An outlet for my own reflections and musings on life, people, and just all around stuff. (The title comes from one of my favorite Flannery O'Connor stories.)
Day1 Blog
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For any of you who may still be following this blog, I have also started blogging as a Key Voice blogger for Day1.org. You can find my first post here.
I remember a time when I had come home for the weekend from college and found a folded, twenty dollar bill stuck in the driver side window of my truck. It was from my dad. That twenty and a cigar box of rolled quarters was just about the total amount of financial help I got from my dad for college. I remember him telling me once he wished he could have given me more to help pay for college. I don't think he's ever realized just how much he did help pay for college...and for so much more ever since. You see, I grew up spending weekends with my dad (he and my mom divorced when I was three), and a lot of those weekends I was holding the light so he could see where the oil leak was coming from, or I was holding the other end of the board so the saw wouldn't bind when he was cutting it, or I was the extra pair of hands to tote bags of sakrete. I was (sadly) the best help available when there was a leak in the roof or a chicken house to tear down for the tin. I've got a...
Four years. Most people finish college in four years (I did it in three and a half, but who’s counting?). A lot of folks pay off car loans in four years. Four Years. How can such a span of time feel so incredibly short and long at the same time? I can remember being scared to death standing in that little apartment-turned-office in Kunming, my rising anxiety made all the more real by the dozen or so other people in that place making copies, signing papers, shuffling through bags to find passports and other documents. The only thing that kept me from going crazy was the same thing that always keeps me from going crazy, your mom. She knew what forms they needed to see, where I needed to sign. There was this flurry of paperwork it seemed, then, all of the sudden, without confetti, without the celebratory pomp and circumstance such an event demands, you came strolling in the room, holding the hand of a woman’s whose name I either never knew or have long-since forg...
I was fine. For about three years I had been preparing myself for that day; I knew it was coming soon. I always asked myself what I'd do when it happened. Would I be upset? If I was, would I show it? Would the world stop spinning? What about everyone else; how would they react? It seemed like that day would never come, but then it did. And as soon as it did it started to feel like a distant memory--fading at first around the edges, creeping its way towards the center of my memory like a dissolving acid. We hadn't been home long. Our move back across the Mississippi River was a long haul, but we were here, back where there were hills, pork barbecue, and boiled peanuts. We hadn't even unpacked the boxes in our temporary rent house. I was getting used to the routine (or lack thereof) of being the "new guy" when my phone rang. I knew who it was and what they were going to say: "She's getting worse. It won't be much longer now. Can you do the funeral?...
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