What’s Important?

It’s Saturday morning. I retrieve the newspapers, all three of them. The local fish wrapper, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Balanced perspectives are important. I know what you’re thinking, no one can reconcile such disparate opinions into a cohesive consensus of what’s important today. It’s like trying to get harmony from …

The State of Things to Come

America is in turmoil. It’s ungovernable. Order is fugitive. Dysfunction reigns. A comedy of Democratic dodos. The solution? Create more states. But how? Annex Mexico? It’s too late. Done. Over. We’re talking mental states. Democracy for the mental demographic. Aggregate, collate, dominate. Divide and conquer. Perfect integrations, ideal for election campaign strategies. Easier for politicians …

The Magic of Wisteria

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying.”  Poet, Robert Herrick (1591-1674)   In our front yard are three tall pine trees. Springtime enshrouds them in vast array of purple wisteria. Like flowering nooses, the gnarled wisteria vines ascend skyward to …

The Leaves Let Go

March opens the door to Spring. It’s the month when the Great Silent Voice speaks: “Time’s up, release without remorse and make way for the new.”       Nature has a different set of rules for the live oaks that canopy the islands of coastal Georgia. They’re programmed to shed their leaves in Spring, not in …

Greeting Cards

Last week I had a birthday. So what, you say? Everyone has birthdays. Yeah, but mine was special. Ok, ok, I know.  Everybody’s birthday is special. But everybody doesn’t have a birthday where you can take a couple of 7’s, jumble them up any way you want and they end up indicating the same number: …

A Jump-Start

If you’re wondering why the Weakly Post has not been faithfully adding to your already-clogged in-box, it’s because its battery has been dead. It has nothing to do with congressional hearings, trade talks or government shutdowns. **********      The other day I needed to use our extra, backup car. It has been parked inactively for …

An Imaginary Line

Life is filled with lines. They are drawn early. This is a story of one. ********** It was long time ago, another time, another place. It was the Fall of ’52 when two 5th grade boys grappled on the playground behind the elementary school during recess. It wasn’t a mortal battle with a zero-sum outcome, …

The Naked Truth

What is truth, you ask? Where is it to be found? One place knoweth your secret sins: The bathroom scales. ********** They lie there, silent as death, watching you approach, trembling with trepidation. You know the verdict: Guilty. You want to avoid them, to sluff off the error of your ways. You hate its brutal …

On a Road to Santa Fe

Occasionally something magical can happen to us, something so unexpected it might be called an epiphany, and we are changed forever. ********** January 6th is Epiphany Sunday. It finds me sitting in a padded pew in the village Methodist Church, celebrating the wind-up of the twelfth day pf Christmas. Christians remember Epiphany Sunday as the …

The Grits are Gone

And so is 2018. At least much of it. The dangling details of yesteryear are like the uneaten leftovers that linger in our refrigerator. They loiter like holiday hangovers and attest to our experimentation with epicurean indulgence. Inside is an array of what appears to be small, dish-like spaceships and other galactic debris, all wrapped …