My ten-year-old son recently got glasses. It’s not a surprise: my wife and I both wear them. And while two wrongs don’t make a right, apparently two nearsighteds make a farsighted. I was nine when I got my first glasses. I was in third grade, my first year in the old, long-gone Gibson Elementary School in Tennessee. Now, with the … Read More
A True Story of Frog-Gigging and Disappointment
I wrote the following piece for a memoir class taught by Michelle Wildgen, best-selling author of Bread and Butter and You’re Not You (soon to be a movie starring Hilary Swank). When I was a kid growing up in rural Tennessee, my dad determined that I would follow in his footsteps and leave a trail of dead small animals behind … Read More
George Lucas and Elvis: Echoes from 1977
Thirty-five years ago, two things that fundamental changed my life happened in the same summer. In May, Star Wars was released. In August, Elvis Presley died. The arrival of Star Wars turned the thing that everyone in my small town mocked, that had gotten me teased and beaten up, into the hippest thing in the world. Spaceships, aliens and robots … Read More
You can’t go home again (and really, who’d want to?)
Recently a family emergency required me to return to my tiny West Tennessee home town. How tiny? The population is roughly 300, and around 250 of them are related to me at some level. Later, doing research for a novel set in the region, I came across this vintage (1970) description written by Donn (sic) Munson in SAGA magazine: West … Read More