When the Smoke Clears

Back from the wilderness.
Did we make it all the way through our stated destinations? no. Did we have a good time? absolutely. In a strange journey that included a late night scramble to find water and eventually visiting the grave of my grandfather, we are back.
The fine Blogfather… who apparently likes to spill [...]

Today was Yom HaShoah, or Day of (remembrance of) the Holocaust and the Heroism. .

In some traditions, a red-tailed hawk is a vision, perhaps a warning, that change was coming, massive changes from unexpected directions, sometimes good, sometimes bad. A spring not too many years ago I remembered seeing these hawks everywhere for about a week, even though I was living in a city.
Then a small fist pounded [...]

I knew something deep inside felt off today. When you lose a piece of yourself, the missing space left behind never really fills. I can’t feel the hole, but I can feel the muscles in my heart that surround it. Today the edges really hurt though I couldn’t put my finger on why. The cabin [...]

I thought about Jess today. Rather, I thought about his parents. For some reason they suddenly showed up in my mind like an old favorite movie starting on a television in another room, a tickle of something familiar heard, something comfortable. Maybe it was the old ball-cap, not my own, I found in my Jeep.
Jess’ [...]

Heat can destroy. It can also shape and create. Slightly increase the heat inside our bodies and the proteins that make us begin to break down. Greatly increase the heat on some ores and they, too, will break down. But blend the ores and take the heat to incendiary levels and you can craft some [...]

Warning: personal entry.
The ghosts were there today. I stepped back on campus for the first time in almost 15 years. Luckily I was going to meet David. He is still a professor, though never one of mine, but I had assisted him once with research on a book. He was a guiding influence and a [...]

Last night a blue faced angel spoke to me, a conversation I had earned, but did not want. He placed his sword by the door. As he stepped inside, a black stag looked up from the woods, grey horned, then took two steps backward before turning and stalking off to the north.
A voice, deep [...]

New Year’s Eve was a great night, nothing too taxing, but plenty of fun. I was able to visit a couple of friends at their new house, their dogs an excited match to their marriage, their other friends ever present. I last saw them several months ago, and that was the first time I had [...]

I was an obnoxious kid. There’s no two ways about it. I started reading at three and writing before I started kindergarten. It lent me a sense of intellectual snobbery. Most teachers had nothing they could do with me at their class level so I was usually allowed to sit to the side and study [...]

Sometime after the snows and ice hit and the winter really kicks in, my musical tastes start to shift with the season. I listen to Kate Bush and Talk Talk. Kip, a friend of mine who’s wife I went to college with, introduced me to Talk Talk years ago. He said, “give it a chance, [...]

Early adulthood is a time for testing limits. Those limits should not always have a safety net. A young adult needs the chance to screw up, to fail, to find out they are mortal. It is one of the things I most worry about with the latest generation: we have taken away so many of [...]

“They come down sometimes, kind of like now.”
I shook my head, recalled to reality “What?”
“The walls,” she said. “They come down sometimes. Kind of like now.”
Across the table sat a woman a good bit older. We were the only two in the truck stop diner aside from a waitress too tired to notice any more [...]

Time is a bitch. Nay, a bastard. At least a bitch can be a comfort once in a while.
Years ago during those sophomoric days, I knew all the realizations I was coming to were felt by millions of others in their lives, but, hey, it was happening to me that time. That made it [...]

I had already talked briefly about my friend Mary, but she sprang to mind again this afternoon. I went to lunch at the chow hall and had a heaping pile of potatoes.
Germans love potatoes.
When I spent the summer studying in southern Germany, our student housing had a kitchen and dining area on the [...]