Ain’t No Need to Sit and Wonder Why

Clinton, South Carolina, Wednesday, June 6, 2018, 8:07 p.m. I haven’t had a day like this since my daddy died. They happened all the time when I was a kid, and he was in his natural prime. Daddy would ask me to help him with a couple things, say it wouldn’t take 30 minutes, and …

Daddy Downhill

I haven't had time to write short stories recently. With a seventh novel on the way to publication, and an eighth in an ongoing state of repair, I've been excising episodes from the latter manuscript. It's hard to remove items that are amusing but unnecessary. It occurred to me that I could turn them into short …

The Annual Clash of Emotions about Daddy

Clinton, South Carolina, Sunday, June 18, 2017, 10:15 a.m. In a way, Father’s Day is empty. I’m not one, though a niece, nephews, a great-niece, and great-nephews pretend I am. This I appreciate. In another, it makes me ever more mindful of how I remain affected by my father, who died in 1993. Over the …

The Old Snow Days Just Ain’t What They Used to Be

Clinton, South Carolina, Saturday, January 7, 2017, 10:28 a.m. The snow hasn’t completely covered the grass I probably should have cut one more time before it stopped growing. It fell in hits and misses, and here it mainly swung and missed. It’s fallen in greater amounts most everywhere else, and TV tells me that one …

Something About Nothing

It's gone, gone, gone. Gone, gone, gone. Crying won't bring it back. I have paraphrased. Lefty Frizzell was singing about a woman. My loss was just seven minutes long. It was a blog I worked on for seven minutes, but it was moving rapidly when the keyboard went dead, and the screen turned Petty blue, …