When Dad was nearing the last years of his life, when he could no longer move about and travel like he once had, he would sometimes wistfully talk of how he wanted to visit someone, somewhere, “one more time.” “One more time,” he would say. “I’d like to drive to Kentucky and visit you one …
“You can ride with us to the awards ceremony,” my daughter Madi told me. She would pick up my wife, Lori, and sit together to watch our 2nd-grade granddaughter, Emmie, receive several achievement awards. “But what about Eli?” I asked. Eli, a 6th grader, was at another school, and his and Emmie’s ceremonies were close …
Often, the little worries surprise us the most, arriving like special operation forces, attacking us in the middle of the night. None of them by themselves pose an ominous threat. It’s not like the Huns are pounding on the city gate, threatening to destroy civilization as we know it. But one by one, they mount …
The living can bring back the dead. Seventy-eight-year-old Barney Tharp of Lebanon, Ky., is proof. When he was barely 21, Tharp was wading through a rice paddy field in the Mekong Valley of Vietnam. Having been selected by Uncle Sam’s draft, Tharp, no “Fortunate Son,” dutifully complied, and when the band played “Hail to the …
“What’s his name?” I asked Paul. “I can’t remember,” he answered. My college roommate, Paul Oglesby, and I were looking at a group photo from our fraternity forty-six years ago. “I can’t believe you remember as many as you do,” Lori and Alix (Paul’s wife) said almost in unison. For years, I wondered what had …