When my niece was a couple-three years old, she went through this engaging stretch of weeks, maybe months, during which she improvised neverending stories. For some reason these tended to involve creatures like the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, and so on. (That may have been attributable to my sister’s macabre sensibilities.)
For instance, a story (told, and [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Family'
Attach Imagination to Mouth. Turn Ignition. GO.
November 19th, 2008 · 5 Comments
Tags: Everyday Life · Family · Language · Looking Backward · The Online World
Dad (and Others), Somewhere and Sometime
November 11th, 2008 · 5 Comments
(1) Me — during work hours. Just came up for a breath of air.
(2) It’s me again. Actually working! See, I told you so!
(3) Here I am still working. I don’t know how I can work so hard!!
The above photos (taken somewhere in France, sometime in 1944), their captions penned in ink on the back, [...]
Tags: Family · History · In the Blood · Looking Backward
Seeing Things
October 31st, 2008 · 4 Comments
From whiskey river:
Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that’s on its mind and can’t make itself understood, and so can’t rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving.
(Mark Twain, The [...]
Tags: Everyday Life · Movies · Poetry · Ruminations · Television · The Missus
Oblig Region-of-Birth-Loyalty Post
October 30th, 2008 · 2 Comments
I don’t pay much — well, all right, any — attention to baseball. In practice, this means for example that in the photograph at the left, if you masked the team names and logos, for all I knew I’d be looking at… gee, what are those other teams with red in their uniforms? Cardinals? (I [...]
Tags: Everyday Life · Family · In the Blood · In the News
The Flames. The Smoke. The Highway. The Terror.
October 29th, 2008 · 20 Comments
[Today's post is my contribution to travel writer Angela Nickerson's Blogapalooza blog party. The theme of Angela's Halloween Blogapalooza is "What a Strange Trip It's Been," for which her instructions are:
...put a photo of a pumpkin at the top of your post and tell us the story of your strangest or scariest trip ever.
Be sure [...]
Tags: In the News · Looking Backward · The Missus
The Sunday-Morning Debate: Sweet or Savory?
October 26th, 2008 · 9 Comments
When I was a kid, the family habit was to stop on the way home from church at the L&M Bakery. (I’m so happy to see they’re* still in business and still getting rave reviews.) For the six of us, a reasonable guess might be that we’d get, say, a dozen doughnuts and be happy, [...]
Tags: Everyday Life · Family · In the Blood · Looking Backward
The Travels of Mickey Tom (2)
October 15th, 2008 · 2 Comments
[This post continues yesterday's. I won't redefine any of the terminology here, so if you find yourself a little confused it probably just means you need to read that one.]
In the fall of 2003, The Missus and I were preparing to host her sisters, brother, and their families for Thanksgiving.
At the time, the four families [...]
Tags: Family · GPS · In the Blood · Nature · The Missus · The Online World
Don’t Embarrass the Dog
September 29th, 2008 · 2 Comments
As I’ve mentioned (briefly) before, The Missus and I have a recent addition to our household population: a Yorkshire terrier named Sophie. That is not Sophie over at the right — it’s one “Lexi Ann,” from the dogsinduds.com site. But it’s a good place to start this post.
We got Sophie as a “rescue dog,” which [...]
Tags: Everyday Life · Nature · Poetry · Style and Craft · The Missus
Puzzlin’ Evidence… Done Hardened in Your Heart
September 25th, 2008 · 6 Comments
Talking Heads was one of those bands which I probably never would have picked up on — not on my own, anyhow. Predictably, in retrospect, it took a nudge from my brother.
Or rather, a couple of different nudges. One of the later ones came in 1986, with the release of the musical film True Stories. [...]
Tags: Family · Looking Backward · Movies · Music · Politics
A Bout of Gout
September 24th, 2008 · 4 Comments
From Richard Selzer’s Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery, quoting Lady Mary Wortley, via Hugh Walpole:
People wish their enemies dead — but I do not; I say, give them gout, give them the stone.
From “When in Gout,” by Allison Williams, Time Out New York, April 16-22, 2008:
You would know if you had [...]
Tags: Everyday Life · Looking Backward · Science & Medicine · The Missus
