It hardly ever happens that I walk out of a movie theater after viewing a film and want to turn right back around and see the same film once again. Yesterday evening was one of those rare occurrences. I experienced such a strong desire to make a 180 degree turn back into the movie theater. […]
It’s now two days since Temma’s “big birthday bash”. It was a wonder! Close to sixty-five friends, neighbors, and family came out to celebrate Temma’s forty years of life, and many others who wanted to be there but could not make it. I have a little more time to reflect now than I did in […]
“If you stare at a painting long enough, you begin to see things you never saw before,” Tim says. We’re standing before the painting The Lamentation of Christ, by Rogier Van Der Weyden that hangs in the Uffizi Museum in Florence, Italy. With an open drawing notebook in one hand and a pencil in the […]
The image is of my daughter, Temma Day, a painting done by her father when she was about two-years-old. Temma had this shock of hair even when she was first born. She is struggling to lift up her head, her physical therapist put her on her stomach to help her, resting her hands on the […]
We first began hearing of a deadly virus designated Covid-19 back in late January and early February of 2020. I need to remind myself of that fact. Everyone I talk to about the virus that resulted in a global pandemic will say something like, “It feels like two weeks ago or two months ago rather […]
Growing up in Michigan is a story of winter, at least in my memory. The harshness of winter when things cannot grow in the ground and the fun of winter tobogganing at the golf course hill, snowboarding on the small hill in our backyard, sledding, snowball fights, and walking out on the big ice waves […]
My mom is beautiful. She just turned ninety-three-years old. I don’t know if she ever really yearned to be a mother—especially of five children. I’ve not asked her that question. Or was it the only alternative to a woman of her generation, married young with an eight-grade education? Her own mother died when she was […]
I just finished reading the editorial pages in this last Sunday of 2018’s New York Times. The editorials grouped under the title “Hope Isn’t Only About the Future” renewed a sputtering flame of creative writing inside me (other than sermon-writing and other writing for church work). 2018 was a hard year. I lost some heart […]
The World Series Chicago Cubs vs. the Cleveland Ball Club, the 2016 presidential election Trump vs. Clinton, and the dilemma of my church charge – close the church and merge vs. close the church and go our separate ways; these three “battles”, options, competitions are becoming entangled in my mind and heart. The emotional ups […]
Writing From the Margins 