My college professor handed back my paper with red ink up and down both edges. My heart sank looking at the mess. I walked out of the classroom heartbroken. I felt like my heart had been ripped out of my body. I skipped the rest of my afternoon classes. I was in no mood for …
Continue reading Everything I needed to learn about life, I learned writing
It was Friday night and the music boomed throughout the restaurant. Boom, ba, ba, boom, ba, ba, boom. The restaurant manager had the lights down low and the place was packed with people, with everyone seeming to be shouting to the person next to them. I could barely hear myself think, forget about hear my …
When I was a kid, I hated that we lived outside of town away from most of the other kids in my school. The distance was a mere three miles, but it felt like 3,000. To my way of thinking, we may as well have lived in another country. I should probably explain, when I …
Continue reading Going home again: My hometown through adult eyes
The memory is clear as day. It’s been more than thirty years ago, but I still remember how I came back from class to find that someone had ripped in half a poster and doodled on another that I had hung on the wall of my college dorm room. My roommate and I weren’t the …
When my wife and I were a few years out of college and lived in Northern Virginia, she’d beat me home each day. She’d walk in the door to our small one-bedroom apartment and I would get home a few minutes later. We’d both throw our briefcase/bags behind the door and crash on the sofa, …
I look in my son’s room and find him sitting one leg scrunched underneath him, the other hanging from his chair, pouring over his computer screen and a nearby tablet. He’s been working on his homework for much of the weekend. As a junior, he’s got a heavy load with Pre-Calculus and two AP classes, …
Continue reading Climbing a challenging mountain one step at a time
Let’s talk hair. When I was a kid, I had wild, wavy hair that had a mind of its own. I'd be in our tiny little bathroom and I'd comb it one way and by the time I'd walk out to the kitchen for my mother's inspection, it would have gone in a completely different …
I was going about my day last week and something popped up on one of my social media feeds that upset me. It was one of those misleading posts, full of half-truths and falsehoods that had taken on a life of its own. If I was wise, I would have just let it pass without …
Crack open the champagne bottles. Let the confetti and balloons fly. Ring the bells, it’s time to celebrate. September marks the five-year anniversary of my blog. Five years and some 520 posts later, I’m still writing. When I first started this blog, I summarized the site as a place to put a few thoughts, a …
The young woman wore a white lab coat and smiled back at me, but before she even said a word, I could see that she had no idea what I had just asked. I was more than 3,900 miles from home and I was in trouble. When I had agreed to travel with my daughter …
