The year was 1965. We—my mother, dad, and older brother, Mark— had just finished supper. That’s when Eric called to speak to Mark. Just a few hours before, I had been playing football on the sandlot team Mark had formed after I had hounded him to do so. The sandlot team was my only hope …
I heard about a town in Southwest Oklahoma that had a community-wide Easter pageant. It so happened that the character chosen to play Jesus had obviously been miscast; he was more suited for the part of a Roman soldier. This man, a roughneck, a seasoned oil field worker, was known for an occasional barroom brawl. …
Years ago when our son, Dave, Jr., was about 7 or 8 years old, he awoke early one Easter morning before anyone but I was awake, and he immediately began singing the chorus of the Don Francisco song, “He’s Alive.” “He’s alive yes He’s alive/Yes He’s alive and I’m forgiven,” Dave sang as he hopped …
“The sun is finally out, the weather is warming up, I’m definitely heading home and putting on my Beach Boy records,” a friend once told me one bright, sun-shiny spring day, back when people still played records. I now know why she was thinking about those good vibrations: We tend to invoke music that parallels …
He was sitting on the front pew, crumpled over in a heap, like one of those college basketball players writhing on the court because his team has just lost a game in the Final Four. Only this young man had not just lost a game. He had lost his mother. She had been killed in …