The Story
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Christmas 1989
As we approached the holidays in 1989, our daughter was 5 and our son was barely 2. We were living in Austell, GA, a suburb of Atlanta in Cobb County. It was the holiday season of 1989, the poorest Christmas I ever spent, but in many ways, it was also the richest. This time of Continue reading
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Seattle.
My hands are shaking as I write this. It is about a chapter in my life that changed so many things, for better and for worse. Maybe I should take a page from Hemingway and have a stiff drink before I decide to write. But oh yeah, I don’t drink. When the urge to write Continue reading
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My inheritance is sugar.
Life has a way of teaching you things you don’t want to know, especially when rebellion is a huge part of your nature. These lessons are usually things you know intellectually but feel don’t apply to you, or rationalize because of any number of excuses. The Surgeon General has been warning us for decades about Continue reading
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A haunting on Nina Lee Lane.
Not long after I moved into the green room, the haunting began. At first it was only slight movements in the closet. Later, it came closer. Continue reading
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Melba’s ghost.
My extended family is very large. My paternal grandmother gave birth to ten children and saw seven of them into adulthood. So I have a multitude of cousins on that side of my family, many of whom I’ve never met, because they were all older than me. My dad was 40 when I was born, Continue reading
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Still I rise.
I was supposed to see Maya Angelou on a cruise I took in 2014, but she was ill. She died just months later, but she did join our cruise by satellite video link to read some of her poetry and share some of her thoughts. One of my favorite Angelou poems is Still I Rise. Continue reading
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Forgiveness.
Plenty of people have said that forgiveness is not for the other person; it’s for you. Most of the time, though we understand the concept, we can’t do it. It’s too hard to let it go, to put aside the intensity of the grudge we carry. That grudge can make us feel powerful in some Continue reading
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The abyss.
Are you one of those people who, when standing too close to the edge, feels pulled? Like gravity is sucking you over that edge? I am. It’s for this reason I have never been interested in things like hiking steep inclines or rock climbing or even rollercoasters. The ground beckons me back to its cruel Continue reading
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Fuck cancer, part deux
Like most things in life, people want you to get over whatever it was that hurt you, and as soon as possible, because they don’t want to hear about it. It makes them uncomfortable. When my daughter died, there was an initial outpouring of support, but it dried up quickly. Some of the things I Continue reading
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Fuck cancer.
Friday was the one year anniversary of my friend Jordan’s death. (This is my post from last year shortly after Jordan died, if you’re interested.) Jordan was my “chemo buddy”. He was my friend. Here’s how that came about. Jordan was a little older than me and had retired from Xerox, where he had worked Continue reading
About Me
A writer and solitary soul in the mountains of Western North Carolina.
Poetic License 