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 neighborhood to be asleep. My parents were gone for the weekend. My house was the Read more

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 practice with my dad one day. I was, I don’t know, eight years old? Ten? Read more

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 big day. To my parents. They seemed pleased with me, anyway. The youngest of their Read more

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 Wilson’s Soul Boom podcast of teaching Sunday school to two nine-year-olds and two teenagers in Read more

The Flatulence

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 to release the pressures of it all. Privately. Otherwise, they Read more

The Lawn Mower

I started pushing a powered lawn mower at age 11. It was nearly autumn in northern Missouri and the mowing season was winding to a close. The next summer, around the time I’d cross my twelfth birthday, I took over my family’s mowing business.  Which is to say, I’d start Read more

The Landline

I am of the last generation to experience childhood in the pre-Internet, pre-cell phone era of human existence.  Let’s think about that. All the what and who and years that came before. Uncountable and unfathomable, really. And the mere few decades, not even a blink of the universe’s eye, that Read more

Humanitou