Running After My Hat header image 4

Entries Tagged as 'How It Was'

Perfect Moments: The Boy, the Wintry Day, the Film, the Flash of Panic

January 12th, 2010 · 11 Comments

On a recent wintry day, The Boy (Who Was No Longer a Boy) and The Missus decided to go to a movie.
Now, because the day was in fact wintry, and because “wintry” seldom applied to weather conditions where The Boy and The Missus lived, they needed to undertake certain careful preparations in advance. Warm clothing [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Everyday Life · How It Was · Humor · Movies · Perfect Moments · Science & Medicine · The Missus

How It Was: Deck the Halls

December 10th, 2008 · 3 Comments

The time: late fall, 1990.
The place: Ashland, Virginia.
A young(ish) man sits at a card table by his bedroom window. He is temporarily jobless, by choice, and living on accumulated savings while he writes what will become his first book.
And he is panicking, inwardly, because nowhere in his budget is there sufficient flexibility for anything like [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Family · How It Was · In the Blood · Looking Backward

Perfect Moments: The Boy, The Boy’s Father, The Sandwich

November 30th, 2008 · 2 Comments

When The Boy grew up, he would tell people — with slight hesitation, thinking first of pizza — that his favorite food of all was sandwiches.
But there was a time when this was not true. There was a time when all that The Boy knew of sandwiches was what his mother made for him, and [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Everyday Life · Family · How It Was · In the Blood · Looking Backward · Perfect Moments

How It Was: Rake’s Progress

November 22nd, 2008 · 2 Comments

The number of reasons people start up blogs probably verges on uncountable. But the most common reason — wanna bet? — is surely, “Ummm… I don’t know.” If you dig deeper, you’ll probably get something like this: “Well, I didn’t know at first. But as it’s worked out, I’m actually blogging mostly about X.”
With Running [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Family · How It Was · In the Blood · Looking Backward

Paying Attention to History

November 9th, 2008 · 1 Comment

If you’ve been visiting Running After My Hat for more than a few days, you already know about what you might politely call my serial attentiveness. Theoretically, this is a blog about writing. But then, oh, yeah — there’s stuff about music. And true, I rattle on sometimes about reading, too, but isn’t that sorta [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: History · How It Was · Looking Backward · Paying Attention · Running After My Hat · Seems to Fit · Style and Craft · Writing

While on the Subject of Bad Memory…

July 17th, 2008 · No Comments

…as I was earlier:
In this case, however, the subject isn’t “bad memory” in the sense of “Huh? Did I just say something?” It’s more along the lines of, “Holy sh!t. Did I actually live through that?!?”
Via the MAD about Words blog (discovered, in turn, via DCWYTBMA), we have word of a definitive list — from [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Everyday Life · How It Was · Looking Backward · Reading · Writing

The Boy Hears Himself (Part 1)

May 16th, 2008 · No Comments

During an… odd few years in my younger life, my friend Dean and I became absorbed in experiments involving a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The brand name which Dean and I both “owned,” in those days when electronics were still manufactured domestically, was “Recordio.” (And yes, all right: we didn’t own them; our fathers did.)
What “odd [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: How It Was · Looking Backward · Music · Radio

Boomer Memory

May 8th, 2008 · No Comments

The New York Times reported the other day on the frenzied efforts among Boomers to sharpen their minds — particularly the parts of their minds involving memory.
When David Bunnell, a magazine publisher who lives in Berkeley, Calif., went to a FedEx store to send a package a few years ago, he suddenly drew a blank [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: How It Was · Looking Backward

How It Was / Spring: Where It Was

April 29th, 2008 · 1 Comment

(Here’s the first excerpt from the first booklet in the How It Was series. I do not plan to post the entire book this way, in regular blog posts spread out over time; what I do hope to do, I explain here.)
——
Deep in his being, The Boy knew that somewhere out there existed a world [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: How It Was · Looking Backward

How It Was: Getting the Books

April 29th, 2008 · No Comments

I know, I know… I said, “In my next post on How It Was, I’ll include an excerpt from ‘Book 1: Spring.’” It’s coming.
In the meantime, please check this page. It describes how I’m hoping to make the whole process of posting, downloading, and reading excerpts easier for both you and me. Eventually, it will [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: E-Books, E-Reading, E-Publishing · How It Was · Running After My Hat