Dinner in the Field and other stories
I find you can discover your strengths at any age. For example, I find I’m a better writer than I am an editor. I have a full-length draft of a memoir that I’ve devoted countless hours to, and it’s finally finished. I’m anxious to move on to new material. But finishing the book is not the same as completing the project. Doing it right, I’m told, entails a less than...
Hot Toddy
Fittingly, as the temperature plunged on Tuesday I caught my first serious cold of the winter. I get cocky at times, and find myself thinking ‘Wow, I haven’t gotten sick all winter.’ I attributed my good health to yoga and swimming, the better food I’m trying to eat, the relatively clean and stress free living I’ve recently enjoyed. Smug, I went to yoga Tuesday with a bad feeling nagging the...
Career Day
I didn’t prepare anything for career day at Ottawa High School. I was asked so long ago, and it snuck up on me. I just went to the high school after yoga and went with the flow. I was greeted at the front door by a group of students in blue tee shirts that said “Mentor” on the front. As the young woman assigned to me walked me up to...
Yesterday I went to Court
It was -6 when I walked to the shack this morning. It takes a while to warm up this little room on a day so cold. Yesterday I took one of the dog food bags stuffed with wood scraps I saved from building the shack and split the scrap into burnable pieces. I’m running out of them. As I split the wood I remembered where it came from. That bag...
Death of the Muse
This Dave in the Shack blog has always been a first person narrative. The person is me. It’s my voice that comes through, and I’ve worked to make it as genuine and consistent as possible. It’s creative non-fiction. Some of my posts are diary like, some essays, but all of them are an account of something that I’ve done, something that has happened to me, or something I’ve been thinking....
Long Distance Dad
Driven by opportunity and a powerful desire to see my kids I spent Thursday and Thursday night in Chicago, where both my children live. I both miss being an everyday parent and enjoy not being one at the same time. Is that possible? I saw them both at Christmas. I used a Chicago annual meeting of an outfit I’m still part of to ask for an invitation to spend the...
Cheese, Guns, and Death. C'est la vie.
At times readers ask me to write follow up articles on a given topic and at times I get such good feedback on a particular blog post I’m tempted to do that. Usually I don’t. I’m like a band that doesn’t take requests. My wife has known this for some time. Ask me to do something and I usually won’t. This one shot and done, this jumping from topic to...
A Gun, in a Purse, by a Baby
Sometimes I don’t know what to say. I want to ignore events outside the shack, outside my neighborhood, outside my community -but I can‘t. They intrude on my thoughts, change the way I feel, nag my emotions. A mix of sadness and anger fills me up and makes me tired. Imagining the grief experienced by others wears me out. I hesitate to write about guns and the violence caused by...
Letting Go of the Old, Welcoming the New
I’ve spent the last few days of the year deleting e mail and unsubscribing from things I no longer read. I don’t know what got into me, but I signed up for all kinds of messages and communiques I thought I would enjoy, needed even, but didn’t. It feels good, paring down. I made some big changes when I retired, lost contacts, stopped getting mail from lots of places. Maybe...
Road Trip Epilogue
It’s good to be home. When I got back to the shack everything was as I’d left it Thanksgiving night. It smelled like cigar smoke and from the empty bottles by the stove it was evident the family and I had seriously depleted my stash of hard liquor. I started a fire in the stove, lit a stick of incense, and began to tidy up. Eventually I started writing. As...
Road Trip Six
After church I avoided Tuskegee and went through Troy, Spring Hill, and Enterprise on my way to the Florida border. l had a late lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Hartford, which looked as if it were once a fine little town. The young Chinese couple’s establishment was one of the last open on the little town square. How will these towns survive? Esto was my first Florida town. Florida...