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At the recent rehearsal dinner for our son and his fiancée, a few of us older folk injected one of their last hours of singleness with bits of wisdom learned gleaned through our own struggles in life. If you’ll indulge me, I’ll pass along a few personal musings that time didn’t allow that evening. —– “I’d like to live my life over again,” some assert, “if I could just know what I know now.” Not me! Nevertheless, I’ve purposely relived a few brief hours this past week through a number of old video tapes I’m trying to convert to more durable DVD. We loved our Jenny intensely in life, but the films [...] My back to the river below me, I hunker on a stone and gaze into the forest. And seeking refuge from the challenges of responsibility, I listen to its story. The patriarch of this diverse community, a sturdy black oak of 24-inch diameter, speaks for them all: "We have not sought trouble; it has found us [...] Regular readers know our daughter Jenny, who died unexpectedly in October 1995. So in honor of Father’s Day, I share this brief essay about her that I prepared for a writing contest. And to that I add a few journal snippets from Father’s Days past. It hardly seems as seems as if our 37 years together have come and gone so quickly, but sifting through old pictures this past week convinces me that they have. My hair was once black, but what few locks that age and stress have permitted to remain are now decidedly gray. We were young and in [...] Last week I heard the early morning wail of a train. Though trains are commonplace in our city, fleeting years and evolving circumstances have diminished their importance to me, and I seldom notice them anymore. Our son was 19 months old when we moved here, and for a brief but pleasant span of years trains played [...] When I was a child of six, Mother boosted me onto the Trailways bus to North Little Rock. "If Uncle J.E. isn't at the station to meet you," she reminded me, "you know his phone number and address." She had hammered those critical numbers into her firstborn's head so thoroughly that they took up permanent [...] "Tell me, Watson, your opinion of this. Is it better to start well or to finish well?" "The answer seems obvious, Holmes. Without starting well, one can't hope to finish well, can he?" "I see your point, Watson. But what about the story of the tortoise and the hare? Surely you're not suggesting that jumping quickly into [...] War’s gruesome visage snarls from flickering screens with bone-chilling horror. And with each explosion, every flash, the cost of freedom visibly manifests itself through death and destruction–right before our eyes. Not many years ago I stood in poignant reflection as a mother decorated the grave of her son killed in battle at age 18. The ever-youthful [...] On a recent rural excursion, a friend and I reminisced about the gradual disappearance of neighborhood grocery stores, once significant building blocks of our heritage. For a good portion of my childhood, we lived just a block from the Oakhurst Superette, our neighborhood grocery. Lexie Woods, or “Mr. Lexie” as we knew him then, was proprietor. Whenever [...] |
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Copyright 2012 James McAlister - All Rights Reserved |
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