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 …
“I’ll go ahead and take that 50 pound bag of fertilizer,” I told the proprietor at the feed store, after briefly debating the matter in my mind. The fertilizer was my deposit for the promise of spring. It happens every year: From the warmth of my house, I look out my window to the fallow …