My daughter loves hanging out with her friends. She also enjoys reading or relaxing with our dog Nittany. Likewise, my oldest son loves to lift weights and watch action movies. Over the past twelve months, I’ve watched as both have given up things they love and stepped out of their comfort zones to tackle new …
Category: family
Erasing the past
I hesitated. I looked at my cell phone again. The "erase" button jumped off the screen. At my wife's urging, I recently purchased a new phone and was getting ready to trade in my old one. To protect my information, I needed to erase everything and return the phone to its original factory settings. In …
A perfect day
The coffee was weak, my toast was burnt, and my omelet tasted bland. My wife’s breakfast wasn’t much better—her crêpes looked soggy and lumpy. That’s not all. The restaurant was loud and had a strange echo and a cold breeze shook me every time a customer opened the door. Despite the food and the surroundings, …
A dog’s love: Welcome home
I’ve never won a Golden Globe Award given out by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, an Emmy, an Academy Award or even a Pulitzer Prize for that matter. There's no Grammy Awards hanging on my fireplace mantle and I’ve never thrown three touchdown passes in an NFL game or won the NFL's Most Valuable Player award. …
Gone in the blink of an eye: The past decade
The decade started with viewers rushing home from work or wherever they had been for round-the-clock updates on the miners trapped by the Chilean mining accident. The cave-in took place on Thursday, August 5, 2010 at the San José copper–gold mine, located in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. Television cameras from around the world …
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Twas’ the Night before Christmas & the rest of the story
In Clement Clarke Moore’s memorable poem, “Twas' the Night Before Christmas,” the house was quiet as can be, the stockings were hung by the chimney with care and the children were all nestled in their beds – in the hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there. Moore, an ancient languages scholar, wrote the poem …
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Favorite Christmas moments
The service department manager had his cellphone up to his ear, but kept cracking jokes under his breadth to the worker standing next to him about the computer system being down again. The worker just smiled and kept looking at his own screen. Unlike the two of them, I wasn’t smiling. I had my car …
What they fail to tell you about becoming a parent
When you become a parent, the hospital nurses on the maternity floor give your darling new baby a bath or two, physically check the backseat of your car to make sure that you have the car seat locked in correctly, and then send you on your merry way. The nurses don’t give you an instructions …
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Missing a few family members
When I was a young kid, I stumbled across the black-and-white 1947 movie, Miracle on 34th Street, starring Maureen O’Hara, John Payne, and a young Natalie Wood. My parents weren't home and instead of watching football late on a Sunday afternoon, I started watching the movie. I fell in love with the plot right away, …
Shutting down Mom & Dad’s taxi service
I looked up from my phone to look out the car window. Nothing. I went back to scrolling through social media and chatting absentmindedly with my wife about her day. We sat in the dark in our car waiting for our son to finish up from his school’s marching band practice. A few minutes later, …
