You know it when you see it. There it is, gathering again on the bookshelves and under the bed. It crunches between your teeth on windy days. You feel it underfoot while walking to the patio; wipe it off the windowsill with a moistened rag; scrawl “Wash Me” on the back of a delivery truck that’s been down a rural road. Everyone knows it....
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Mr. Philyaw was the cool English teacher, the one with the shoulder-length mane of wavy silver hair, the one the girls talked about, the one who could teach Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance with some authority because he rode a motorcycle himself, as was readily evident on early spring days when you’d see him strolling the halls in...
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It was a good thing I didn’t grow up in Arizona. I was too much of a pyromaniac for that. I well remember a time when I was in fourth or fifth grade and playing with the slightly wild kids who lived across the street. Jonathan and Danny: their house was a mess, and they didn’t have an established dinnertime like we did. I envied them no end. They ran...
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When I was a boy haircuts were tears compensated with lollipops, a reward that seemed adequate only afterward when the whole ordeal was done for another couple of months. I can’t say I’ve changed that much. But like many things first approached with a bit of trepidation, haircuts have provided me with some of the most memorable of moments. Maybe it’s the...
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I’ve always had a thing about mud, which is to say, about in-between places. As a boy roaming the Lake Michigan beaches there was nothing better than climbing the “clay hills,” an eroding bluff whose bare gray face was constantly calving off in sharp-edged chunks during the summer, or oozing slowly downhill during the wet of winter. That mud...
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