Among Other Things
The Train Whistles
Twice, train whistles saved my life. Two instances separated by a hemisphere and nearly a decade. Here is the first. When I was 16 years old, I worked for a fast food chain. That summer, Read more…
Among Other Things
The Free Throws
I was a basketball star of rural Midwestern proportions in my youth. I was a flash of a big-ish deal in a small-town, no-big-deal way. But I never took a game-winning shot at the buzzer, Read more…
Among Other Things
The Water Tower
It was after midnight. My two friends and I pulled my dad’s aluminum extension ladder off the garage wall. We walked out of the garage into the dark, hoping we’d waited long enough for the Read more…
Among Other Things
The Sex Workers
As I knelt along Rue Saint-Denis in Paris, a woman short, round and worn, yelled at me in French. She was waving me away. Angrily. I did not understand why. My attention was focused through Read more…
Among Other Things
The Laundry
Sometime during the summer of my tenth birthday, I learned how to do laundry. My mother was giving my oldest brother the procedural rundown before he went off to college as a freshman. I stood Read more…
Among Other Things
The Jobs
I had a barracks roommate 25 years ago while in the Army, who for amusement broke down our lives into the varied job skills they contained. All the little stuff our days consisted of as Read more…
Among Other Things
The Batting Cage
An outdoor batting cage stood between the Pyeongtaek (평택) train station and a lane where, it was said, the mafia controlled the sex trade. Red light. American soldiers were off limits to the sex workers, Read more…
Among Other Things
The Skating Rink
REO Speedwagon carried us around the skating rink in perpetual left turns. Our own version of a flat NASCAR track in a dim, windowless building that once had been a service station situated along the Read more…
Blog
What is ‘Dethusiasm’ / ‘Dethusiast’
Where are the haters? When will they show themselves? It will hurt, at least at first. But if I am to really shine in my work, I will encounter that unbridled dethusiasm. Is that a Read more…
Among Other Things
The Best Meal
The most satisfying meal I ever ate was while alone on a bed in a rented room in the speck of a nation called Andorra. I was a hungry 28-year-old backpacker a month or more Read more…
Among Other Things
The Bat
A wooden Louisville Slugger stands in the corner next to my family’s front door. Black electrical tape wraps much of the bat’s handle. And then some. It squeezes tight a hairline that fissured during batting Read more…
Among Other Things
The Trees
There was a sprawling tree of essential importance in the yard of my childhood. It stood in the crook of the northeast elbow of our yard. The grasses of the back and side yards blended Read more…
Among Other Things
The Baptism
I was baptized at eight years old. I was old enough to know wrong from right, I was told, and to make that commitment to God of my own grown-up volition. It felt like a Read more…
Among Other Things
The Whiskey
My parents do not drink. At all. Never did. I had my first drink at age five, maybe six. Whiskey. Neat. Even though my parents did not drink at all. Or was it somehow because Read more…
Among Other Things
The Church
Anne Lamott talks of being a Sunday school teacher at a failing church. The context for this description seems to be, or at least include, the fact of low prayer turnout. She talked on Rainn Read more…