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, for reasons I don’t think Read more…
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, not in an official game. Read more…
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 neighborhood to be asleep. My Read more…
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 the lens of a vintage Read more…
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 beside her, watched and listened. Read more…
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 soldiers that didn’t fit the Read more…
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, and vice versa. The women Read more…
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 highway south of town. In Read more…
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 word? “Dethusiasm.” I’ve never encountered Read more…
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 deep into a summer in Read more…
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 practice with my dad one Read more…
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 there. It was a climbing Read more…
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 big day. To my parents. Read more…
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 of it? Or because it Read more…
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 Wilson’s Soul Boom podcast of Read more…
Editor’s Note: I am the host, producer and photographer for We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream podcast. I also write a monthly guest column related to the podcast for two local newspapers in Chaffee County, Colo.: the Chaffee County Times (Buena Vista) and The Read more…
(Release Date: 7.2.24) Overview: In this short episode of We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream podcast, Adam Williams is solo. He highlights episodes and topics from the past two years of the podcast and talks about what’s on his mind for Read more…
In the house of my youth, flatulence did not exist. Farts. The natural biological process of releasing gas from the body was a source of embarrassment, shame. Farts were not heard or acknowledged. The bathroom was, presumably, the acceptable place Read more…
The decisive moment of truth came while I was freefalling toward Earth at 120 miles per hour and my parachute was not opening. I was 23 years old and had, perhaps flippantly, answered my mother’s concern about my penchant for Read more…
On the eve of Father’s Day, I went to sleep thinking of how my dad used to sing to me when I was a young boy. The one song I remember him singing, that I still can call back to Read more…