. The last time we joined Lori and her husband was when Abby…
Continue reading →Why is not needing surgery news? In succinct terms, I was grimly beginning to think that my achy breaky left shoulder was going to need work. I already had a minor piece of surgery this summer, and while it was easy and painless, part of me says that I don’t want to be the guy…
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Wake me up when September ends After a summer that got browner and hotter from the end of June through most of August, our patch of green got some unexpected – and sometimes unforecast – rain. The Shoffner family reunion was this weekend, and I went Saturday. Our hosts Troy and Rachel had portobello mushrooms…
Continue reading →I had a very welcome visit today from Abby’s daughter Chele, her husband Tom, their son Paul, and their gorgeous golden retriever Samson. They grabbed a couple of pizzas on the way in, and we had a great time. After Abby died in March, Chele and I spent a week kick-starting the big clean-out, the…
Continue reading →Trigger warning: stop now if pictures of stitches or scars bother you. Updated June 28 to include a photo of the scar with the sutures removed. I haven’t had any surgery of any kind since I was 17, when I had my upper third molars (“wisdom teeth,” whatever) removed. Before that you have to go…
Continue reading →For some time now I have noted that my vacuum cleaner, a wedding gift from Dorothy in 2004, wasn’t picking up things like yarn bits and threads like it should. I don’t know how long this has been going on, but a while. Yesterday when I spilled a huge amount of dirt and dust from…
Continue reading →I had lunch in Ardmore yesterday with Abby’s daughter Chele and her husband Tom, who were in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to look for a house, as they are moving there from Baltimore in July. It was great seeing them, and we all hope their move puts them on the north side of the metro…
Continue reading →Now is the time for Team Blackout to start planning for two solar eclipse events. An annular eclipse will pass across the United States October 14, 2023, and a total eclipse will pass across the United State on April 8, 2024 just two years from today. I plan to be in the path of both…
Continue reading →Today would have been my wife Abby’s 72nd birthday. Since she died just ten days ago, I’ve had a ton of stuff to do, and another ton of stuff on my mind. I shared my thoughts about her birthday on Facebook, saying, “I promise I won’t be that guy who gets all nostalgic with every…
Continue reading →I spent the evening with my wife Abby at Ballard Nursing Center watching Super Bowl LVI. She and I have shared every Super Bowl since we’ve known each other. This one wasn’t very good, and the pageantry surrounding it was even worse. We turned to conversation. “I lost one of my travel rings Friday,” I…
Continue reading →Day 10, Monday, Jan. 24, 2022, final report: This is my last entry about this illness. Although I am still experiencing residual symptoms, especially nasal and chest congestion, I believe I am through it. It’s been days since I had any fever. I had a worse case than many of those around me, and there…
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When I feel like I am getting into a creative rut, I sometimes turn to the rather large cadre of work I have created in my journals over the years. Just in the last few days, I picked up a journal from 2002 and read in it some, putting little Post-It® notes on the pages…
Continue reading →Journal, March 1997… “You sounded really euphoric on the phone,” she said. Alone in the four-seat Cessna Skyhawk, I climbed quickly to 4500 feet to find a very special layered sunset. I did a couple of hard-breaking power-on stalls, and handled them perfectly, then headed back for my required three night full-stop landings to remain…
Continue reading →Our long-time photographer friend Robert visited today, both to see Abby, and because today is National Pickle Day, and he brought The Pickle. Wait, “The Pickle”? Well, it’s a long story, and I haven’t talked about it much because really, it’s not my story. The Pickle has been on television and in newspapers, and, as…
Continue reading →How can winter be coming again? Everything in tenth grade was blue and grey. “The pain comes in waves. Soon they will wash me away.” Did Anna write that in a letter from Puerto Rico in 1983? I want to know, but I don’t want to reread those letters because I was such an asshole…
Continue reading →I feel sad for people who are incapable of genuine intimacy. “Our communication is almost entirely physical, through looks and, mostly, through touch. What we say to each other seems incidental. Tonight I rubbed her back for a while, then brushed her silky blonde hair for half an hour. She fell asleep in my lap,”…
Continue reading →There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Continue reading →My wife Abby is back in the hospital, this time for a bout of lower lobe pneumonia. The acute phase is over, but her recovery, like her difficult illness in August, is achingly slow. It is stretching me thin. One thing everybody tells me is “take care of yourself.” On paper, I know what that…
Continue reading →As the years have gone by, I have made a mental note of prominent people, many celebrities, who died at a younger age than I am now, 58 as I write this. Steve McQueen and Michael Jackson were 50. Frank Zappa and Christopher Reeve were 52. Jim Henson and John Denver were 53. John Ritter,…
Continue reading →Over the last year and a half, I’ve made an effort to write more by hand in my journal. When I first started keeping a journal, I married it to a rigid style: date and day at the top of the page, standard block paragraphs, at least a page a day. I tried to break…
Continue reading →In the last 15 years, we have all witnessed the internet deteriorate. What at first seemed like a gleaming futurtopia of the “information superhighway” has become a place for intellectual and spiritual poison. I’ve been getting nostalgic recently about that golden age: Nyan Cat, Amber Lamps, Double Rainbow All the Way, Badger Badger Badger, Salad…
Continue reading →By the time I was a senior is high school, I was hanging out with some people who might not have been the best influences on me. One thing we did all summer long after graduation was to “cruise.” Younger readers might not exactly understand this activity, since it seems so lame, but essentially, we…
Continue reading →In 2000, I joined a Yahoo! group associated with my high school’s Class of 1981 20th reunion. I got really interested in it for a while. It was like a forum or chat room, only with people who, mostly, attended Eisenhower High School in Lawton, Oklahoma with me. Like most Yahoo! groups, or anything else…
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Early in her internship, Mackenzee Ellen Crosby was using the moniker “Mac,” both personally, and on social media. As she grew up, her identity matured and she felt more distance from who she had been as a child and as a young teenager, and she struggled with her identity. We all do that. My sister…
Continue reading →A portion of this was my column this weekend. I added some less-palatable bits to this entry. As I cover graduations this year, as I do every year, I think of when I walked the same walk. I graduated from Lawton’s Eisenhower High School on May 31, 1981. If you subtract, yes, that is 40…
Continue reading →I am pleased to welcome my long-time friend Mackenzee Ellen Crosby as the summer 2021 intern for The Ada News. I lobbied for her to get this position, and so far, she has delivered. I believe I first met her when her eighth grade class at Ada Junior High won a bet to collectively give over…
Continue reading →I apologize for not posting more often. May is always like that – playoffs, proms, graduations – there’s lots of stuff to cover for my newspaper in a very short time. But I am not dead or in a mental institution. I’m right here, and here are some images from what’s been going on.
Continue reading →A confluence of conversation this week got me thinking about aging. “You never change,” someone told me as I was covering a playoff softball game earlier this week. It’s true that I haven’t changed all that much in the nearly 33 years I’ve been at The Ada News. Some of that is by chance, and…
Continue reading →Today’s bleak winter weather is bringing back a dark winter for me, 1979. I was a tenth grader, writing in my embryonic journal, making embryonic images. The two images I posted with this entry are very much like the images I made back then, in part because I dug out the Fujinon 55mm f/2.2 lens…
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